Meet the Girls' girls

Girls is the most talked-about series debut since, well, Sex and the City. It is also about four female friends loving and living in New York, but the comparisons end there, because these ladies’ shoes are as shabby as their sex lives. Girls has already aired in America where it has earned censure as well as boundless praise. Where are all the black people? Who cares about the tribulations of four privileged white girls played by four privileged white girls (all of whom have famous parents)? But its defenders insist its brilliance lies in the ‘realness’ of its depiction of Millennials in their native environment; this is how they dress, how they talk, how they have sex. Written, created and directed by Lena Dunham, the 26-year-old has blurred the reality of her own life, and that of her friends, with her dramatic creation to an unprecedented degree. So who are these girls, and who are their real-life counterparts?

THE RINGLEADER

Lena Dunham, 26, is the precocious wunderkind who has all Manhattan either spitting or worshipping at her feet. The daughter of artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, aged 23 she made the film Tiny Furniture about a 23-year-old girl who had just left college and was living with her mother, an artist, and her younger sister in a Tribeca loft. It featured her real mother, her real sister and their real family home. Some said it was solipsism gone mad, but the film won the best first screenplay gong at the Independent Spirit Awards and not long afterwards Judd Apatow called and offered to help Lena make a TV show.

Fame, and personal revelation, come easily to Lena. She attended Saint Ann’s, an elite private school in Brooklyn. Vito Schnabel (son of the artist Julian Schnabel) was in her class and Zac Posen, now a fashion designer, was a babysitter. She majored in creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio, and kept a journal for a while but thought, ‘What’s the point, if no one’s reading it.’ So she would leave it out for her family to find. At college she made a short film of herself bathing in a fountain. It was viewed more than 76,000 times on YouTube and elicited hostility because some deemed her puppy fat and tattoos not worthy of public exposure.

She has now moved into an apartment in Brooklyn Heights (with the help of her friend, the late Nora Ephron), the second series of Girls is currently being filmed and rumour has it that Lena’s agent is seeking a $3.6 million deal for her first book, Not That Kind of Girl: Advice by Lena Dunham, a collection of, yes you guessed it, personal essays/cautionary tales.

Says: Her typical character is ‘like me, minus a certain kind of self-awareness. She is one step behind where I am at any given moment.’

Plays: Hannah Horvath who has recently left college and is trying to make it as a memoirist in New York. Her parents, college professors from Michigan, are refusing to bankroll her existence any longer, so her best friend and flatmate, Marnie, is helping her pay the rent. Her terrifyingly weird boyfriend doesn’t answer her calls, she can’t get through a job interview without mentioning rape and although she wants to be a writer she never seems to write anything.

Says: ‘I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or a voice, of a generation.’

THE WILD ONE

Jemima Kirke, 27, is the London-born daughter of Simon Kirke, the drummer with 1970s band Bad Company, and Lorraine Dellal, a ‘muse’ who owns a New York vintage store called Geminola (and is aunt to the shaven-head model Alice Dellal). As well as being an actress, Jemima is a painter who trained at Rhode Island School of Design and specialises in unnerving portraits inspired by Manet and Freud. She met Lena on an American Vogue shoot when they were 11, and they became friends at Saint Ann’s. ‘Everyone was obsessed with Jemima,’ recalls Lena. ‘Any cool experience I had in school was trailing behind Jemima. Even my mum was like, “I can’t believe that girl is your friend.” ’

Jemima appeared in Tiny Furniture as Charlotte, Aura’s free-spirited childhood friend, and got pregnant during the making of the film. She had her daughter, Rafaella Israel, got married to a property developer and is now pregnant again. She has fitted a lot into her short life, as wild girls often do, taking drugs, having an abortion, tattooing a Yorkshire terrier on Lena’s ribcage and generally behaving badly. But she has put all that behind her and is a happy homegirl, although she does still go to Patti Smith concerts, with her baby, and has the ability to make grown men into fools — see The New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als’ recent encomium: Kirke ‘has something that can’t be worked at: the ability to draw you in because she’s a star, and because she has in spades what no less a presence than Katharine Hepburn once said a star must have: the ability to be fascinating.’

Says: ‘Sex and the City is a total lie. That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’

Plays: Jessa Johansson who has spent her life roaming the globe in silky playsuits with chopsticks in her hair. She is spontaneous, sexually voracious and morally dubious. Inevitably, when she becomes a nanny, the father of the children falls for her. And inevitably, behind all the bohemian bravado, is a scared, lost little girl.

Says: ‘Every time I do coke I shit my pants.’

THE ALPHA FEMALE

Allison Williams, 24, is the daughter of NBC news anchor Brian Williams and TV producer Jane Gillan Stoddard. She attended Yale and has worked as a salesperson at Ralph Lauren and as the assistant to Tina Fey’s assistant. After college she wrote and appeared in a number of sketches for the comedy video website Funny or Die, most notably as Kate Middleton: ‘I had no idea he was so f***ing bald!’ she says to camera while sitting next to a forlorn Prince William. She also shot a video called ‘Mad Men theme tune... with a twist’ that appeared on YouTube, earning her an audition with family friend Judd Apatow. She has admitted that she has always been a ‘type-A’ personality and there has been talk of her playing Anastasia Steele in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Says: ‘I would prefer to keep my clothes on. Unless there’s a brisk breeze or something, I tend to keep them on.’