Phoebe Waller-Bridge. (Image: BBC)
If the producers were looking for someone who could match the promiscuity of Bond, then Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag character would be spot on – she’s a woman who has an attitude to sex that Bond would certainly appreciate.
Rumour has it that Waller-Bridge has introduced a female character to 007’s latest outing who resists his charms and is not seduced by Bond.
Fleabag is far more likely to have succumbed on the spot.
The film has had a troubled start after director Danny Boyle quit over “artistic differences” and now the 33-year-old star writer has been drafted in to help.
So who is the woman whose edgy skills have made her one of the most in-demand screenwriters? Despite the earthy humour – some would say crudity – of Fleabag, Waller-Bridge actually comes from a very upmarket background, boasting a couple of baronets in her lineage and a Catholic private school education.
Born in Ealing, West London, her grandfather was Sir John Edward Longueville Clerke, 12th Baronet of Hitcham, and on her father’s side she is a descendant of Conservative MP The Rev.
Sir Egerton Leigh, a 2nd Baronet.
Her father Michael co-founded Tradepoint, the first fully electronic stock market, and her mother Teresa works for the Ironmongers’ Company in the City – one of London’s “great 12” livery companies that administer charitable trusts.
Rumour has it that Waller-Bridge has introduced a female character to 007. (Image: BBC)
The couple are divorced. Older sister Isobel is a composer in film and television and younger brother Jasper is a music manager.
Waller-Bridge went to St Augustine’s Priory, a Catholic girls’ school followed by the independent DLD College in Marylebone, and then graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She thought that would be enough to give her a career in acting but on leaving Rada in 2006, her belief that “being posh with curly hair equals a Shakespearean career” turned out to be wrong and she struggled to find work.
It wasn’t just her.
She felt there was a marked lack of good roles for women: “The girls didn’t get many decent parts because not that many plays have them,” Waller-Bridge said. “I was always crying or pointing at things.”
When director Vicky Jones was fired from a play in which Waller-Bridge was performing, she quit as well and the two became firm friends.
Drowning their sorrows over a bottle of wine in a pub, the pair set up their own theatre company, DryWhite.
They began with short-format plays often performed in pubs and Fleabag started life as a 10- minute stand-up routine.
It was expanded into a one-hour, one-woman show for the 2013 Edinburgh Festival that was described by one critic as a character who “has proudly embraced her inner
