NYLON - August 2008 - (Page 132) HAYLEY’S COMET With roles in a Waugh adaptation and The Duchess, alongside Keira Knightley, actress Hayley Atwell’s star is on the rise. By Nick Duerden. Photographed by Will Sanders Seventy-two hours after we were first scheduled to meet—our original appointment was cancelled at the last minute due to illness—and Hayley Atwell is here at last, gliding in through the London hotel lobby, all cheekbones and pout, black hair pulled back tight, and a sparkle in her eye. She is late today by half an hour—her new puppy, a miniature dachsund, requiring immunization at the vet—but no matter, for she has at least arrived, and that is what counts. Up close, Hayley Atwell is uncommonly beautiful, her face an artful splicing of British actress Rachel Weisz’s smouldering sexiness and French siren Juliette Binoche’s otherworldly grace. It’s the grace you notice most when she sips her cappuccino with the delicate refinement others would reserve for caviar. “Hello at last,” she says, offering up an impressively firm handshake, “and sorry for all the delay.” Atwell, 26, is a rising star of British cinema, one of Woody Allen’s innumerable new muses and, according to many, the new Keira Knightley. But she is also charming and funny and down-to-earth. She’s refreshingly blunt, too. “Filming Cassandra’s Dream,” she says of Allen’s troubled latest, “left me feeling a little well, a little bit shit, to be honest.” Atwell, an only child, was born in London in 1982 to a British mother and American father who divorced when she was still young. She grew up in fashionable West London with her mother, and would spend summers with her photographer father in his native Kansas, a world away in every sense. “Both my parents were seekers of the truth,” she says, “and spiritual with it, but spiritual in completely different ways, both forever searching and, yes, occasionally finding whatever it was they were looking for, but then completely losing it at other times as well. I was brought up in a very eccentric and bohemian fashion, which of course I revolted against.
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