Just six months of out drama school, Natalie Dormer read for the role of a clumsy ingénue in Lasse Hallstöm's "Casanova."
Source: Daily Mail
Dormer, a Berkshire, England native, blew away the casting directors and walked away with a three-picture contract with Disney.
Source: Daily Mail
It later fell through for unknown reasons. A year later, Dormer was working a temp job doing data entry just to pay rent.
Sources: Evening Standard and Daily Beast
It was the best lesson I could have had in the first 12 months of my career," Dormer says. "From that moment on, I realized you can never get above yourself.
Source: Evening Standard
Her luck came back in spades. From 2007 to 2010, Dormer became a brunette, playing the short-tempered, but charismatic Anne Boleyn in Showtime's "The Tudors."
Surprisingly, the first scene she filmed for the drama depicted her character's execution. They shot it in the courtyard of Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail.
Source: Daily Mail
Dormer related to the character's look. "I know I'm not a conventional beauty," she says. "Famously, Anne Boleyn was not a beauty. She was more about quirkiness and an innate sensuality."
Source: Daily Mail
Following her season-two exit, Dormer appeared in a string of small roles in TV and movies, including Private Lorraine in "Captain America: The First Avenger."
She took on the daunting role as the Queen Mother in "W.E.," a biopic co-writtten and directed by Madonna.
A year later, she embarked on what would become her most famous part, as the cunning Margaery in HBO's "Game of Thrones."
Dormer says she based her portrayal on the media circus that surrounds Kate Middleton, dubbed "the Princess Diana effect."
Source: Daily Beast
She is very much a PR genius," Dormer says of Margaery. "Now she would be one of those It girls, tweeting and Instagramming their latest dresses and raising money for orphanages by running half-marathons.
Source: Express
“I love those women that I play that have sexual power,” Dormer says. But as an actress, she's trying to grow past the "femme fatale" typecast now.
Source: Daily Beast
Dormer swapped a corset for a military fatigued look and a partly shaved head in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1."
Dormer got the part by shooting an audition tape at home with her hair slicked back into a tight ponytail. She later shaved half of it off.
Source: Daily Beast
She reprises her role as Cressida, a badass film director who makes rebel-propaganda movies for District 13, in the sequel, out Friday.
Next year should to be another blockbuster year for the 33-year-old actress. She searches for a disappeared sister in haunted woods in "The Forest."
Next fall, she'll search for a cure for a frightening pandemic in Sony's fantasy-horror "Patient Zero."
After that, Dormer says she'd love to play a Bond girl someday. "I want to keep people guessing," she says.
Source: YouTube/BAFTA Guru, Daily Beast