Rosamund Pike Bio: In Her Own Words – Video Exclusive, News, Photos

Rosamund Pike (born January 27, 1979) is an English actress. She is best known for her roles in Die Another Day, Pride and Prejudice, The World’s End, and her starring roles in Gone Girl and I Care A Lot.  She has earned nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award. She has also won a British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Libertine.

Rosamund Pike Early Life

Pike was born in 1979 in the Hammersmith section of London. She is the only child of two opera singers – Caroline and Julian Pike. Rosamund followed her parents around Europe through her early years, as they jumped from place to place in their musical careers. Pike went to school in Bristol and was soon noticed by an agent when she performed as Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the National Youth Theater. From there, Rosamund set forth on a path that would lead her to become a professional actress.

Although she was turned down from many stage schools, Pike would enter Oxford’s Wadham College, where she would graduate with an upper second class degree in 2001. While there, she also took some time off to build up her acting career by taking roles in various plays.

Rosamund Pike Acting Career

Pike’s professional career started with a few minor roles on British television during her years at university. They included A Rather English Marriage, Wives and Daughters, Love in a Cold Climate, and Foyle’s War.

After finding it tough to land roles, Pike reconsidered her acting career. Her big break came in 2002, however, when she was asked to play the role of a Bond girl in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. She would play Miranda Frost, an M16 agent assigned to aid James Bond (played by Pierce Brosan). Her performance garnered up attention worldwide, as she was awarded or nominated for a handful of new actress awards as well as a MTV Movie Award.

Roles began to pick up for Pike in 2004 and 2005, as she was in four movies in the two year span. She played the role of Rose in Promised Land to kick off the stretch. Later that year, she played Elizabeth Mallet alongside Johnny Depp in The Libertine. The performance landed Pike the 2005 British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actress, her first major award. The following year, Pike played Jane Bennet in the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.  She would also be the female lead in the movie based on the video game Doom, where she played the role of scientist Samantha Grimm.

Pike went back to her stage roots in 2006 by taking on a role in the London West End play Summer and Smoke. The next year she would be back on the stage in the production Gaslight. Although Pike’s career has mainly focused on film and television through the past decade, she still occasionally takes part in theater performances in England, the most recent of which the leading performance in Hedda Gabler in 2010.

The stretch between 2009 and 2011 was another busy period for Pike, as she took on a multitude of roles. 2009 saw her in Surrogates and as a narrator in the documentary Yesterday We Were in America, but her most notable performance was playing Helen in An Education. The role landed her two nominations for Best Supporting Actress in Britain as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award with the rest of her cast. The following year, Pike took on four more movie roles, including Burning Palms, Jackboots on Whitehall, and Made in Dagenham. She also received critical acclaim for her  role of Miriam Grant-Panofsky in the Canadian film Barney’s Version, which also landed her some more award nominations for her role as lead actress. In an exclusive interview with uInterview around the film’s release, Pike said working with Paul Giamatti in the movie went very well.  “I don’t think we needed to do anything, actually,” she told uInterview. “I mean, I’ve been obsessed with Paul for years. I think he’s just wonderful, and you know, very flatteringly he knew my work too, which is sort of very surprising when you’ve admired someone for so long… and I just had a hunch that we’d sort of click and I think we’re quite similar, we’re actually we both think in quite off-the-wall ways about things, about life in general — we both have sort of strange, slightly off-the-wall interests, we’re kind of good companions really. And I think it was very easy to find a physical intimacy together, which is not so much about, you know, sort of touching one another — it’s about being able to actually look someone in the eye and sort of say, ‘I know you, I understand you,’ and it just felt very simple right from the word ‘go’.” Rosamund took on two more roles in 2011, including the role of the love interest in the James Bond spoof Johnny English Reborn, harkening back to her role as a “Bond Girl” earlier in her career.

2012 would be another big year for Pike’s worldwide exposure, first playing the role of Queen Andromeda in Wrath of the Titans. The film racked in big bucks at the box office, and although critics generally panned the movie, many felt Pike was the movie’s bright spot. Later in the year she was the female lead alongside Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher, which once again was a worldwide box office success. Pike would be in another high profile movie in 2013 with a supporting role in the British comedy The World’s End. 

Rosamund Pike’s breakout performance among Hollywood critics came in 2014 with her performance in Gone Girl. Pike played Amy Dunne, a woman who goes missing on her wedding anniversary, in the film directed by David Fincher based on Gillian Flynn’s novel. Opposite Ben Affleck, Pike shined in the film and won the praise of both critics and moviegoers alike. As a result of her role in Gone Girl, Pike would be nominated for a wide variety of Best Actress awards, including the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, BAFTA Awards, and the Academy Awards. She also won the award for 2014 British Actress of the Year by the London Film Critics Circle Awards.

In 2020, Pike was cast for another starring role in the film I Care A Lot. The comedy thriller garnered Pike and her costars much acclaim, as Pike won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical that year.

Rosamund Pike Interview

In her exclusive interview with uInterview, Pike said she’s come a far way from her days of being a “Bond Girl.” “Nowadays, I mean very few people come up to me and say, you know unless they’re Bond aficionados, you know, recognize me from the Bond film,” she exclaims. “Mostly now, it’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘An Education,’ so I would say just by sort of my day-to-day experience on the street, that more people know me from those films than know me from the Bond film.” With her work in Gone Girl, the public at this moment knows her more as Amy Dunne than the sidekick to the fictional super spy.

Pike also told uInterview that there’s a reason why many of the more developed character-driven movies are relegated to the indie scene rather than in big studio releases. “You know, that’s the way things are going,” she said prior to the release of Barney’s Version. “But until you get adults to go back into the theaters — at the moment, 80 percent of movie tickets on a Saturday night are bought by 18-25-year-olds, so as long as they’re the core audience, people are always going to make films for them. So you’ve got to sort of go back to basics, and if you get adults into movie theaters — but it’s Catch 22, it’s chicken and the egg, right? They’re going to go if there’s films they want to see, but there aren’t going to be films they want to see unless they go.”

Pike’s upcoming projects include a reboot of the British cartoon series Thunderbirds. Rosamund will lend her voice for the role of Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward in the series that will air on British station ITV later this winter.

Rosamund Pike Dating History

Pike was involved in a relationship with film director Joe Wright. The two were engaged in 2007, but he called off the wedding the next year. Pike is currently dating mathematical researcher Robie Uniacke. Together they have two sons, born in 2012 and 2014.