The Oscar-winning director poking fun at ‘grotesque privilege’ (including her own): Emerald Fennell, whose father is celebrity jeweller Theo, went to Kate’s £39,000-a-year boarding school and is taking down toffs in her latest film

• Emerald Fennell, 36, directed Saltburn, which is released in the UK next month
• READ MORE: Emerald Fennell hits the red carpet for Saltburn premiere but the opening night of the BFI London Film Festival is disrupted as UK film and TV crews stage protest 

Starring Barry Keoghan, Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike, Saltburn is set to be the movie hit of the season after opening to rave reviews.

The film, which premiered at the London Film Festival last night, has been described as an ‘outrageously watchable’ Brideshead-style satire about the aristocracy by The Telegraph, led by a director with a ‘sharp eye for outrage’, Emerald Fennell.

Fennell, the Oscar-winning director of Promising Young Woman, was born in Hammersmith, west London to a jewellery-maker and old Etonian father, Theo, and author mother, Louise. 

The 36-year-old mother-of-one went £39,000-a-year school Marlborough College, the same Wiltshire institution which educated the Princess of Wales, before going on to study English at Greyfriars at Oxford University. It was there that she picked up an agent who had seen her acting in student plays.

It is perhaps no surprise that her second feature-length film satirises the upper classes, considering that she has previously admitted she’s ‘hyper-aware’ of her own ‘grotesque privilege’. 

Emerald Fennell, 36 (pictured with her Best Screenplay Oscar in April 2021) is the director of aristocratic satire Saltburn

Her father Theo founded his jewellery business in 1982 and built up a following of close friends and clients. 

Sir Elton John is said to have dropped £200,000 in a single visit to his store one time, plus party stalwarts including actresses Joan Collins and Liz Hurley and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood. 

She says, however, that she was not named after the gem, but the 1930s society hostess Lady Maud ‘Emerald’ Cunard.

In a curious foreshadowing of Emerald’s The Crown role, she was notorious for encouraging her friend Wallis Simpson and Edward, Prince of Wales.

Emerald’s mother Louise is a novelist, her books including Fame Game and Dead Rich.

Family friends include Sir Elton John, Sarah Ferguson, Dame Joan Collins and Lord Lloyd-Webber.

Saltburn, an aristocratic satire starring Barry Keoghan (left), premiered at the London Film Festival last night 

Emerald is the daughter of jewellery designer and old Etonian Theo Fennell and writer Louise Fennell. Her sister Coco is a fashion designer

The Hammersmith-born writer and director once said of her family: ‘I’m very aware that part of my luck was that I had parents who lived in London who were able to support me. I have to work really hard because that head start that people like me get, you need to prove you deserved it.’ 

Speaking to British Vogue last month, Fennell reflected on her silver-spoon upbringing and revealed she wanted to go back in time and ‘smack herself in the face’ for the way she behaved as a school pupil at Marlborough, which included sneaking off to the bushes to smoke.

However, despite telling the outlet that she felt she may have taken a place at Oxford University from someone ‘more deserving’, Fennell’s work ethic is strong, and as well as being a star of the small screen, she has been behind some huge hits.

She bagged background roles in TV dramas Trial & Retribution, New Tricks and Any Human Heart before landing Channel 4 comedy Chickens, alongside The Inbetweeners stars Simon Bird and Joe Thomas.

At the same time her film roles began to pick up, with the 2012 Keira Knightley-fronted adaptation of Anna Karenina marking her first major credit.

But it was in 2014 when Emerald sprang to fame in as boisterous redheaded nurse Patsy Mount on Call The Midwife.

She was originally cast for a one-episode turn in series two but impressed creators so much she was invited to join the cast as a regular for series three. Her character Patsy was in a secret relationship with nurse Delia (Kate Lamb).

 ‘Had I known when I auditioned that there was more than a small walk-on role at stake I would have been sick with nerves,’ she previously revealed.

She was also behind the second series of Killing Eve, on which she followed in the footsteps of her friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who left the series to work on the Bond film.

She clearly had the time of her life, beginning with a child having his neck broken in his hospital bed and ending with a gruesome axe murder.

These blood-spattered tales seem an anomaly coming from the imagination of a thoroughly nice woman. ‘It’s interesting, isn’t it?’ she said in an interview with Weekend Magazine.

‘Very interesting, because it was what I felt like a lot of the time when I was writing Killing Eve, although I didn’t murder anyone in order to be able to write it!’

The script was a hit: Emerald received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series.

In addition to writing screenplays, Fennell has penned a series of novels, which have also earnt her acclaim.

Her first two books, Shiverton Hall in 2013 and its sequel The Creeper (shortlisted for the Waterstones 2014 Children’s Book Prize), were written for older children. 

Perhaps Fennell’s biggest onscreen role was playing Camilla Shand (later Parker-Bowles) in the third and fourth series of The Crown.

Fennell’s earliest acting roles include playing Patsy Mount in BBC period drama Call the Midwife

She is captivating as a young Camilla, although critics have slammed the suggestion she and Prince Charles maintained a relationship throughout the duration of his marriage to Princess Diana.

The choice to play the role was considered ironic because Emerald’s father Theo was friends with Camilla’s rival, the late Princess Diana.

He and Louise remain on good terms with Duchess of York. 

In 2020, when Fennell was seven months pregnant, she revealed the entire thing had been filmed in 23 days so she could complete the project before giving birth.

On the red carpet at the film’s premiere, she said: ‘We never expected it to get to this stage — I think what’s been so moving is people’s candor and the conversations it’s opened up for lots of people.’ 

Ahead of the release of the movie in 2021, Fennell said in an interview: ‘I’ve always wanted to direct. It feels as if everything up until now has given me the tools to do that – working with many talented people. It’s been kind of life-changing.

‘I started out writing books and moved into screenwriting, and whenever I’ve been on a set as an actor I’ve been actively learning about what the director was doing.

‘Directing seems to me to be the ultimate way of telling a story, particularly if it’s something you’ve written yourself.’

After the rip-roaring success of Fennell’s first feature film, Saltburn is set to reach the same dizzying heights of popularity after it premiered at the London Film Festival to glowing reviews.

Speaking at the movie’s gala premiere last night, she described the aristocratic satire as a ‘vampire film’.

‘It is about what we do when we’re completely besotted with something or someone,’ she said.

‘And I hope it’s part of the classic Gothic tradition where love and hate are very, very close together.’

Saltburn is released in UK cinemas on November 24 

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