All DOLLED UP

Whether she's toting a baseball bat, pigtails and a wicked grin in Suicide Squad, bringing a real person to life on-screen in I, Tonya or working her magic behind the scenes of Promising Young Woman, Margot Robbie continues to dazzle. Now, she's taking on a role no one has ever played before.

- SANDRA PARMEE

Margot Robbie has an impressive body of work under her belt, runs her own successful production house, and is an ambassador for brands like Chanel and Calvin Klein.

Now, she’s brought us the world’s first live-action Barbie film, in all its bubblegum-pink glory. There’s no doubt that she has huge acting talent, yet it’s actually Margot’s intelligence and determination that have made her a Hollywood force to be reckoned with at just 33 years old.

Perhaps part of her determination to succeed is because she grew up in Queensland, Australia, with her three siblings and a single mother who struggled to provide for them all. It’s taken tenacity and hard work to get where she has. ‘There definitely is an element of luck, but it’s like you have to work really, really hard so that there’s room for luck to come in,’ Margot says. ‘You’ve got to do so much hard work and so much preparation, and just tee up all the potential opportunities.’

At 17, after tirelessly pestering the casting director, Margot was cast in the Australian soapie Neighbours, which meant a move to Melbourne. In her early 20s, she moved again, this time as far as the US, to chase her dreams.

Her drive and her ability to make the right career choices at the right time have never let her down. During her audition for The Wolf of Wall Street she famously went off-script and gave Leonardo DiCaprio a big slap mid-speech – impressing director Martin Scorsese so much that he gave her the job. She’d never met Quentin Tarantino when she wrote to him to say how much she wanted to work with him. Not long afterwards, he cast her as Sharon Tate in his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.