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This week, Andrea Riseborough is celebrating her first-ever Oscar nomination; she's up for Best Actress for her performance in To Leslie as a woman battling addiction who is trying to reconnect with her estranged son. Riseborough's other roles include Matilda the Musical, Birdman, and Black Mirror, but she often keeps a pretty low profile, so were taking the opportunity to get better acquainted with her. Here are 10 things you may not know about this versatile and surprising British actress.

1. She once described herself as a "Geordie punk who started out in classical theater."

"Geordie" is a colloquial term for someone from Newcastle, the city in Northeast England where Riseborough was born and raised. "Punk" reflects her slightly rebellious and unconventional approach toward her career. "The last thing you want to say if you even lean remotely towards punk is 'I am a punk,'" Riseborough told The Big Issue. "But it is the easiest shorthand to say: 'Please don’t put me in a frock.'"

2. She believes her formidable work ethic comes from her maternal grandmother. 

Riseborough appeared in no fewer than five movies released in 2022, including To Leslie and Matilda the Musical.  "Nana, who pretty much raised me and my sister, got up at 5am and went to bed at 11pm," Riseborough told The Guardian recently. "She started work at 13 years old pushing a bread cart up a really steep hill and worked as a cleaner until late into her 80s. I cannot remember her sitting down – to the point where we were once having Christmas dinner and she was ironing. If she could hear me now, she'd say: 'Well, it needed to be done.'"

3. Before her acting career took off, she worked in a greeting cards store and at a Chinese restaurant.

Riseborough has said, drolly, that her worst ever job was "either shredding duck" in the restaurant or 2013's Oblivion, an adventure movie in which she starred opposite Tom Cruise.

4. She trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA).

Riseborough's fellow students in the class of 2005 included Tom Hiddleston, Ashley Madekwe, David Dawson, and Joel Fry.

5. She took a brief career break shortly after making the Oscar-winning 2014 movie Birdman.

Riseborough told The Guardian that she needed to press pause so she could "shake off" the Hollywood studio system. "It hadn’t felt satiating, for myriad reasons," she explained. "It’s very different now, thankfully, and I have allowed myself to fall in love again with the purpose of what I am doing, which had very much been lost."

Recalling why she became disillusioned, Riseborough added: "You think that you’re going to be talking about Chekhov, and you find yourself talking about things you’re not interested in, in an effort to sell a product. You feel like a cog in a vast machine.”

6. She knows she is associated with slightly "out-there" roles.

And she's perfectly happy about that. "I'm just irritatingly picky," Riseborough told The Times. "It's about having the courage to take the risk with something that could be absolutely extraordinary, or equally it could be disastrous, but at least it’s something that’s not been done before."

7. She has been directed by Madonna.

Riseborough starred in W.E., Madonna's 2011 movie about Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. "The first time I met her she asked me for tea because she's very fond of an English cuppa," Riseborough told Metro at the time. "I really respect how she allows her femininity to drive her. And I think that's not something we are really encouraged to do."

8. She has spoken out about being paid less than her male co-stars.

Disappointingly, Riseborough has been paid less even when she was on top of the call sheet. "It wasn’t for want of me having asked for transparency," she told The Independent. "It would be naive to assume that if you ask, you get what you want. For so many people in life – the majority of people on this planet – that is not their lived experience."

9. She has her own female-led production company, Mother Sucker.

Riseborough told Sundance that the idea behind the company is: "What would it be like to see a film that was, from beginning to end, a female construction?" The first movie Mother Sucker helped to produce was 2017's Nancy, a psychological thriller in which Riseborough plays a woman who pretends to be the long-lost daughter of a couple whose child was kidnapped many years earlier.

10. She is in a relationship with Karim Saleh, her co-star in the 2020 movie Luxor.

In the film, Riseborough plays Hanna, a British aid worker who reconnects with her former lover (Saleh) during a trip to Luxor. She told The i at the time: "It's the film on which I found the love of my life. It couldn't be a more celebratory experience for me."

Do you have a favorite performance by Andrea Riseborough?