Biografia

Fluent in Russian

Discovered an older half-brother, Ross Bentley, as a result of a past relationship between actress Wendy Craig and her father Sir John Mortimer.

Educated at the prestigious St Paul's Girls School in London. Was in the same class as fellow actress Rachel Weisz.

Attended Moscow Arts Theatre School.

Was originally cast to play the second killer, Angelina Tyler, in Scream 3 (2000). She filmed most of her scenes under the impression that she would be unmasked as a killer, until the last minute change to remove her character as the accomplice killer. Mortimer was genuinely surprised when she found out near the end of filming that she wouldn't be revealed as a killer.

This is not meant to have happened to me at all. I am a Sloane, from the Chilterns.

To be in the hands of an auteur like [Andrei Tarkovsky], that would be just brilliant. But I don't know if those kind of films can ever be made any more. To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe . . . it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion. But that's part of the problem with politics and history and everything today, that people think there's a right and a wrong, a good and a bad . . . maybe there just isn't . . . .

I have to say that, though it sounds so superficial, the accent really does help. I like having accents preparing for a part. It's a hard thing to do, to be given a script, and know that you've got to turn up on the first day of the shoot - generally without having had any rehearsal - and present a character. It's really baffling; it's incredibly hard to know how to begin, to approach it, other than just thinking about it. But how do you think about it? There's no guidebook.

Until Frankie [Dear Frankie (2004)], I didn't realise that feeling part of a film was about staying up late, getting drunk, smoking and all that. And I wasn't doing it, obviously; or if I did, I felt wracked with guilt about it. That was odd. It felt much more like a job of work.

It doesn't feel like that. The big producers still want Kate Winslet and Kate Beckinsale, I suppose. - on whether she has made it into mainstream Hollywood.