alice glover wears satin-organza dress, £3,145; leather bodice, £1,320, both by Alexander McQueen; organdie skirt (worn as underskirt), poa; leather and wood platform shoes, poa, all by Charles Anastase. hair and make-up by teiji, using l’oreal tecni.art and mac. styled by siobhan hughes. photographed at manton house estate with the kind permission of brian meehan ltd (info@brianmeehan.com) and the sangster family
I’m always being cast in jodhpurs with a whip
artscene Neigh, lady,neigh Bets are on actress Alice Glover racing to screen stardom
Flame-haired Oxford student Alice Glover is setting hearts racing. She first burst onto screens in the BBC series Tchaikovsky as the composer’s wife, for which she had to leap naked out of a bath. ‘My friends in the rugby team at Oxford found it very funny when we watched it... I saw most of it with my hands over my eyes.’ She plays the Duchess of Montrose – infamous for racing horses and hissing at Queen Victoria – in the film The Young Victoria. ‘We had to wear 20-inch corsets for 17 hours a day – girls kept swooning all over the set!’ Co-stars were Emily Blunt (‘really down-to-earth’) and Paul Bettany (‘charming’), while ‘Julian Glover, who played Wellington, turned out to be related to me!’ Downsides were the white eyelashes – ‘I looked like a toad’ – and the voluminous underwear. ‘It was difficult to get through doors.’ An addict of rock ’n’ roll dancing, Alice spent her school days jiving around the Notting Hill Arts Club. Now at Magdalen College, with Narnia star Anna Popplewell, she hosts outdoor raves with her ‘absurd’ ghettoblaster. Ever the performer, she parades around town on her tricycle. ‘I get the boys to do the biking and I stand like Ben Hur on the back.’ Naughtiest part to date is in Octavia, the ITV adaption of Jilly Cooper’s novel, out later this year. ‘I play Tamsin Egerton’s schoolgirl love rival. For some reason I’m always cast in jodhpurs with a whip.’ Jilly Cooper visited the set: ‘She’s really mischievous. She would come up and say, ‘‘Read my books. They’re terribly naughty – there’s lots of sex in them.’’ Brilliant!’ With her new role, Alice’s fanbase can only grow. Bel Trew The Young Victoria is out now.
photograph: nick kelly