Felicity Jones in The Chalk Garden

AGE:

HOMETOWN: Birmingham. Jones is the daughter of a business consultant father and a mother who works in marketing. "Both in their spare time enjoy the theater," says Jones, whose uncle, Michael Hadley, in fact works in the theater: Hadley is appearing in the forthcoming Donmar revival of Piaf.

CURRENTLY: Treading the Donmar boards herself as the precocious, pyromaniacal Laurel in The Chalk Garden, Michael Grandage's astonishing revival of the rarely seen Enid Bagnold play from the 1950s. (There has been talk of a commercial transfer.) Hayley Mills had Jones' part in the film version, which nabbed an Oscar nomination for Dame Edith Evans in the role of Mrs. St. Maugham that is now being taken by Tony winner Margaret Tyzack. Jones was attracted to the project by the singularity of the play itself and by the chance to work with Tyzack and co-star Penelope Wilton, who plays Miss Madrigal, Laurel's governess. "I don't think I've ever learned more than I have on this project," says Jones, "both on the level of the sophistication of the dialogue and in terms of just observing people whom I've admired."

MOTHER LOVE: Bagnold's play charts three generations of women inhabiting a Sussex manor house marked out by eccentricity and a gift for highly articulate gab. As Laurel and her grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham, trade quips, one is aware of the absence of Laurel's own mother, who appears fleetingly in the elegantly coiffed presence of Suzanne Burden. "There's a lot of dialogue around the mother without actually reconstructing the relationship," notes Jones, who anatomizes the play with the clarity one might expect from an English literature graduate of Oxford. "I think that's part of the power of [the play] in that it sort of lets you guess what the mother is about. Even after she's left, you're not too sure of her motives."

Penelope Wilton and Felicity Jones in The Chalk Garden

DAMAGE: Bagnold is also writing about damage, which young Laurel seems to have sustained on both a psychic and physical level. "Laurel is obviously quite a damaged creature in the sense that she's been given a lot of attention but not necessarily the nurturing attention you need as a child, hence ‘the chalk garden'"—the play's titular metaphor. To some extent, the task isn't a million miles from her previous stage role at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in Polly Stenham's award-winning That Face, in which Jones originated the part of the terrifyingly precocious Mia that was passed to Hannah Murray in the play's subsequent West End transfer. "It's quite interesting playing these damaged characters not having experienced anything like this myself," says Jones, with a laugh. "I had a very happy upbringing."

SCREENINGS: Jones is making her name scarcely less skillfully on screen. She joins Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode in the film take on Brideshead Revisited, which remains one of the defining British TV miniseries of all time. Jones plays Cordelia Flyte, the role taken in the 1980s TV programs by Phoebe Nicholls: "They're very different mediums in a sense," Jones says of the big-screen adaptation as compared with TV. "We have two and a half hours to tell our story." And she just finished her role alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend in Stephen Frears' film of Cheri, where Jones once again plays a teenager, Edmee, who ends up marrying Friend's character, Cheri. "I was rehearsing Chalk Garden in the week and filming Cheri in Paris at the weekend—a slightly stressful life."

WHEREFORE ART THOU, JULIET?: Given her own height (5'3") and training, surely Shakespeare's Juliet beckons, not least for a performer who tends consistently to get cast younger than she is. "I think it's quite a luxury that I get to explore teenage lives quite different from my own," says Jones, who would love to give the Bard a go. "I would always want to do stuff where the words are interesting to say. Juliet is a brilliant, brilliant rhetorician, and I think that gets underestimated."