Miu Miu gymslip skirt

With her standout elegance and cut-glass vowels, Rosamund Pike shines in autumn’s hottest film, Made
in Dagenham. But she insists that in reality she’s far from the perfect English rose. As she tells Judith Woods, she gets into ‘scrapes’ far too often…

'Being single has propelled me into some amazing adventures. I have nothing to lose,' says Rosamund

Rosamund Pike and I are meeting for lunch in a pub near London’s Old Vic theatre. Not because she’s appearing in a show there, but because the kitchen serves the likes of deep-fried pig’s head, cold roast beef on dripping toast and lamb sweetbreads. Just scanning the menu makes me blanch, but the 31-year-old former Bond girl – Keira Knightley’s sister in Pride and Prejudice and Carey Mulligan’s friend in An Education – hasn’t tried offal before, and what is the point of life if not the giddy accumulation of lovely, new experiences?
‘When I was working in New York recently, I decided to do something strange every day,’ she explains. ‘I would pick up a magazine and do whatever was on the page that fell open. I ended up making a trek across the water from Manhattan to eat lobster in a bun on the Brooklyn quayside, and the next morning I rode the Cyclone wooden roller coaster on Coney Island, which was utterly, horrendously terrifying, because it was built in 1927 and is so old that you can’t be entirely sure it won’t fall apart. There’s a camera fixed to take pictures on one of the dips, and I had planned to adopt some sort of artful expression – boredom, maybe – but instead I was screaming and grimacing like a zombie.’
She pulls a face but, despite the acting abilities that have made her one of the hottest British properties both here and in the US, she looks nothing like a zombie. She does, of course, personify the English rose, but I promised not to say so, because it’s a label that hangs like a millstone round her slender, Grace Kelly neck. Although her Miu Miu gymslip skirt and white James Perse T-shirt are teamed rather eccentrically with fluorescent trainers, she is a picture of unselfconscious elegance, positively radiating the sort of money-can’t-buy class that most actresses would kill for. But when
I say as much, her exasperation is palpable. ‘I’m not an English rose at all,’ she says.
‘Or maybe I’m an English rose with…’