Perfect English

Photo by Mike Rosenthal

Actress Annabelle Wallis is doing exactly what she was always meant to do.

By Lori Capullo

Being blonde and gorgeous may put a girl at an obvious advantage, but let’s face it—to really make it in show business today, you’ve got to have more than that. And British beauty Annabelle Wallis does.

The actress, who until her current turn as a coed in X-Men: First Class was probably best recognized from her role as Jane Seymour in the Showtime hit series The Tudors, is hitting her stride. It’s not really surprising; after all, her father was an actor and she’s the niece of famed actor Richard Harris. “Acting was always something I did,” Wallis says. “I grew up surrounded by very talented people who helped ignite the passion for my craft. It’s something I felt running through my veins from a very early age. Nothing else was ever an option. Nothing else existed, because I knew so strongly I was meant to be doing what I do now.”

Born in Oxford, England, Wallis and her family relocated to Portugal when she was just one and a half; she lived there for 17 years. “Portugal is a wonderful place to grow up. Being from a very English family and having the opportunity to live and breathe another culture is an experience that I recommend to anyone. The Portuguese taught me to be very proud of who I am; you can’t help but instill a pretty solid moral code. They have a wonderful sense of what is really important—family and friends.  It was my mother’s decision to take the chance, knowing that you can only make a move like that when the kids are young and when you’re settled in a marriage and have the support of your partner. She was going to test it out, lured by the romantic idea of a different way of life—very different from the one she had grown up to know. It was a very brave move and I am forever grateful to her for having done it.”

Once in Portugal, the blue-eyed, fair-skinned Wallis fit right in. “Everyone spoke to me in English and I would answer in Portuguese—[it was] always fun to see the look on their faces,” she says. “There is a big international community where I grew up. Portugal was a neutral country throughout the World Wars and was the choice of residence for many exiled European Monarchs, from the Spanish Royals when Franco was in power to the Italian Royals when Mussolini was in power. The Queen of Bulgaria lived in my best friend’s house before her!” she laughs. “So you can imagine, it is quite the mix…I was not the only blonde in the village.”

Annabelle had moved back to England and started her acting career by age 21. A few years in, she got the role of Jane Seymour in Showtime’s saga of Henry VIII, The Tudors, after going for a casting and then hearing nothing, as she says, “for ages! Then bang—it was all systems go, and I went from being on set on a Portuguese film about their dictator, Salazar, where I was playing a French journalist with a French accent in Portuguese, to landing in Dublin a couple hours later and going straight into rehearsals with Jonathan Rhys Myers. It was a whirlwind.” The role only extended over five episodes, but she wasn’t disappointed by its brevity. As she puts it, “It’s nice to go into something as a leading lady and leave still being wanted by your audience. They never had time to get fed up with me!”