Kelly Reilly is an English actress. Reilly was born and brought up in Chessington, Surrey, England, the daughter of a hospital receptionist mother, and Jack Reilly, a police officer. She attended Tolworth Girls' School in Kingston, which was a comprehensive school where she studied drama for GCSE. Her grandparents are Irish.
Reilly wrote to the producers of the television drama Prime Suspect to ask for work, and six months later she auditioned for a role in an episode of Prime Suspect 4: Inner Circle, which aired on ITV on 7 May 1995. Six years later, she again appeared alongside Helen Mirren in the film Last Orders (2001).
Her first professional role was followed by a series of parts on the English stage. She worked with Terry Johnson in four productions: Elton John's Glasses (1997), The London Cuckolds (1998), The Graduate (2000) and Piano/Forte (2006). Reilly has stated that she learned the most as an actor from Karel Reisz, who directed her in The Yalta Game in Dublin in 2001. Her performance in After Miss Julie at the Donmar Warehouse made her a star of the London stage and earned her a nomination for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress of 2003.
By 2000, Reilly felt she was being typecast in comedy roles, and actively sought out a role as the young Amy in Last Orders, directed by Fred Schepisi. This was followed by a role in the Royal Court's 2001 rerun of Sarah Kane's Blasted. The Times called her "theatrical Viagra". In 2002, Reilly starred alongside Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris as Wendy, an English Erasmus student, in the French comedy L'Auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment). She resumed her role in the 2005 sequel, Les Poupées russes (The Russian Dolls) and the 2013 follow-up, Casse-tête chinois (Chinese Puzzle). In 2015 Reilly made her Broadway debut in Harold Pinter's play Old Times at the American Airlines Theatre.
Reilly's film credits include: Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), Pride & Prejudice (2005), the horror film Eden Lake (2008), Me and Orson Welles (2008), Sherlock Holmes (2009), Triage (2009), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), A Single Shot (2012), Flight (2012), Heaven is for Real (2014), Calvary (2014), and The Take (2015).
