Dimpled, British, and looking younger than her age, Carey Mulligan made her professional debut in 2005 -- as Kitty Bennet in the film adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice -- and parlayed it into regular stage and screen work and then an Academy Award nomination only four years later. She was Oscar-nominated as best actress for her 2009 portrayal of Jenny, an English teen who falls for an older man, in An Education. She also won a BAFTA award, the British counterpart to the Oscars, for the same role. Carey Mulligan has had prominent parts in such British TV dramas as the BBC's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Bleak House (2005) and in the 2007-2008 stage revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in London and New York. In 2010 she appeared in Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (opposite Shia LaBeouf) and the film version of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (also starring Keira Knightley). She co-starred with Ryan Gosling in the 2011 thriller Drive.

Carey Mulligan's only acting experience before Pride and Prejudice was in grade school in Germany, where her family lived while her father helped run a hotel there, and in a Catholic girls' school in England... She was turned down by three drama schools to which she had applied without the knowledge of her parents, who had advised against an acting career... Actor Peter Sarsgaard appeared with Carey Mulligan in both An Education and The Seagull... She has been linked romantically with actor Shia LaBeouf.