Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke (born 23 October 1986) is a British actress. She is best known for her portrayal of Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. She has received various accolades, including an Empire Award, a Saturn Award, three Critics' Choice Award nominations and four Primetime Emmy Award nominations. In 2019, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Clarke studied at Drama Centre London, appearing in a number of stage productions. Her television debut was a guest appearance in the BBC One medical soap opera Doctors in 2009. The following year, she was named as one of the "UK Stars of Tomorrow" by Screen International magazine for her role in the TV film Triassic Attack (2010). Clarke had her breakthrough role as Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO epic fantasy television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019).
Clarke made her Broadway debut as Holly Golightly in the 2013 play Breakfast at Tiffany's, and played Nina in a West End production of The Seagull that was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her film roles include Sarah Connor in the science fiction film Terminator Genisys (2015), Qi'ra in the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), and the romance films Me Before You (2016) and Last Christmas (2019).
Early life :
Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke was born on 23 October 1986 in London. She grew up in Oxfordshire. Her father, Peter Clarke, was a theatre sound engineer from Wolverhampton. Her mother, Jennifer, was a businesswoman and is the vice-president for marketing at a global management consultancy firm as of 2020. Clarke has Indian ancestry on her mother's side of the family; her maternal grandmother was the child of a secret affair between Clarke's great-grandmother and a man from the Indian subcontinent, and wore light make-up to conceal the darker complexion she had inherited from her father. She credits this background for her family's having a "history of fighters", stating, "The fact that had to hide her skin colour, essentially, and try desperately to fit in with everyone else must've been incredibly difficult." She stated that her grandmother "loved India more than she loved England" and as such, when she died, sixteen-year-old Clarke travelled to India to scatter her ashes. She has an older brother, Bennett, who works in the entertainment industry and was part of the camera department on Game of Thrones.
Clarke became interested in acting at age three after seeing a production of the musical Show Boat. When she was ten, her father took her to a West End audition for The Goodbye Girl, a musical by Neil Simon. Clarke was educated at Rye St Antony School in Headington and St Edward's School, Oxford, which she left in 2005. In a 2016 interview with Time Out, she stated "I went to posh boarding schools, but I wasn't the posh girl at the posh boarding schools." She also stated that most of the people at her boarding school in Oxford were from Conservative backgrounds, which meant she and some of her friends often felt like outsiders. After graduation, Clarke unsuccessfully applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She worked and travelled before enrolling at Drama Centre London, where she graduated in 2009.
