Biography
Swedish-English actress Rebecca Ferguson's compelling turn as an English Queen in training in "The White Queen" (BBC, 2013) helped to mint her as a star in Hollywood features, including "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation" (2015), "The Girl on the Train" (2016), "The Greatest Showman" (2017) and "Men in Black: International" (2019). Born Rebecca Louisa Ferguson Sundström on October 19, 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden, she was raised in a bilingual household - her mother was English and her father was Swedish - in the city's Vasastan district. Ferguson began her career in front of cameras in her early teens, first as a model for print publications and later, in television commercials for cosmetics and fashion accessories. After graduating from Adolf Fredrik's Music School in 1999, the 16-year-old Ferguson earned her breakout role as an upper-class teenager on the soap opera "Nya tider" (TV, 1999-2006). She left the series after a year and joined the cast of another soap, a Swedish-American series filmed in the United States called "Ocean Ave."(TV4, 2002-2003), which received poor reviews; Ferguson then retreated to the coastal town of Simirishamn, where she gave birth to a son with then-boyfriend Ludwig Hallberg in 2007. She remained largely off-screen until 2011, when director Richard Hobert spotted her at the town's market and asked her to appear in his upcoming film, "A One-Way Trip to Antibes" (2011). Ferguson was cast as Maria, a duplicitous maid who is blackmailed by elderly widower Sven-Bertil Taube into foiling his children's plan to steal his life savings. She soon returned to steady work on screen, first in Scandinavian features like the drama "Us" (2013), and then in English-language projects, beginning in 2013 with "The White Queen," which cast her as commoner turned 15th-century English Queen consort Elizabeth Woodville. Her performance earned a Golden Globe nomination and led to more projects in the UK and United States, though none more high-profile than "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation," for which she starred as Ilsa Faust, an icy operative connected to a criminal organization. Star Tom Cruise chose Ferguson for the role based on her performance in "The White Queen," and the global success of the film led to starring roles in the spy thriller "Despite the Falling Snow" (2016), as Hugh Grant's mistress in the comic biopic "Florence Foster Jenkins" (2016), as Justin Theroux's wife and one of several objects of unhealthy fixation by Emily Blunt in "The Girl on the Train" (2016), and as a doomed scientist in the 2017 science fiction thriller "Life" (2017). Ferguson's run of roles in major features continued unabated in the years that followed: she played singer Jenny Lind in the musical "The Greatest Showman" and reprised her turn as Ilsa Faust in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" (2018), while also lining up prominent roles in "Men in Black: International," "Doctor Sleep" (2020) - the sequel to Stephen King's "The Shining" - and Denis Villeneuve's epic adaptation of Frank Herbert's "Dune" (2020).
