.FOR a while Emily Mortimer seemed to specialize in characters not unlike herself: sweet, vulnerable, even a little scattered or ditzy. She was a neurotic, insecure actress in Nicole Holofcener’s “Lovely and Amazing”; Steve Martin’s hapless, bumbling assistant in the “Pink Panther” remake; and, in the role that probably put her on the map, the oblivious upper-class wife of the brooding Jonathan Rhys Myers character in Woody Allen’s “Match Point.” In that film her rival for Mr. Rhys Myers’s attention was Scarlett Johansson, and the difference between the women told the whole story: Ms. Johansson was ripe and simmeringly sexy, while Ms. Mortimer, with her bangs and swanlike neck, was innocent and winsome in an almost Audrey Hepburnesque way. Her perkiness was both endearing and a little annoying.
In March, however, Ms. Mortimer won rave reviews for a much darker role in “Parlour Song,” Jez Butterworth’s bleak, Pinter-like comedy at the Atlantic Theater Company, where she was a tense but alluring housewife simultaneously playing mind games with her husband and having a raunchy affair with their next-door neighbor. And in Brad Anderson’s “Transsiberian,” opening Friday, which also stars Ben Kingsley and Woody Harrelson, she plays a seemingly earnest and ordinary young woman with a past and a secret; you can see her troubles flickering over her face; and as the movie progresses, she unpeels herself in layers.

Being in the play was terrifying, Ms. Mortimer, 36, recalled over lunch recently at a restaurant near Boerum Hill in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, the actor Alessandro Nivola, and their 4-year-old son. “In retrospect I’m glad I did it,” she said. “I have this strange compulsion to do whatever thing seems most frightening to me. But I was scared from opening night right to the end. The one or two times I wasn’t scared were a complete disaster. I kept waiting for the moment when somebody would tell me how to do the part, and that never happened.”
On the other hand, making “Transsiberian” — a train thriller in the tradition of “Shanghai Express” and “North by Northwest,” but without the glamour — was a lark, except for shooting in the bitter Lithuanian winter. “There’s something exciting about being in that kind of genre film,” Ms. Mortimer said. “Running through the corridors, hanging off the end of the train — how wonderful. You really feel like you’re making a movie.”
She also felt she had a firm grip on her character. “I think I have an implicit understanding of people who are trying to be good but have a lurking suspicion that they might not be quite as good as the face they’re putting on,” she said. “There’s two sides to most people: the good side and — I guess it’s all very Freudian — the side that’s fascinated by chaos and excitement and adventure. And with this particular girl there is just a guilt feeling that I was picking up on, and of course that tragic inevitability that if you’re trying to fend something off, it’s bound to happen.”
In person Ms. Mortimer is funny and charming, without a hint of actorly pretense. She hangs out at Starbucks a lot, and to see her there you could mistake her for yet another attractive, harried Brooklyn mom, trying to steal a moment of peace and quiet. She used to feel, if not guilty exactly, then at least a little embarrassed about her profession.
She is the daughter of the British playwright and novelist John Mortimer, known here mostly as the creator of “Rumpole” but a celebrity in England, with an enormous and admiring circle of friends and a famously complicated personal life. Ms. Mortimer has four stepsisters, a half brother and half sister by her father’s first marriage, to the novelist Penelope Mortimer, and a much younger sister from his marriage to her mother, also named Penelope. Another half brother, the product of her father’s affair with the actress Wendy Craig, surfaced just a few years ago.
Ms. Mortimer grew up, in effect, as an adored only child within a larger, older family, and though surrounded by books and writers, she was besotted from an early age with the cheesy, sequined side of show business. (She particularly loved Torvill and Dean, the British ice dancers.) At Oxford she read English and Russian literature and, in her last year, was discovered by an agent while performing in an adaptation of Kafka’s “Trial” — a production so wretched that all she recalls now is that it involved mimes and caused her grandfather to fall asleep. He later declared that it should have been called “Much Ado About Nothing.”
The agent got her a job on a television series, and Ms. Mortimer has seldom been out of work since. “I’ve sometimes passed off my career as something I fell into, and I definitely did not seek out that agent,” she said. “But I did always do it. It’s what I wanted.”
In 2001 she and her husband were living in Los Angeles, where she had smallish parts in mostly forgettable films like “Scream 3,”“The Kid” and “Formula 51.” “I had this disease, and I still do to a certain extent, of not being able to take myself seriously, of being unwilling to advance myself,” Ms. Mortimer said. “It’s that British thing of not wanting to be seen to work too hard or try too much, because it’s vulgar and embarrassing.”
She recalled meeting an agent or studio type at a party once who asked what she did. “I’m an actress,” she replied and then, thinking that was boastful, quickly added, “But not a very good one.” He immediately walked away. “It was as if I’d said, ‘I eat babies,’ ” she said. “Or ‘I’m a devil worshiper.’ ”
It was her husband who cured her, she recalled. One day, after she complained about getting turned down at a tryout for which she hadn’t bothered to learn the lines, he asked her, “Well, why are you doing this, if you’re not going to try?”
“I was sure he was right,” she recalled. “So I thought I might as well see what it’s like to try, and it was shortly after that that I got ‘Lovely and Amazing,’ which was great. That experience was just so excellent.” Ms. Holofcener, noting that Ms. Mortimer had even sent her an audiotape of her American accent, recalled recently: “Emily kind of broke her neck to get the part. I auditioned a lot of women. But when I met Emily, the way she smiled, the way she sat, her hair — everything seemed right. When I wrote the script, I imagined someone less attractive, but then I decided I didn’t care. I felt she had the right combination of vulnerability and tenderness.”
Ms. Mortimer’s performance was funny, subtle, touching and much talked about, not least because of a scene in which she stands naked while her lover critiques her body. “Actually getting undressed doesn’t bother me that much,” she said, and she explained that the first time she did it, playing a nun during the Napoleonic Wars, the director thanked her and asked her to try the scene again with her clothes on. “So now I’m just grateful when they don’t ask me to put my nightie back on.”
For Ms. Mortimer part of taking her work seriously is talking about it — something, she has discovered, that doesn’t always happen on movie sets. “On a lot of films you’re lucky if you meet the director once before you start shooting,” she said. “There’s a sort of taboo about talking about what’s going on.”
So the part of “Parlour Game” she did enjoy was the rehearsals, and on “Transsiberian” she found a kindred spirit in Ben Kingsley, who plays a scary Russian cop.
“We used to sit in his compartment on that freezing train for hours and hours and talk about acting,” she said. “What he kept saying was you don’t have to tell the story with your face. The audience will impose it. You don’t have to act out the story every second. It’s the sort of thing a guru would say, but that’s the way he is, very calm and gurulike. One night we went to an Indian restaurant in Lithuania, and they thought it was Gandhi.”
Da The New York Times, 12 Luglio 2008

Nella vasta filmografia di Emily Mortimer, troviamo il ruolo che l’ha lanciata nell’acclamata pellicola Lovely & Amazing, un racconto comico e malinconico di quattro donne sfortunate ma tenaci, e delle lezioni che imparano per tenere testa alle loro nevrosi. Il film ha portato grandi consensi alla Mortimer, tra cui un Independent Spirit Award nel 2003. Recentemente, è apparsa in un paio di successi: Match Point di Woody Allen, per il quale ha ottenuto ottime recensioni recitando assieme a Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers e Matthew Goode; e La pantera rosa (The Pink Panther), in cui interpretava la povera segretaria dell’ispettore Clouseau, che aveva il volto di Steve Martin. Nel corso dell’ultimo anno, ha lavorato senza sosta girando diversi progetti, tra cui la toccante commedia del Sidney Kimmel Entertainment Lars e una ragazza tutta sua (Lars and the Real Girl), assieme a Ryan Gosling e Patricia Clarkson; il thriller di Brad Anderson, l’autore de L’uomo senza sonno (The Machinist), Transsiberian, al fianco di Woody Harrelson, Kate Mara, Eduardo Noriega e Sir Ben Kingsley; e la commedia romantica Chaos Theory, in cui recita con Ryan Reynolds diretta da Marcos Siega. Nella sua filmografia, figurano anche titoli come Dear Frankie di Shona Auerbach, nei panni di una povera madre single che si trasferisce in una cittadina scozzese sulla costa con il figlio non udente; Young Adam, una produzione indipendente dello sceneggiatore/regista David Mackenzie, con protagonista Ewan McGregor, che ha permesso nel 2004 alla Mortimer di essere candidata come miglior attrice britannica agli Empire Award e come miglior attrice britannica non protagonista ai London Film Critics Circle Award; il debutto alla regia di Stephen Fry, Bright Young Things; Notting Hill; Pene d'amor perdute (Love’s Labour’s Lost) di Kenneth Branagh; la pluripremiata pellicola di Shekhar Kapur Elizabeth; Il santo (The Saint); Spiriti nelle tenebre (The Ghost and the Darkness); Formula 51 (Code 51) assieme a Robert Carlyle e Samuel L. Jackson; Scream 3 di Wes Craven; Faccia a faccia (The Kid) con Bruce Willis; e il film indipendente di Helmut Schleppi A Foreign Affair. Oltre a questi progetti, la Mortimer ha interpretato il ruolo ricorrente di Phoebe (l’interesse amoroso del personaggio di Alec Baldwin, Jack McBrayer) nell’acclamata serie 30 Rock, mentre ha prestato al sua voce al personaggio della giovane Sophie nella versione inglese dei Walt Disney Studios de Il castello errante di Howl (Howl’s Moving Castle), diretto dal celebre regista di animazione giapponese Hayao Miyazaki. Inoltre, ha partecipato a diversi progetti televisivi per la BBC. A teatro, è stata impegnata nelle produzioni de Il mercante di Venezia (The Merchant of Venice) per il Lyceum Theatre e di The Lights per il Royal Court. Mentre studiava letteratura inglese ad Oxford, ha partecipato a numerose rappresentazioni teatrali, interpretando ruoli come Ofelia in Amleto (Hamlet) all’Oxford Shakespeare Festival, Gertrude in Amleto e Lady Nijo/Winn in Top Girls al Festival di Edimburgo del 1992, Miss Burstner/Leni in The Trial all’Oxford Playhouse, ed Elena in Sogno di una notte di mezza estate (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) all’Old Fire Station di Oxford. Ha anche ideato, diretto e interpretato la produzione di Don Giovanni (Don Juan), che si è aggiudicata un Drama Cupper nel 1990. La Mortimer è nata a Londra, figlia del celebre scrittore John Mortimer e di Penelope Glossop. Ha frequentato la rinomata scuola femminile di St. Paul a Barnes, a Londra. Ha poi studiato letteratura inglese e russa all’università di Oxford dal 1990 al 1994. Ha sposato l’attore Alessandro Nivola nel 2002 e il loro primo figlio è nato l’anno successivo.