At the UK premiere of his new sci-fi blockbuster Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg was rhapsodising about his leading lady. He’d been in awe of Emily Blunt, he said, ever since she stole the show in The Devil Wears Prada back in 2006. “This is a force of nature and one of the nicest people in the world,” he added. “I’m so lucky that she liked our script.”
He is far from the only one so smitten. Adored by everyone from teenage boys to their grandmothers – and claimed by the Americans as one of their own, after she obtained dual citizenship in 2015 – Blunt has parlayed that affection into a reported $80m fortune and a stint among Forbes’s highest-paid actresses. Part of her appeal may be the absence of fuss: no tabloid melodramas, no whiff of the diva. The rest is sheer reliability. Who else could have travelled from the period swoon of The Young Victoria (2009) to the alien invasion of Disclosure Day, by way of musicals, weepies and the life-or-death hush of post-apocalyptic survival thrillers, with only one real failure (2020’s Wild Mountain Thyme)?
