Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy (/ˈænjə/ ANN-yə; born 16 April 1996) is an actress. She has won several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Film Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Born in Miami and raised in Buenos Aires and London, Taylor-Joy left school at the age of 16 to pursue an acting career. After portraying small television roles, she found success through a role in the horror film The Witch (2015). Taylor-Joy later starred in the horror film Split (2016), its sequel Glass (2019), and the black comedy Thoroughbreds (2017). She won the Trophée Chopard at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
Taylor-Joy appeared in the fifth and sixth seasons of the television crime drama Peaky Blinders (2019–2022), and played Emma Woodhouse in the period drama Emma (2020), which gained her a Golden Globe Award nomination. Also in 2020, she received acclaim for her performance as chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit, winning a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award and receiving a nomination for an Emmy Award. Taylor-Joy has since starred in the films Last Night in Soho (2021), The Northman, and The Menu (both 2022), earning another Golden Globe Award nomination for the last of these.
Early life :
Taylor-Joy was born on 16 April 1996 in Miami, Florida, to Dennis Alan Taylor, a former banker, and Jennifer Marina Joy, a psychologist. She has stated that her birth in Miami was a "fluke", since her parents had been holidaying in the city at the time; because of her birthplace, she holds American citizenship due to the country's jus soli nationality law. Her father is an Argentine of English and Scottish descent, the son of a British father and an Anglo-Argentine mother. Her mother was born in Zambia to an English diplomat father, David Joy, and a Spanish mother from Barcelona. She is the youngest of six siblings, four of whom are from her father's previous marriage.
Taylor-Joy lived with her family in Buenos Aires and attended Northlands School until the age of six, when the family relocated to the Victoria area of London. She is fluent in both Spanish and English. Taylor-Joy experienced the move as "traumatic" and refused to learn English in hopes of moving back to Argentina. She attended Hill House International Junior School and Queen's Gate School, acting in school productions. She left school at the age of 16, citing bullying from her fellow pupils as the reason; she recalled:
Argentina is all green and I had horses and animals everywhere. All of a sudden I was in a big city and didn't speak the language. I didn't really feel like I fit in anywhere. I was too English to be Argentine, too Argentine to be English, too American to be anything. The kids just didn't understand me in any shape or form. I used to get locked in lockers. I spent a lot of time in school crying in bathrooms.
Taylor-Joy initially trained in dance, studying ballet until the age of 15. Aged 17, she was scouted as a model by Storm Management founder Sarah Doukas, while walking her dog outside Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, London. She signed with the agency on the condition that acting was her passion and pursuit. During a modelling shoot promoting the television series Downton Abbey which she had almost rejected because she was studying for her GCSE examinations, Taylor-Joy was noticed by the Downton Abbey actor Allen Leech running errands for the crew and reciting the Séamus Heaney poem "Digging" for a forthcoming screentest. He later introduced her to his agent, with whom she signed as an actress.
