The Crown‘s young Queen Elizabeth, Claire Foy indeed has that noble grace in her. The adjectives like confident and charismatic may not be enough to describe this 37-year-old British actress. Claire Elizabeth Foy was born on 16 April 1984 in Stockport, a large town in Great Manchester. She is active in the entertainment industry since 2008 and has done many notable roles in films, television series, and also on stage.
Foy is the youngest and the most active child in her family. Her parents are not from arts. Foy’s father was a salesperson and her mother worked in a pharmaceutical company. Her mother, Caroline is Irish and her mother’s family is from Dublin and Kildare. She is a British national but has a mixed ethnicity as her mother is Irish and her father is English. Foy’s hometown is Manchester but their family moved into Longwick village because of her father’s job. Foy’s parents gone estranged and divorced when she was only eight. She has two elder siblings. Her elder brother’s name is Robert Foy and her elder sister’s name is Gemma Foy. She also has a youthful half-sister from her father’s second marriage. Foy had a passion for arts since childhood and she loved to watch movies. There is more to know about this young promising actress. Stick on the page to see how the rising star Claire Foy rose into the beautiful Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.
Net Worth
As of 2021, Claire Foy has a net worth of 4 million dollars according to her estimated assets. First Man and Season of the Witch are some of the high-grossing films she had done. There were disagreements regarding Claire Foy’s salary for her role as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. The show’s production budget was around 7 million dollars. But Claire Foy’s payment per episode was only 40,000 dollars. This was low considering the budget of the show and the fact that she was the lead actress. Matt Smith, her co-star in the show who played a role less important than hers was paid more. There were reports that she received back pay, but she later told that she haven’t received any back pay.
“there was a lot of pay inequality across the board—in the music industry, in journalism, in every industry” – Claire Foy in an interview for Al Arabiya
Claire Foy’s husband
Claire Foy married the English actor Stephen Campbell Moore in 2014. Foy met him for the first time in 2011 when they were filming the Season of the Witch. They dated for three years before getting married. Stephen is famous for his role in The History Boys. Foy and Stephen have a daughter together, Ivy Rose Moore. She was born in March 2015.
The lead role in The Crown
The Netflix original series The Crown chronicles the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth II. The romance, rivalries, and the reign of the Queen were followed and perfectly portrayed in the show. Claire Foy played the lead role in the show. She portrayed the young Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of the show. It wasn’t her first time in the role of a Queen. The role brought her global popularity and there was a notable increase in her number of fans. Foy won several awards and applauds by critics for the role. As the show moved onto the third season Foy was replaced by Olivia Colman. It was because the age of the characters change and an older actress was more suitable to play the character when the period of history changed in the show.
Education and career
Claire Foy attended Aylesbury High School in Buckinghamshire from the age of twelve. She later joined Liverpool John Moores University to study screen studies and drama. She originally had an aim to become a cinematographer. But one of her drama teachers suggested that she should attend drama school. She also did a course in Oxford School of Drama which was completed in a year. According to her teachers in the drama school, Foy was very creative and bold with a good sense of humor. It made her everyone’s favorite. After graduation, Foy moved to London. She stayed in Peckham with a group of friends from her college.
Foy appeared in several plays like Top Girls, Watership Down, Easy Virtue, and Touched during her course in Oxford. Foy’s debut in television was through the supernatural comedy-drama series Being Human in which she played the role of Julia Beckett. Her roles Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal American supernatural film Season of the Witch followed in the next years. She played the character of Lady Persephone, an aristocrat in the Upstairs Downstairs. Foy played the heroine, Helen in the tv movie The Night Watch, an adaptation of Sarah Water’s novel. Foy’s performance in Kosminsky’s Wolf Hall was remarkable. She played the role of English Queen Anne Boleyn in the show. It was a complex character but Foy was able to give life to the character perfectly. Peter Morgan’s The Crown was her biggest and most popular project of all. In 2018, Foy starred in the American psychological horror film Unsane. Foy played the wife of Neil Armstrong in the biopic First Man.
Awards and nominations
Foy won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama, Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series for her role as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. She was also nominated in BAFTA awards in the category of Best Actress. For her role as Janet Shearon in First Man, Foy was nominated for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Supporting Actress, Critics’ Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture.
With her hardworking nature and inventiveness, Claire Foy loves to challenge herself with different roles. She is undoubtedly one of the best actresses in the industry now.