Florence Pugh is an English actress that made her professional acting debut in the mystery film The Falling (2014) and had her breakthrough with a leading role in the independent drama Lady Macbeth (2016). Her performance as an unhappily married woman in the latter won her the British Independent Film Award for Best Actress.

In 2018, Pugh portrayed Elizabeth de Burgh in the Netflix historical film Outlaw King (2018), and played a 1970s actress involved in espionage in the television miniseries The Little Drummer Girl (2018). The following year, she starred as WWE wrestler Paige in the sports film Fighting with My Family, and starred in the horror film Midsommar.


Pugh was born and raised in Oxfordshire.[2][3] She lived in Andalusia, Spain, for part of her childhood. Her father, Clinton Pugh, is a restaurateur in Oxford[4] and her mother, Deborah, is a dancer and dance teacher. Pugh has three siblings, including actor and musician Toby Sebastian and stage actor Arabella Gibbins. Her first school was in Sotogrande in Spain. Her love of accents and comedy was first displayed at age six at Cokethorpe Juniors: cast as Mary in a Christmas nativity she decided to play her as having a broad Yorkshire accent. More lead parts followed at Wychwood School (2007–2009) and at St. Edward's School, Oxford.

2014–2018: Early work

Pugh made her professional acting debut in mystery drama The Falling (2014), in which she played a precocious teenager opposite Maisie Williams, while still in school. Tara Brady of The Irish Times labelled her "remarkable" and Mike McCahill of The Daily Telegraph took note of how well she conveyed her character's "teen-queen bearing with the vulnerability of one still unsure of her own body." Pugh was nominated for Best British Newcomer at the 2014 BFI London Film Festival and for Best Young British/Irish performer by the London Film Critics' Circle.

In 2015, Pugh played her first lead role in the television film Studio City, co-starring Eric McCormack. The following year, she starred in the independent drama Lady Macbeth and had a recurring role as a webcam model in the first season of the ITV detective series Marcella. In the former, based on the novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov, she starred as a young girl unhappily married to a much older man. Reviewing the film for Variety, Guy Lodge termed Pugh a "a major talent to watch" and praised her portrayal of her character's "complex, under-the-skin transformation". For her performance, she won the BIFA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a British Independent Film, among others.

In 2018, Pugh featured in the action film The Commuter and played Cordelia to Anthony Hopkins' Leir of Britain in Richard Eyre's television film King Lear. Later that year, she portrayed Elizabeth de Burgh in the Netflix historical film Outlaw King (2018), starring Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce. Charles Bramesco of The Guardian found her to be "excellent despite her thankless role". She next featured in a six-part miniseries adaptation of John le Carré's spy novel The Little Drummer Girl, in which she played an actress in the 1970s who becomes embroiled in an espionage plot. In a mixed review of the series, Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wrote, "Pugh is terrific throughout, once again asserting her star-on-the-rise status. She smartly mixes earthiness with sophistication, wisdom with naïveté."

2019 onward

Pugh next starred as professional wrestler Paige in Fighting with My Family (2019), her first lead role in a Hollywood film. A comedy-drama about Paige's relationship with her family, co-starring Lena Headey and Dwayne Johnson, the film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and received critical acclaim. Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent took note of how different the role was from her previous appearances, and wrote that she was "completely convincing as the wrestler. She has all the moves in the ring and shows the same defiance, scruffy glamour and self-deprecating humour as the real life Paige." In the same year, she took on a leading role in Ari Aster's horror film Midsommar, about a troubled couple who encounter Swedish cultists. David Edelstein of Vulture labeled her performance "amazingly vivid" and wrote, "Her face is so wide and open that she seems to have nowhere to hide her emotions."

Pugh will next star in Greta Gerwig's film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women. She will also star alongside Scarlett Johansson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Black Widow, about the titular superhero.