Background and career
Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke (born 23 October 1986) is an English actress. She achieved international recognition for her role as Daenerys Targaryen in the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones (2011–2019), for which she received nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards. She is also widely known for playing Sarah Connor in the science-fiction film Terminator: Genisys (2015) and Qi'ra in the film Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), and for starring in the romantic dramas Me Before You (2016) and Last Christmas (2019).
Clarke's television debut was a guest appearance in the BBC One medical soap opera Doctors in 2009, at age 22. Clarke made her Broadway debut as Holly Golightly in the play Breakfast at Tiffany's (2013), and played Nina in a West End production of The Seagull. She also played G'iah in the Marvel Cinematic Universe miniseries Secret Invasion (2023).
Clarke was born on 23 October 1986 in London. She grew up in Oxfordshire. Her father, Peter Roderick "Rick" Clarke, was a theatre sound engineer from Wolverhampton who died in 2016 from cancer. Her mother, Jennifer Susan Dodd Clarke, is a businesswoman who is the vice-president for marketing at a management-consultancy firm and the director of The Anima Foundation, which is a charity to help young people in Ghana. She has a younger brother, Bennett, who works in the entertainment industry and was part of the camera department for Game of Thrones. Clarke's maternal grandmother was from India. She ascribes her family's "history of fighters" to their Indian ancestry, which she stated to be a source of pride and integral to her identity: "The fact that [my grandmother] had to hide her skin colour, essentially, and try desperately to fit in with everyone else must've been incredibly difficult".
Clarke stated that her mother had rules when she was growing up: "Don't do drugs, don't have sex, and don't touch your eyebrows", and that she was bullied as a child for "having ridiculous eyebrows". Clarke stated that "My father always told me—Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their bookshelf". Clarke became interested in acting at the age of three years after seeing a production of the musical Show Boat. When she was ten, her father took her to a West End audition for The Goodbye Girl, a musical by Neil Simon.
How Emilia Clarke makes money
In 2017, she reportedly became one of the highest-paid actors on television, earning between £1.2 and £2 million per episode of Game of Thrones. The film, which also stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jai Courtney, and Jason Clarke, received unfavourable reviews from critics but was a box office success, grossing over $440 million worldwide.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (2025-02-26), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
