Emilia Clarke

Biography of Emilia Clarke

Emilia Clarke was born on October 23, 1986, in London.

Daughter of an audio engineer, her mother, Jennifer Clarke, is a businesswoman director of The Anima Foundation. She had an older brother. She grew up in Berkshire.

She attended Rye St Antony School and St Edward's School in Oxford. She later attended the London School of Dramatic Art, which she graduated from in 2009. While she was a student she worked six jobs to pay her expenses.

She launched her acting career by appearing in the BBC series Doctors (2009), and with a co-starring role in the American telefilm Triassic Attack (2010).

Since 2011, she has played Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, HBO's highly successful television series based on the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, written by George R. R. Martin. For this role she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

She made her Broadway debut in 2013 in the stage adaptation of Truman Capote's classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

For the cinema, she starred alongside Jude Law in the film Dom Hemingway, released on April 4, 2014. The following year she starred in Terminator Genisys, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Sarah Connor. She had the opportunity to play the movie Fifty Shades of Gray but she did not accept because of the nudity that she would have to do.

In 2016, she was Louisa Clark in the film Me Before You based on the book of the same title by British writer Jojo Moyes. In November of that same year, she was cast as the female lead in the Solo: Star Wars Story anthology film. She later filmed Above Suspicion with the role of Susan Smith (2017).

She was named Esquire magazine's 2015 Sexiest Woman Alive.

She was related to actor, screenwriter, producer, comedian, and singer, Seth MacFarlane, from 2012 to 2013. She was then related to Charlie McDowell (2018-2019).

Shortly before filming the second season of Game of Thrones in 2011, she passed out in a London gym. She was diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage caused by an aneurysm. She underwent an emergency operation, the surgery caused her aphasia and for days she could not remember her name.

In 2013 she went back into the operating room to treat another aneurysm. She told The New Yorker: "In my worst moments, I asked the medical team to let me die."