Rebecca Hall life and biography

Rebecca Maria Hall is an award-winning British stage actress who recently graduated to the silver screen with a pair of winning performances in The Prestige and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

One of Britain’s most talented stage actresses, Rebecca Hall has starred in more than a dozen plays, including lavish productions of As You Like It, Don Juan, Galileo’s Daughter, and Mrs Warren's Profession, for which she won the prestigious Ian Charleson Award in 2003. Her cinematic output, although still in its nascent stages, has also been remarkably promising thanks to a series of head-turning performances in The Prestige, Frost/Nixon and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where she more than held her own opposite Oscar-nominated actors Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Patricia Clarkson.

Rebecca was born in England. The daughter of acclaimed opera singer Maria Ewing and legendary theater director Sir Peter Hall, she followed in her parent’s footsteps at the age of 10 when she made her professional acting debut in her father’s televised adaptation of The Camomile Lawn.

Although the experience appealed her, Rebecca Hall didn’t appear in another notable production until her 18th birthday, when she starred in a Cambridge stage presentation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Her father was particularly impressed with her performance in the play, and he promptly offered her the role of Vivie in his upcoming stage production of Mrs Warren’s Profession. “I thought he was off his nut," she recalls. “How could I walk straight into a lead role in the West End, with everybody saying, ‘Here comes the director's daughter'?" Fortunately, her dazzling performance silenced her critics, and Rebecca Hall capped off her inaugural West End run by winning the prestigious Ian Charleson Award, an honor given annually for the best performance by a young actor in a classical role.

Rebecca continued her professional relationship with her father the following year by starring in his productions of The Fight for Barbara and As You Like It, for which she received her second Ian Charleson Award nomination. The pair teamed up again in 2004 at the Theatre Royal in Bath, where they collaborated on the well-received plays Man and Superman and Galileo’s Daughter.

Rebecca decided to switch gears the following year when she was handed the script for Starter for Ten, a big-screen comedy about a working-class college student from Essex. “I loved it [but] didn't think in a million years they'd cast me,” she admits. “I think it was kind of very sort of different in my head, at the time actually as to what they were looking for. And so I went on a lot of auditions. I think about four, maybe five. Or maybe eight. And then waited a long time, and then got told I got the part. I was very excited.” Rebecca Hall’s excitement only grew as she discovered more about the medium of film. "In theater, you have a context for the story that you establish and you create an entire world on stage from beginning to end, whereas in film, you’re really at those places -- at that school, on that campus with extras with flock-of-seagull haircuts and shoulder pads and too much blue eye shadow,” she explains. “It’s an imaginative adjustment that you make, and I loved it.”

Rebecca landed another major role later that year when she was cast as Christian Bale’s wife in The Prestige, a stunning Oscar-nominated film about a pair of rival magicians. The movie went on to generate more than $107 million worldwide, and Rebecca Hall was recognized for her dazzling performance with a pair of Best Newcomer nominations from the Empire Awards and the London Critics Circle Film Awards.

Rebecca’s string of strong performances eventually caught the attention of Woody Allen, and he called her in to audition for one of the lead roles in his romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. "I came in and met Woody and he said, 'Can you do an American accent?' and I said, 'Yes', and he said, 'OK, bye'. That was pretty much it,” she recalls. "Two weeks later I got a call saying, 'Woody Allen wants you to be in his next film.' That was obviously quite an exciting time." The film premiered to critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, and has since grossed more than $40 million worldwide. Rebecca Hall also enjoyed a substantial role several months later as David Frost’s glamorous and fun-loving girlfriend in the political drama Frost/Nixon.

Hall was cast with Ben Barnes in the film Dorian Gray, which was released nationwide 9 September 2009;nesxt she appeared in Please Give with Catherine Keener and Amanda Peet, and The Town with Ben Affleck and Blake Lively.
She is the female lead role in the British ghost film The Awakening, released in September 2011.

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