Margot Elise Ackerley (née Robbie; born 2 July 1990) is an Australian actress and film producer. The world's highest-paid actress in 2023, she is known for her performances in both blockbuster and independent films. Robbie's accolades include seven AACTA Awards and three Critics' Choice Awards in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards, six British Academy Film Awards and four Golden Globes.
Born and raised in Queensland, Robbie began her career in Australian television, starring in the soap opera Neighbours from 2008 to 2011. After relocating to the United States, she starred in the television drama Pan Am (2011–2012), before landing her breakthrough role in Martin Scorsese's crime comedy film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). She then starred in the crime film Focus (2015) and portrayed Jane Porter in The Legend of Tarzan (2016).
Robbie achieved wider recognition for portraying Harley Quinn in three DC Extended Universe films: Suicide Squad (2016), Birds of Prey (2020) and The Suicide Squad (2021). She earned respective Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress for her portrayals of figure skater Tonya Harding in the biopic I, Tonya (2017) and a Fox News employee in Bombshell (2019). She received further acclaim for her performances as Elizabeth I in Mary Queen of Scots (2018), Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), an aspiring actress in Babylon (2022) and the titular fashion doll in Barbie (2023); the latter became her highest-grossing release and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture as a producer. She has since produced and starred in Wuthering Heights (2026).
In 2017, Time included Robbie among its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is married to filmmaker Tom Ackerley, with whom she has a child. Together, they co-founded the production company LuckyChap Entertainment in 2014. Under the label, they have produced several projects, including the films I, Tonya, Promising Young Woman (2020), Barbie and Saltburn (2023), as well as the Hulu series Dollface (2019–2022) and the Netflix miniseries Maid (2021). Outside the entertainment industry, Robbie is an advocate for human rights, women's rights, gender equality and LGBTQ rights.
Margot Elise Robbie was born on 2 July 1990 on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Her father, Doug Robbie, was a sugarcane tycoon, while her mother, Sarie Kessler, is a physiotherapist. Robbie has paternal Scottish heritage. She has an older sister and older brother, as well as a younger brother. She lived in the rural town of Dalby until she was five years old, when her father separated from the family, and they moved back to her mother's hometown of the Gold Coast. Robbie recalled that she and her siblings "didn't make life easy" for their single mother, remembering that they often fought and that her mother had to be a "very strong woman to hold things together". The family spent most of her childhood on her grandparents' Currumbin Valley farm in the Gold Coast hinterland.
As a child, Robbie frequently went boar hunting and surfing with her siblings, and developed an early interest in agriculture and animal husbandry—an upbringing she described as one "you'd never expect to lead anyone into acting". Around this time, her classmates began nicknaming her "Maggot", which originated from a teacher's mispronunciation during roll call and stayed with her into adulthood. Robbie often staged performances at home, and her mother later enrolled her in a circus school, where she excelled in trapeze and earned a certificate at the age of eight. During her teenage years, she became obsessed with the novel series Harry Potter, admitting that she once lied to an optometrist in order to get glasses like the title character. For her secondary education, Robbie attended Somerset College, where she studied drama. During this period, she held three jobs: tending bar, cleaning houses, and working at Subway. After graduating, with experience in commercials and independent thriller films, she relocated to Melbourne to pursue acting professionally.
2008–2012: Early work and Neighbours
Robbie's first acting roles came when she was in high school. She starred in two low-budget independent thriller films, called Vigilante and I.C.U., both released years later. She described the experience of being on a film set as "a dream come true". She made her television debut in a 2008 guest role as Caitlin Brentford in the drama series City Homicide and followed this with a two-episode arc in the children's television series The Elephant Princess, in which she starred alongside Liam Hemsworth.
With agent encouragement at the time and as Robbie recalled on The Graham Norton Show, she called FremantleMedia on a daily basis. "One day, I got put through by accident to the casting director for Neighbours," and she said, "I'm in town working on something." The casting director asked how old she was, and she responded "seventeen". She was told, "We're looking for exactly that, come in and audition" for the television soap opera Neighbours. In June 2008, she began playing Donna Freedman, a role that was meant to be a guest character, but Robbie was promoted to the regular cast after she made her debut. In her three-year stint on the soap, she received two Logie Award nominations.
Shortly after arriving in America, Robbie landed the role of Laura Cameron, a newly trained flight attendant in the period drama series Pan Am (2011). The series premiered to high ratings and positive reviews but was cancelled after one season due to falling ratings.
Robbie next appeared in Richard Curtis' romantic comedy About Time (2013), co-starring Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams. It tells the story of a young man with the ability to time travel who tries to change his past in hopes of improving his future. To play Gleeson's unattainable teenage love interest, she adopted a British accent. The film was a modest commercial success. Robbie's breakthrough came the same year with the role of Naomi Lapaglia, the wife of protagonist Jordan Belfort, in Martin Scorsese's biographical black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street. In her audition for the role, Robbie improvised a slap on co-star Leonardo DiCaprio during a fight scene which ultimately won her the part. The film and her performance received positive reviews; she was particularly praised for her on-screen Brooklyn accent. Critic Sasha Stone wrote of Robbie's performance, "She's Scorsese's best blonde bombshell discovery since Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull. Robbie is funny, hard and kills every scene she's in." The Wolf of Wall Street was a box office success, grossing $392 million worldwide, making it Scorsese's highest-grossing film to date. Robbie was nominated for the MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance and won the Empire Award for Best Newcomer.
She later said that the fame and attention the movie brought her led her to consider quitting acting, but her mother was philosophical about her profession and explained to her that it was probably too late to quit. She fully understood and stuck with it. With the aim to produce more female-driven projects, Robbie and her future husband, Tom Ackerley, and their respective longtime friends Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara, started their own production company LuckyChap Entertainment. The company was founded in 2014, and its name was inspired by Charlie Chaplin.
Robbie appeared in four films released in 2015. The first of these was opposite Will Smith in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's $158.8 million-grossing romantic comedy-drama film Focus. In the film, she played an inexperienced grifter learning the craft from Smith's character; she learned how to pickpocket from Apollo Robbins for the role. Reviews of the film were generally mixed, but Robbie's performance was praised; Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, "Robbie is wow and then some. Even when Focus fumbles, [she] deals a winning hand."
She was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 68th British Academy Film Awards. Her next appearance was alongside Michelle Williams and Kristin Scott Thomas in Saul Dibb's war romantic drama Suite Française, a film based on the second part of Irène Némirovsky's 2004 novel of the same name. In the film, she played a woman falling for a German soldier during the German occupation of France during World War II, a role which Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter found "underwritten".