Tilda Cobham-Hervey

Cobham-Hervey was born on 4 September 1994 in Adelaide, South Australia.[1] Her father is set and lighting designer and event director Geoff Cobham, and her mother is dance teacher and former dancer Roz Hervey.[2] The family travelled a lot, sometimes "living backstage in theatres”. Starting from the age of nine, she trained and performed in the Adelaide-based youth circus performance troupe Cirkidz for seven years, and was involved in five major productions.[3] Her specialities were hula hoop, trapeze, and acrobatic pitching, but the emphasis was theatrical, and the focus was on storytelling.[4][5]

She attended Marryatville High School.[6]

Cobham-Hervey performed with Force Majeure in The Age I’m In, a show which was part of the 2008 Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, toured to 17 regional cities in Australia, and also toured to Ireland, Canada, and Korea.[7][8]

In 2009, Cobham-Hervey became a founding member of an Adelaide circus group called Gravity and Other Myths, where she co-devised a show called Freefall. The troupe won the Adelaide Fringe's "Best Circus" award in 2010, the festival's Tour Ready award in 2011 and later that year won "Best Circus" in the Melbourne Fringe Festival, and she won the festival's award for "Best Emerging Circus/Physical Theatre Performer" in 2011.[9][10]

After tagging along to an open audition with friends,[3] Cobham-Hervey won the lead role of Billie in Closer Productions' feature film 52 Tuesdays, which was filmed on one day each week between August 2011 and August 2012. After 52 Tuesdays was released at the Sundance Film Festival, Cobham-Hervey was signed by Creative Artists Agency (CAA), a major talent agency in the United States,[4] and by United Management in Australia.[11]

In 2012, Cobham-Hervey played the supporting role in Projector Films' feature One Eyed Girl. In 2013 she created and performed the front-of-house entertainment at the Adelaide Festival club, Barrio,[9] and in 2014, starred in the "Find Wonderful" television commercial[12] for the re-launch of the Myer brand, filmed in New Zealand over three days.[13]

In 2016, Cobham-Hervey appeared in her first play as Rosie Price in Things I Know To be True, which was written by Andrew Bovell for a co-production between State Theatre Company of South Australia and UK's Frantic Assembly.[14]

Cobham-Hervey played the role of Kitty in the six-part TV series Fucking Adelaide, which premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2017[15] and screened on ABC national television as well as iview from 2018[16] (still available as of April 2019[17]).

Cobham-Hervey's directorial debut, a short film commissioned by the ABC and Screen Australia as part of the ABC ME Girls Initiative, premiered simultaneously at the 2017 Adelaide Film Festival and on ABC ME on 11 October 2017, the UN's International Day of the Girl. Made by Sophie Hyde's Closer Productions in Adelaide, A Field Guide to Being a 12-Year-Old Girl was awarded the Crystal Bear for Best Short Film by the Youth Jury of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival's Generation KPlus Section in February 2018.[18][19] It is available on ABC iview until June 2019.[20]

She played the role of Nanny Sally in the major film Hotel Mumbai, released in 2019.[21]

In December 2017, she was cast as Australian singer Helen Reddy in Australian film-maker Unjoo Moon's bio-pic about the singer Helen Reddy, I Am Woman.[22] Filmed in Australia, Los Angeles and New York City in late 2018,[23] the film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019. Her performance was lauded by The Hollywood Reporter, describing it as a "breakout performance".[24]

Cobham-Hervey and Dev Patel co-wrote and -directed a short film, Roborovski, about a hamster, which premiered at Flickerfest in Sydney in January 2020.[25] The film won three prizes at the Rencontres Internationales du Cinéma des Antipodes (Antipodean Film Festival) at Saint Tropez, France, in 2021: Australian Short Film Today; the Nicholas Baudin Prize; and the Audience Award.[26]

In 2021, Cobham-Hervey devised an interactive theatre piece entitled Two Strangers Walk into a Bar which was premiered in the Adelaide Fringe and had a later season at MOD., a South Australian "futuristic museum of discovery".[27][28][29]

As of December 2021 Cobham-Hervey had relocated back to Australia, after around four years in Los Angeles, to film The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.[30]

In September 2023, she took the main role as Esme Nicoll in the stage adaptation of Pip Williams' novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, co-produced by the State Theatre Company South Australia and Sydney Theatre Company. The play, written by playwright Verity Laughton, premiered at the Dunstan Playhouse in Adelaide, before moving to the Sydney Opera House.[31][32]

In March 2017, Cobham-Hervey's relationship with British actor Dev Patel became public. They had met nine months earlier on the set of Hotel Mumbai.[43][30] In April 2022 they moved to Adelaide.[44] In August 2022, Patel featured in the local news after he broke up a fight in Gouger Street in Adelaide city centre.[45]

• Marsh, Walter (19 August 2020). "I Am Woman's Tilda Cobham-Hervey on becoming Helen Reddy". The Adelaide Review.

• Official website
• Tilda Cobham-Hervey at IMDb