Holliday Grainger is juggling three mobile phones, and an air of furious concentration pervades her doll-like face as she sets them into rest mode. ‘They’re for different countries,’ she sighs without a hint of swank, leaving the phones to pulse unheeded. While she is a thoroughly modern girl, insisting that Skyping from film locations is the solution to the perils of long-distance love, she has spent the past three years being laced into – and in some cases helped out of – corsets, bustles and bonnets. 

Appearing in films of Jane Eyre, Bel Ami and Anna Karenina, and playing Lucrezia Borgia in the Sky Atlantic hit The Borgias, Holliday has clearly become the go-to girl for period drama. ‘It’s weird: people have started asking me recently if I’m worried about being typecast. But actually I started on contemporary TV series when I was little, so in my head that’s what I am. Still,’ she concedes modestly, ‘my career has stepped up to a new level since I’ve started this costume drama lark.’ Now the 24-year-old Mancunian will, I predict, become an ‘overnight’ star – after 18 years as an actress – when her luminous performance as Estella is seen in a new film of Dickens’s Great Expectations later this month.

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