At the second time of asking, and against all predictions, actress Claire Foy finally got her hands on an Emmy on Monday night.
The star said that she ‘completely flatlined’ from shock when her name was read out as the winner of the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, for her role as the Queen in The Crown, and rather regretted the very British ‘bloody hell’ she uttered from the podium.
In all, it was a night of high drama and great triumph in Hollywood for the British contingent, led by 34-year-old Foy.
Claire Foy (pictured) won the award for her role in Netflix hit, The Crown
Wearing a custom-made, strapless Calvin Klein sheath dress with an outsize bow at the back, she went on to gush: ‘Listen, thank you, Emmys. I had the most extraordinary two and a half years of my life [on The Crown].
‘I was given a role that I never thought I would ever get a chance to play. And I met people who I will love for ever and ever and ever. And the show goes on, which makes me so, so proud.’
This was Foy’s last chance to win an Emmy for The Crown, since she won’t be returning to the show for the next series – her role will be taken by Broadchurch actress Olivia Colman.
However it looks certain that more plaudits will follow. Her performance opposite Ryan Gosling in First Man, as the wife of astronaut Neil Armstrong, is drawing rave reviews.
Claire Foy and Stephen Campbell Moore (left) attending a film premier, while right Foy soaks up her victory
Even though the film has yet to be released, there is a buzz that she may be lifting an Oscar statuette in February, which is astonishing – if only due to the incredible obstacles she has overcome to get here.
She endured two serious childhood illnesses. Her husband, Stephen Campbell Moore, 40, was diagnosed with cancer of the pituitary gland within the first few months of their romance, a disease that returned in 2017 when she was in the middle of filming The Crown, and when their daughter, Ivy, was just a baby.
The most recent blow came at the start of the year, when the couple announced they were splitting up.
No reason was given for the breakdown of the seemingly rock-solid relationship, which had lasted seven years, other than they remained ‘great friends with the utmost respect for one another’.
On the night Foy wore a £1,000 pair of mismatched shoes (pictured)
In a recent interview she remarked that the one thing she has in common with the Queen is ‘I guess we can both be tough old birds’. She’s not wrong.
No wonder her colleagues on The Crown found her rather ‘chilly’ and ‘reserved’ as she was dealing with crisis after crisis in private, with a stoicism befitting of the role which made her name.
She told an interviewer that when she and Vanessa Kirby finished filming their final scene, disco lights came on and the whole cast and crew had a party but she didn’t want to laugh or cry, unlike the rest of them – she just wanted to go home.
There is an expectation that this middle-class girl from Buckinghamshire, with the cut-glass vowels, big blue eyes – and backbone of steel – is on the brink of an A-list Hollywood career.
She already has the A-list Hollywood agent – hers is shared with Anne Hathaway – and has hired top stylist Nicky Yates to make sure that she stuns on red carpets in Venice, Toronto and everywhere else.
She seems to be good at making friends with everyone from fellow British thesps like Andrew Garfield to serious directors like Steven Soderbergh.
This was Foy’s last chance to win an Emmy for The Crown, since she won’t be returning to the show for the next series
Born in Stockport on April 16, 1984 to David and Caroline Foy, she is the youngest of three children.
The family moved to Manchester and Leeds when she was young before settling in Longwick, Buckinghamshire, where her mum still lives in a £370,000 end-of-terrace house.
Her father was a sales director for Rank Xerox, her mother works in logistics in a pharmaceutical company. Her parents divorced when she was eight and her father has remarried.
She says she ‘scraped’ a place at Aylesbury High, the local grammar school attended by her older sister, on appeal thanks to her mother’s persistence.
Foy also starred in the 2012 TV programme ‘White Heat’ which aired on BBC Two
‘I was never a brainbox,’ she said. ‘At school I always had to work hard to do well, and that made me conscientious.’
Her first love was ballet, and aged 13 she was training hard when ill health struck – inflammation, stiffness and pain – which was diagnosed as juvenile arthritis.
With her dreams of making it as a dancer dashed, she turned her thoughts to acting, ‘although I never really thought I could do it’.
Her self-belief was further knocked when at 17 she was diagnosed with a benign tumour in one eye. ‘I was like a Cyclops and it was all a bit scary,’ she said.
‘I was on steroids for about a year and a half afterwards. That makes you put on a lot of weight and have really bad skin.
Foy speaks onstage after winning an Emmy for lead actress in a drama series during the 70th Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theatre in Los Angeles
‘It’s quite good when you have something like that, because the amount of time you’ve got to look in a mirror when you’re working [as an actor], the amount of time people talk about your face… it’s quite good to have some sort of perspective, because it’s just a face.
‘That taught me not to care so much about the way I looked. I got over myself. I don’t mind how I look for a part as long as it fits the character.’
She also said the illnesses made her more resilient and determined: ‘It was horrible and debilitating, but it made me realise that I needed to grab the life I wanted.
‘If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to throw my cards on the table and say I wanted to study drama.’
Foy pictured left with Matt Smith and right with Lynne Smith
The turning point in her career came when she gained a place at Liverpool John Moores University to do a joint honours degree in drama and film studies, with a vague idea of becoming a cinematographer.
It boosted her confidence sufficiently to take a year’s course at the Oxford School of Drama.
She moved to London, sharing a house in Peckham with five other drama students. There was a lot of temp work and she had one job, handing out sports magazines at Beckenham Junction station, which required her to start at 5am.
Foy poses with her Emmy for lead actress in a drama series
After an episode of the BBC1 daytime soap Doctors and a small role in BBC3’s supernatural drama Being Human, she was plucked from obscurity to play the title role in BBC1’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, screened in 2008.
She explained her success pithily: ‘Four auditions, and being really jammy.’ Writer Andrew Davies said that he wanted every shot in the drama to be ‘a big close up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze’.
She was hailed as a star and as the next big thing by Vogue magazine. Not that she was impressed. In typical unassuming style, she declared it ‘all complete b******s’.
Foy started work on The Crown in 2015, just after her daughter was born
Soon afterwards she was cast in the big budget 2010 film Season Of The Witch, alongside Hollywood legend Nicolas Cage.
The film was a flop, but it was here that she met Campbell Moore. He had become a star thanks to his part in the Broadway production of The History Boys in 2006.
They moved in together in 2011. By now she was starring in the revival of Upstairs Downstairs as the rebellious Lady Persephone.
They were married in December 2014, just after she finished filming BBC2’s Wolf Hall, where she made a mesmerising Anne Boleyn.
Their daughter was born in February 2015, just before work on The Crown started – which again challenged her physically and mentally.
‘After I had my first child, I only had enough money to stay home for three months, so I had to go back to work,’ she said. ‘So I had 12 weeks to lose the baby weight, find a job and childcare, and conquer motherhood — all after having a caesarean.
‘I look back on that time and think, How on earth did I do it?’
Friends of the couple were shocked when they announced in a statement: ‘We have separated and have been for some time.’
Foy (pictured) says she not quite sure how she will cope if she becomes more famous than she already is
One commented: ‘But they’re lovely people and are determined to keep everything civilised.
They’ve just decided that unfortunately their relationship simply wasn’t working and that this would be for the best.’
Foy says she not quite sure how she will cope if she becomes more famous than she already is.
Her feet, for now, remain firmly on the ground. Home is a relatively ordinary house in Wood Green, North London, and there are no plans to move to Hollywood yet – although her newly single status and still-young daughter seem to indicate the time may be right.
She said: ‘I find fame a very abstract thing to think about – I don’t think that will happen to me.’ It rather looks as if it already has.