Groome's best work is the kind that does not look like work: a child on a cold beach who sulks, asks the wrong questions and wants her mum. Two early parts asked everything of her; most of what followed has asked rather less.
Fi1m perspective
Near the end of London to Brighton (2006), a woman and a child share a bag of chips on a cold beach. The woman has a swollen eye. The child, Joanne, is eleven, has run away, and does not understand what she has been pulled into. Georgia Groome, fourteen when she played her, does nothing an eleven-year-old would not do: she sulks, she asks the wrong questions, she wants her mum. Paul Andrew Williams's note to her, she has said, was to never act, and she took him at his word. We were braced for a child performance that asked us to pity her. Instead we got a child who was mostly bored and cross, and that is why the beach stays with us when the plot has gone.
Two years later she was the lead in Gurinder Chadha's Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), playing Georgia Nicolson, the eccentric diarist of Louise Rennison's books. Groome has called the part the complete opposite of Joanne, larger than life where Joanne was small and shut, and that is a fair description of the job. It did what a breakthrough is meant to do: it made her a recognisable face in British teen comedy, and it showed that the raw, quiet thing Williams got out of her was not the only thing she had.
What followed was steady rather than large. A stage debut in Polly Stenham's Tusk Tusk (2009) at the Royal Court; supporting parts in The Holding (2011), Papadopoulos & Sons (2012) opposite Stephen Dillane, and the horror-comedy Double Date (2017); television in Up the Women (2013–2015) and Lewis. The pattern is a family member or a peer in somebody else's story, and the notices for the later films have tended to find them pleasant and forgettable. That is not a judgment on her so much as on what she has been offered. Since the late 2000s the lead parts have been scarce.
What she can do is sit in a scene without reaching for it. In London to Brighton she holds her own beside Lorraine Stanley, whose practical decency is the film's centre, and Johnny Harris, who supplies its fear, and she does it by declining to compete with either of them. The risk of that gift is that it vanishes in an ensemble, where not reaching can look like not being there. She was at her best when a director told her not to act. Somebody should tell her again, in a part worth not acting in.
Biography
Georgia Groome is an English actress. She was born on 11 February 1992 in Nottingham and trained at her mother's performing arts school, the Nottingham Television Workshop, Derby Youth Theatre and Trent College.
Groome made her screen debut in the 2001 television film A Fish Out of Water. Her first feature film role was as Joanne in London to Brighton (2006). She is also known for playing Georgia Nicolson in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), and for appearances in The Cottage (2008), The Holding (2011) and Double Date (2017). She has been in a relationship with actor Rupert Grint since 2011.
