Lily Collins — actress with roots in the Russian Empire
Lily Jane Collins was born in Guildford, Surrey, on 18 March 1989, the daughter of the English musician Phil Collins and his second wife, Jill Tavelman, an American who was president of the Beverly Hills Women's Club. Her half-siblings from her father's first marriage are the musician Simon Collins and the actress Joely Collins.
Her connection to the Russian Empire runs through her mother's family, and it is thinly documented. According to Wikipedia, her maternal grandfather was a Canadian Jewish immigrant who for many years owned a men's clothing store in Beverly Hills. IMDb's biography describes her as partly of Russian Jewish descent through this grandfather. Neither source names the Russian-born ancestors, who would be the grandfather's parents or earlier, or says where in the Empire they lived.
She first appeared on screen at the age of two, in the BBC sitcom Growing Pains. After her parents divorced she moved with her mother to Los Angeles, where she graduated from Harvard-Westlake School and studied broadcast journalism at the University of Southern California. As a teenager she wrote a column for the British magazine Elle Girl, and in the late 2000s she began acting and modelling more regularly.
Her breakthrough came in The Blind Side (2009), as Collins Tuohy, the daughter of Sandra Bullock's character, followed by Mirror Mirror (2012), as Snow White, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), as Clary Fray, and Love, Rosie (2014). For Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply (2016) she received her first Golden Globe nomination. She played a young woman with anorexia in To the Bone (2017), J. R. R. Tolkien's future wife, Edith, in Tolkien (2019), Fantine in the BBC's Les Misérables (2018–19), and the typist Rita Alexander in David Fincher's Mank (2020). In 2017 she published Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, a book of personal essays.
Since 2020 she has starred as Emily Cooper, an American marketing executive working in Paris, in the Netflix series Emily in Paris, which brought her a second Golden Globe nomination and, as one of its producers, an Emmy nomination for outstanding comedy series. She is married to the film director Charlie McDowell, the son of the actors Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen.
Tracing the roots — Russian Empire — maternal grandfather's family (names and town not documented)
Her mother, Jill Tavelman, is the daughter of a Canadian Jewish immigrant who for many years kept a men's clothing store in Beverly Hills; IMDb describes Lily Collins's Russian Jewish descent as coming through this grandfather. The Russian-born ancestors are not named and their town is not recorded.
Maternal grandfather listed as Russian-Jewish.[web:17]
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Russian Empire — maternal grandfather's family (names and town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.