Rebecca Ferguson is a Swedish actress.
She was born in Stockholm and grew up in the Vasastan district in central Stockholm. Her mother, Rosemary Ferguson, is English, and moved from the UK to Sweden at the age of 25. Her mother helped ABBA translate the lyrics from their 1974 album Waterloo into English and also appeared on the sleeve of the band's 1975 self-titled album. Her father, Olov Sundström, is a Swedish businessman. Ferguson took her mother's surname as her stage name. Her maternal grandmother is Northern Irish, and her maternal grandfather is Scottish. Ferguson attended an English-medium school in Sweden and was raised bilingual, speaking Swedish and English. She attended the Adolf Fredrik's Music School in Stockholm and graduated in 1999.
From the age of 13, she worked as a model and appeared in magazines and on television commercials for cosmetic, apparel, and jewellery advertisements. Ferguson has danced from a very early age; she danced ballet, tap-dancing, jazz, street funk and tango. She taught Argentine tango at a dance company in Lund, Sweden for a few years while she continued her work on several short art film projects. Unsure if she wanted to act, Ferguson had other jobs, such as working at a daycare centre, as a nanny, at a jewellery shop, at a shoe shop and at a Korean restaurant.
She began her acting career with the Swedish soap opera Nya tider (1999–2000) and went on to star in the slasher film Drowning Ghost (2004). She came to international prominence with her portrayal of Elizabeth Woodville in the British drama The White Queen (2013), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film.
Ferguson starred as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, opposite Tom Cruise, in three of the Mission: Impossible films: Rogue Nation (2015), Fallout (2018), and Dead Reckoning Part One (2023). She played Jenny Lind in the musical film The Greatest Showman (2017), starred in the horror films Life (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2019), and had supporting parts in the comedy-drama Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), the thriller The Girl on the Train (2016), and the science fiction films Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024). She also stars as Juliette Nichols in the Apple TV+ science fiction series Silo that premiered in 2023.
