Wednesday 30 November 2011

Who's that girl? Brit actress Felicity Jones is new face of DG

We're going to be seeing a lot more of Felicity in 2012...
Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell and Madonna are a just some of the leading ladies that have starred in Dolce & Gabanna campaigns.

But taking a different tactic the Italian luxury brand has employed a little-known actress from Birmingham to front its latest collection.

Sporting a porcelain complexion and chestnut locks, 28-year-old Felicity Jones first made a name for herself in the Nineties children's drama The Worst Witch as Ethel Hallow.

But over recent years she has appeared in a number of Hollywood features working with the likes of Maggie Gyllenhaal,Rupert Everett and Guy Pearce and she has been likened to English roses Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan.

D&G designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana announced that the rising star will appear in a string of stylish ads promoting a new makeup collection, set to launch next January.

They described Jones as 'representing a heady mix of sensuality, confidence and beauty.'

'Classically beautiful yet modern in attitude, her audacious gaze is impossible to ignore.'

Jones has regularly been spotted wearing D&G designs on the red carpet and she appeared front row at their spring / summer 2012 show in Milan sporting a cream and black lace print cocktail dress, alongside fellow D&G ambassador, Scarlett Johansson.

No images have been released but it is said that they portray the edgy Brit as 'an aristocratic, savage girl'.

Modelling is not a new venture for Jones and she has been snapped by Mario Testino for British brand Burberry and appeared on the cover of Tatler's March 2011 edition with Gossip Girl star and Chalet Girl co-star Ed Westwick.

A spokesperson for the brand said it has not been confirmed if Felicity will replace or join Scarlett Johansson to promote the makeup collection which premiered at Selfridges in 2009.

Currently prices range from £17 for nail varnish to £27 for a lipstick.

Jones will appear on advertisements for the D&G the Khol Collection in the new year.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2067689/Whos-girl-Brit-actress-Felicity-Jones-new-face-D-G.html#ixzz1fB6Dh0g7

Sunday 20 November 2011

Startling discoveries


When Felicity Jones read the outline for "Like Crazy," she knew right away she had to be part of it.
"It was something in just the first few lines," says Jones of the role that won her a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival. "I understood this character and the type of relationship she was having."
Even if the story and the character were all there for Jones, one thing was not -- dialogue. The lines in "Like Crazy" were all improvised, based on the outline from helmer Drake Doremus.
"I love working with Drake because he's willing to go to those places in a relationship that make people uncomfortable but resonate with so much truth," says Jones.
The British-born thesp -- who last year tackled Shakespeare and turned heads as Miranda in Julie Taymor's "The Tempest" -- was clearly ready for this kind of creative challenge. Though she's just 28, the actress came to the part with more than 15 years of experience.
Jones will be seen in Doremus' next film, which co-stars Guy Pearce and also deals with relationship themes.
"And I think people like watching these kinds of movies," says Jones, "because we're all curious about each other's relationships in a way."
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118045880/


Felicity Jones: the New Brit in Tinseltown

Here's an Elle article.

"The biggest British import since Carey Mulligan, Like Crazy star Felicity Jones takes on Beverly Hills in the flirty palette and bold prints of a true Hollywood romantic"
Twenty-seven-year-old Londoner Felicity Jones is about to have a love affair with Hollywood. It begins this month with the soulful indie Like Crazy, in which she plays a young Brit living in Los Angeles whose euphoric, make-scrapbooks and stay-in-bed-all-Sunday romance with a quietly charming American (Anton Yelchin) dissolves into a tenuous long-distance affair when visa issues send her back across the Atlantic. Director-cowriter Drake Doremus cast Jones after she sent a self-made audition tape from her flat in East London that included a wordless but emotionally pivotal shower scene. “Can I just say,” laughs Jones, “that it was a close-up?” Doremus recalls it as “phenomenal, a bold choice…she can just be and make you feel something without even trying to make you feel something.” Jones’ unfussy but exquisitely authentic turn—improvised with Yelchin from a 50-page outline—earned her a Special Jury Prize for acting at Sundance this January. (The picture itself won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature.) Overnight, she was reportedly courted by filmmakers, producers, and chieftains from studios including the Weinstein Company.
Raised in Birmingham, England, where she and her friends held mock auditions on the playground, Jones landed a part in the UK kids’ series The Worst Witch at age 11 and later graduated to standout supporting roles in highbrow adult fare such as BBC One’s The Diary of Anne Frank miniseries, as Anne’s older sister Margot, and Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s ’70s-era Cemetery Junction. This summer, Jones made the risky but respectable choice to take the title role (to raves, we might add) in Luise Miller, an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s landmark German tragedy Kabale und Liebe at London’s Donmar Warehouse theater—consequently turning down the lead alongside Julia Roberts in Tarsem Singh’s Snow White project.
Critics stateside took notice of Jones when she played the vir­ginal daughter Miranda to Helen Mirren’s Prospera—an experience Jones calls “the best schooling there is”—in Julie Taymor’s ambitious but divisive big-screen take on The Tempest. Jones brought the Bard’s words to life (treacherous territory for even the most virtuoso thespian) with graceful ease. It didn’t hurt that she looked the part, with green doe eyes, porcelain skin, and a Brigitte Bardot pout that in June prompted Burberry’s creative director, Christopher Bailey, to cast Jones in the brand’s ad campaigns, a position inherited from another English ingenue, Emma Watson.
Next, Jones plays a priggish Victorian in the upcoming Maggie Gyllenhaal–led comedy Hysteria (about the invention of the vibrator) and has already begun filming Doremus’ next movie as a girl infatuated with a married man. On snatching up Jones yet again, Doremus echoes a sentiment that could belong as much to Yelchin’s Like Crazy Romeo as it could to casting agents the industry over: “Oh, I’m not letting her go.”
http://www.elle.com/Fashion/Fashion-Spotlight/Felicity-Jones-the-New-Brit-in-Tinseltown