Kelly Reilly

Kelly Reilly, born Jessica Kelly Siobhán Reilly on 18 July 1977 in Chessington, Surrey, England, is an actress whose career spans stage, film, and television across both sides of the Atlantic. The daughter of a hospital receptionist and Jack Reilly, a police officer, she attended Tolworth Girls' School in Tolworth, where she studied drama at the GCSE level. Her grandparents are Irish.

Reilly's professional career began when she wrote directly to the producers of the ITV drama Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren, seeking work. Six months after that outreach, she auditioned and secured a role in Prime Suspect 4: Inner Circle, which broadcast on 7 May 1995. The following year she appeared in an episode of the Carlton UK period drama Bramwell and also played a character named Tina in Pie in the Sky. Six years after her screen debut, she appeared alongside Mirren again in the film Last Orders.

Her stage career developed in parallel with her screen work. She collaborated with director Terry Johnson across four productions: Elton John's Glasses in 1997, The London Cuckolds in 1998, The Graduate in 2000, and Piano/Forte in 2006, the last of which Johnson wrote specifically for her. In 2001, director Karel Reisz guided her through The Yalta Game in Dublin, an experience Reilly has cited as a formative masterclass in her development as an actress. That same year she appeared in the Royal Court's revival of Sarah Kane's Blasted. Her performance as Miss Julie at the Donmar Warehouse in 2003–2004 earned her a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress, making her, at age 26, the youngest person ever nominated for that honor. She received a second Olivier nomination for her performance as Desdemona in a production of Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009.

Reilly's film work began in 2000 with the English comedy Maybe Baby. In 2002 she appeared in the French comedy L'Auberge espagnole alongside Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris, playing Wendy, an English Erasmus student. She reprised that role in the 2005 sequel Les Poupées russes, for which she won the Best Newcomer Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and again in the 2013 follow-up Casse-tête chinois. Also in 2005, she appeared in Mrs Henderson Presents, earning the Empire Award for Best Newcomer, and had a supporting role in the romantic drama Pride & Prejudice. In 2003 she played Mary Gerrard in an episode of ITV's Poirot. Her first film lead came in 2008 with the horror thriller Eden Lake, for which she received a British Independent Film Awards nomination for Best Actress. In 2009 she played Mary Morstan in Sherlock Holmes opposite Robert Downey Jr., a role she reprised in the 2011 sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Her 2012 leading role in Robert Zemeckis's Flight opposite Denzel Washington brought her the Spotlight Award at the Hollywood Film Festival. Additional film credits include Triage and Me and Orson Welles in 2009, A Single Shot opposite Sam Rockwell in 2012, and both Heaven is for Real and Calvary in 2014, as well as the thriller 10x10 with Luke Evans in 2018.

On television, Reilly starred in the British crime drama Above Suspicion from 2009 to 2012. In 2014 she played Catherine Black, a neuroscientist concealing her bipolar disorder, in the ABC series Black Box. In 2015 she appeared as Jordan Semyon, the wife of Vince Vaughn's character Frank Semyon, in the second season of True Detective. In 2017 she played the Celtic Queen Kerra in Sky TV's Britannia. Beginning in 2018 and running through 2024, she portrayed Beth Dutton, the daughter of Kevin Costner's character John Dutton, in the Paramount Network drama Yellowstone.

Reilly made her Broadway debut in 2015, appearing opposite Clive Owen and Eve Best in Harold Pinter's Old Times at the American Airlines Theatre. In her personal life, she met financier Kyle Baugher in Marfa, Texas in 2010, and the two married in Somerset in 2012.