Emily Olivia Leah Blunt was born on 23 February 1983 in Roehampton, south-west London, the second of four children in a family where her father practised as a barrister and her mother had acted before turning to teaching. She was educated at Ibstock Place School and then at Hurtwood House in Surrey, a sixth-form college with a strong drama department, according to Britannica.

As a child she developed a severe stammer, and she has credited a teacher who encouraged her to try a character voice in a school play with helping her find a way through it. She has since spoken publicly about the experience many times and treats it as a formative part of her story rather than something to hide, as she told guests at a fundraising gala reported by Variety.

Blunt was spotted by an agent at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and made her professional stage debut in 2001 in Sir Peter Hall’s West End revival of The Royal Family, playing the granddaughter of Judi Dench’s character, a performance that won her a newcomer award from the Evening Standard, as recorded by Britannica.

Television followed quickly, including the ITV drama Henry VIII, before her film debut in Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love (2004), a small British picture that drew strong reviews for both of its young leads. Her performance in the BBC television film Gideon’s Daughter, opposite Bill Nighy, then earned her the Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a television film, according to the Golden Globes.

The role that made her internationally famous was Emily Charlton, the acid first assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Blunt has said she was a late casting choice and that the part changed her career overnight, as the cast recalled for the film’s tenth anniversary in Variety.

She spent the following years alternating period drama and studio work, playing the young monarch in The Young Victoria (2009), a battle-hardened soldier opposite Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow (2014), an FBI agent in Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) and the Baker’s Wife in Disney’s Into the Woods (2014), a performance that brought another Golden Globe nomination, as listed by the Golden Globes.

A Quiet Place (2018), directed by her husband John Krasinski, was a major box-office hit and won Blunt the Screen Actors Guild award for best supporting actress, reported by The Hollywood Reporter. She followed it with the title role in Mary Poppins Returns the same year.

Her most acclaimed work came in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), playing Kitty Oppenheimer. Variety reported before production that the principal cast accepted around $4 million each, well below their usual quotes, with backend participation built into the deals, according to Variety. The film passed $900 million at the worldwide box office, according to Variety, and Blunt received her first Academy Award nomination for the role.

In 2026 she returned to Emily Charlton in The Devil Wears Prada 2, which opened to an estimated $233 million worldwide, according to Variety, and pushed the franchise past $1 billion at the global box office, as reported by Variety.

Across her career Blunt has won a Golden Globe and a SAG award and has been nominated for an Oscar, for BAFTA awards and for several further Golden Globes, a record summarised on her Golden Globes profile. Her range is often cited as her defining quality: she has moved between comedy, musicals, action and prestige drama without being typecast.

She became a United States citizen in 2015 at a ceremony in Los Angeles, attended by Krasinski, as reported by ABC News. She remains a British citizen as well, and the couple have two daughters.

Blunt has taken on few endorsements. The most prominent was her role as the face of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium fragrance, with a print campaign shot by Patrick Demarchelier and a television advertisement launched in October 2011, as reported by FashionNetwork. The value of that contract was never published, and she has not signed a long-running beauty or fashion ambassadorship on the scale of many actresses of her profile.

Blunt’s business activity is modest compared with some of her peers. She has not launched a consumer brand, and her main venture outside acting is producing. She took an executive producer credit on Hugo Blick’s western series The English, a BBC and Prime Video co-production in which she also starred, as reported by Deadline. She told Screen International that producing gave her a say in shaping material rather than simply being cast in it. Producer fees on such projects are not disclosed.

Blunt and Krasinski have bought and sold several homes. In 2012 they paid $2.15 million for a four-bedroom retreat in Ojai, California, according to NBC News.

They later moved to New York and bought a four-storey limestone townhouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope for $6 million, reported by Fox News, and after renovating it listed it for $8 million, citing how much time they spent travelling, according to Money. Their current homes have not been the subject of confirmed public records reporting, so their value is not included here as a documented figure.