Emilia Clarke

Clarke was born on 23 October 1986 in London. She grew up in Oxfordshire. Her father, Peter Clarke, was a theatre sound engineer from Wolverhampton, while her mother, Jennifer, is the vice-president for marketing at a global management consultancy firm as of 2020. Clarke’s older brother, Bennett, works in the entertainment industry and was part of the camera department on Game of Thrones.

Clarke said she became interested in acting at the age of three after seeing the musical Show Boat. When she was ten, her father took her to a West End audition for the musical The Goodbye Girl, a musical by Neil Simon. Clarke attended Rye St Antony School in Headington and St Edward’s School, Oxford, which she left in 2005. In a 2016 interview with Time Out magazine, she stated “I went to posh boarding schools, but I wasn’t the posh girl at the posh boarding schools.” She also stated that most of the people at her boarding school in Oxford were from conservative backgrounds, which meant she and some of her friends often felt like outsiders. After graduation, Clarke unsuccessfully applied to RADA, LAMDA, and Guildhall. She worked and travelled before entering the Drama Centre London, from which she graduated in 2009.

Clarke stated in a 2018 interview that her maternal grandmother was the child of a secret affair between Clarke’s great-grandmother and a man from the Indian subcontinent. Her grandmother wore light makeup to hide the darker complexion she had inherited from her father. Clarke credits this background for her family’s having a “history of fighters”, saying: “The fact that [my grandmother] had to hide her skin colour, essentially, and try desperately to fit in with everyone else must’ve been incredibly difficult.” In a Harper’s Bazaar interview, Clarke stated that her grandmother loved India more than she loved England and so, when she died, Clarke, at the age of 16, travelled to India to scatter her ashes.