It's a wrap

On a freezing December night, Camilla Arfwedson is wrapped up by a roaring fire in The Cross Keys pub in Chelsea, having spent the morning slumped in a fat suit playing a pregnant mother for the new series of

Success has come comparatively late for Camilla, 27. Four years older than Knightley, she is just appearing in her second film, A Bunch of Amateurs, co-written by Ian Hislop and produced by David Parfitt of Shakespeare in Love fame. In the film, she plays the daughter of a fading Hollywood great (Burt Reynolds) who thinks an offer to do King Lear in Stratford will resurrect his faltering career.

Only Camilla's determination has seen her get this far: she was turned down by two drama schools and, after a Classics degree at Edinburgh, she spent a year as a barmaid, only acting in her spare time. 'Eddie Redmayne came into the pub one day. I was so depressed about my future, but he'd seen a play I'd done in Camden called Square One with my friend Theo Cross [directed by his father, actor Ben Cross, star of Chariots of Fire and The Far Pavilions], and he said, "Do not give up. Do not give up." After my next play [The Shape of Things by Neil LaBute at the Barons Court Theatre], this gorgeous silver-haired man comes over and asks to buy me a drink.' It was Dallas Smith, the agent of Sienna Miller, Rosamond Pike and Redmayne. He signed her a week later.

Nothing about Camilla's background suggested that she would become an actress: her father Anthony Arfwedson is an HSBC banker, and his wife Kate is an interior designer. They arrived in London from Stockholm in the Seventies. Camilla and her older sister Christina, a journalist, grew up in a flat off the King's Road and their parents retired to Rye in East Sussex once the girls had left home. Camilla's boyfriend is a young actordirector, Alexander Gilmour, whose Look Back in Anger at the Jermyn Street Theatre earlier this year impressed the Evening Standard's theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh: 'Gilmour has given the play an exciting new dynamic and made a remarkable directorial debut.' The LAMDA and Oxfordtrained Gilmour is now 'smitten by the directing bug', she says.

A Bunch of Amateurs is out on 19 December.

Hair by Juan Carlos at One Make-up using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up by Denise Rabor at Caren. Fashion assistant: Hannah Bort