Why You Should Know Writer and Activist Scarlett Curtis, The Pink-Haired Mind Behind Mamma Mia 2 And Best Friend to Your Favorite Celebs
The scion was given a shout-out in the latest Saoirse Ronan profile for Vogue, but she’s also an established writer and activist.
In Vogue’s August cover interview with Saoirse Ronan, personal details about the actress’s life were kept to a minimum, but a shout-out was given to a childhood friend of the actor—Scarlett Curtis.
It turns out that Scarlett Curtis, the pink haired feminist writer pal of Saoirse Ronan and Beanie Feldstein, descends from both screenwriting and psychoanalysis royalty, and is a public figure on her own. Her father is renowned screenwriter Richard Curtis, the mind responsible for some of the biggest British romantic comedies of the late ’90s and early ’00s. Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, and About Time would not exist without him. The credit for Rowan Atkinson’s sitcom Mr. Bean and the character’s subsequent movies can also be given to Richard Curtis.
On the other hand, the scion’s mother is Emma Freud, known mostly for being a television broadcaster in England but also for being the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, as well as a niece of painter Lucian Freud.
The 23-year-old’s Instagram also serves as one of the rare windows into the notoriously private life of Ronan; the two attended Glastonbury Festival together in 2017, proudly announced Ronan’s third Oscar nomination, and celebrated with the Oscar nominee after the Academy Awards.
Still, the scion is just as central to pop culture as her parents and friends are, and is an established public figure on her own, with bylines at publications ranging from The Guardian to Elle. Curtis is also the Gen-Z columnist for the Sunday Times (a feat so celebratory that even her friend Beanie Feldstein subscribed to the print edition to read her work), and the author and curator of an upcoming anthology called Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and other lies), which features essays from Ronan, Feldstein, and other public figures such as Kiernan Shipka and Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding. (She will donate all royalties from the book to the United Nations Foundation’s initiative Girl Up.) Curtis is also a self-proclaimed “Pink Protest” activist and consistent demonstrator against Donald Trump and his policies, making grassroots activism to support global access to feminine hygiene products (as a part of the Free Periods campaign she started) central to her social platform.
And even though Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again may have been written by her dad, Curtis cheekily claims in her Instagram bio that the idea behind the sequel was really all hers, so in addition to being a prolific feminist activist and the most supportive friend a celebrity like Saoirse Ronan could have, she’ll also have that accomplishment to hang over the heads of her famous friends and family for the foreseeable future.
Related: Lupita Nyong’o and Saoirse Ronan Are the Faces of Calvin Klein’s New Fragrance, Women
