Christmas memories from six stars of the screen and stage, exclusively extracted in the Telegraph Magazine from a new book, Last Christmas. Here, Emilia Clarke shares the touching story of her last Christmas with her darling Dad…

I would say, and I think anyone who knows me would agree, I’m more of a giver than a receiver. Christmas was always my time to shine. I would get giddy with planning, mastering and presenting someone I loved with the ultimate gift. The entire process gave me unbridled joy, from lying awake at night, going through every option and then scribbling notes, before landing on The Perfect Gift. As December rolled round I would go into overdrive.

My dad, however, was one of the hardest people to buy a gift for. He had me stumped every year. I would spend an unnatural amount of time trying to work out just what to get him; the response on giving him something would always be that of sincere love and grateful noises but I was never sure I’d got him something he wanted, or as dads often say, ‘needed’. (I ‘need’ shoes and chocolate; he ‘needed’ food and shelter – you see the predicament.)

I get this gift-giving mania from my mum, whose generosity knows no bounds. Christmas always consisted of navigating a path to the kitchen from the tree that had more presents pooled underneath it than the four members of our family (five including Roxy, the dog, who obviously didn’t miss out here either) could ever hope to open on one day.

Very quickly, our Christmas Eve and Christmas Days would turn into a massacre of ripped paper, ribbons and cards, presents once lovingly wrapped, now discarded in the name of all things CHRISTMAS. But throughout my dad never really shared wholeheartedly in the festivities. The gifts for my brother and me were always from both parents but they had the undeniable trademark Mum stamp all over them. You could tell this from her beaming face as she tried to hide the sheer excitement of seeing us jumping for joy. Throughout, my dad remained quiet and occasionally… erm… soporific.

Former President Barack Obama had the honour of meeting Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea recently, as Emilia Clarke shared pictures of their meeting him on Instagram.

Clarke revealed that there were “tears” as she met the former Commander-in-Chief and called him her “hero.”

The pair met at a Dreamforce conference last week, where they were both keynote speakers alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook, Olympian Megan Rapinoe and David Beckham.

In a gallery shared by Clarke, she and Obama were seen shaking hands as they smiled at one another.

She wrote, “DROP. THE. GODDAMN. MIC. I met my hero. And yes, tears were present.”

Another photo showed them laughing at each other, and her caption may have provided a clue as to what they were laughing about. She continued that her “terrible terrible jokes” were also a part of their meeting.

“@barackobama thank you for being alive…#Michelle…so…wannahang?” she finished.

The actor who played Queen Daenerys says she’s been pressured to shoot naked since the show, but is ‘a lot more savvy’ now

Emilia Clarke has revealed she felt uncomfortable acting in some of her nude scenes in Game Of Thrones.

The British actress played queen Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s sprawling epic, which became notorious for its explicit portrayal of sex and violence.

Clarke, who was 23 when she started filming Game Of Thrones, said she would be in tears before shooting certain “terrifying” nude scenes.

Speaking on actor Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, she said: “I took the job and then they sent me the scripts and I was reading them, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s the catch!’

“But I’d come fresh from drama school and I approached it as a job: if it’s in the script then it’s clearly needed. This is what this is and I’m going to make sense of it and that’s what I’m going to do and everything’s going to be cool.

“I’ve never been on a film set like this before. I’d been on a film set twice before then, and I’m now on a film set completely naked with all of these people, and I don’t know what I’m meant to do, and I don’t know what’s expected of me, and I don’t know what you want, and I don’t know what I want.

“Regardless of there being nudity or not, I would have spent that first season thinking I’m not worthy of requiring anything. I’m not worthy of needing anything at all.”

“I truly believe we would never have made everyone happy,” she says.

Game of Thrones is long gone, and we’re already looking toward the spin-offs, but in a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph, Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s record breaking show, opened up about her own personal response to the show’s ending.

Earlier this year she defended it, saying it was “logical.” Now she’s said the reaction to season 8’s finale made her feel “sad.”

“Everyone is going to have their own opinion and they’re fully entitled to them,” said Clarke. “It’s art and it’s to be dissected and taken on in whatever individual way you wish.

“And if you’re sad that the show is done and you’re sad because you enjoyed watching it, then that’s sad. It sucks this wasn’t the perfect ending that people were hoping for, but I truly believe we would never have made everyone happy.”

Game of Thrones season 8 ended up winning a record amount of Emmy nominations, receiving 32. It managed to take a large number of awards in the Creative Arts categories, but Emilia Clarke, and others, fell short in the acting and writing categories the show was nominated for. Game of Thrones, however, did end up winning the award for outstanding drama series. [Source]

In the midst of Game of Thrones, the star behind Daenerys suffered two life-threatening aneurysms: “If I am truly being honest, every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.”

There’s a growing trend among some of the most powerful women in entertainment. Rather than following the traditional celebrity-interview path, stars like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are increasingly deciding to tell their stories on their own terms and in their own words. So it seems fitting that Emilia Clarke—the star of one of the world’s biggest TV shows—should do the same in the weeks leading up to the final season of Game of Thrones.

In a personal essay for The New Yorker, the notoriously private Clarke—who has kept mum about her relationships, and largely spends her time out of the limelight with her non-famous childhood friends—took the occasion of this ending to open up about a dire medical emergency that nearly killed her, just as the biggest opportunity of her life was getting started.

In her essay, Clarke sets the stage for the subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH)—“a life-threatening type of stroke” that caused her to collapse between Seasons 1 and 2 of Game of Thrones—by talking about the stress and strain she felt vaulting from being an unknown to having the spotlight put on her: “I was terrified. Terrified of the attention, terrified of a business I barely understood, terrified of trying to make good on the faith that the creators of Thrones had put in me.” The nudity required of Clarke in the first few seasons of the show left her feeling especially vulnerable: “In the very first episode, I appeared naked, and, from that first press junket onward, I always got the same question: some variation of ‘You play such a strong woman, and yet you take off your clothes. Why?’ In my head, I’d respond, ‘How many men do I need to kill to prove myself?’” she writes.

October 2017: The Table Read

When Kit Harington entered the conference room, he had no idea what to expect.

The final season’s scripts had been emailed just a couple of days earlier, sending the Game of Thrones cast into a reading frenzy. Like millions of fans around the world, the actors had been waiting nearly a decade to learn their characters’ fates. The entire six-episode season arrived at once, protected by layers of password security.

Sophie Turner flew through her copies in record time, quickly messaging the producers her reaction. “It was completely overwhelming,” says the actress, who plays Sansa Stark. “Afterwards I felt numb, and I had to take a walk for hours.” Others, like Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen), first had to hurry home to get some privacy. “I turned to my best mate and was like, ‘Oh my God! I gotta go! I gotta go!’” she recalls. “And I completely flipped out.” She then settled in for a reading session with a cup of tea. “Genuinely the effect it had on me was profound,” Clarke adds. “That sounds insanely pretentious, but I’m an actor, so I’m allowed one pretentious adjective per season.” Peter Dinklage, meanwhile, broke his years-long habit of checking immediately to see if Tyrion Lannister survives. “This was the first time ever that I didn’t skip to the end,” he says.

Even showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss were uncharacteristically anxious, wondering how the actors would react to the climactic twists. “We knew exactly when our script coordinator sent them out, we knew what minute they sent them, and then you’re just waiting for the emails,” Benioff said.

The cast then journeyed to Belfast to gather in a production office for the formal read-through. By then, everybody knew the tale that was about to unfold, with two notable exceptions: Davos Seaworth actor Liam Cunningham (“The f—ing scripts wouldn’t open, the double extra security!” he grouses) and Harington, who outright refused to read anything in advance.

“I walked in saying, ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’” Harington says. “What’s the point of reading it to myself in my own head when I can listen to people do it and find out with my friends?” So, yes: Jon Snow, quite literally, knew nothing.

“Game of Thrones” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story” star Emilia Clarke will be on the jury of the Official Competition of the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, which runs Oct. 10-21. Another “Thrones” star, Natalie Dormer, is on the fest’s First Feature Competition jury, which hands out the Sutherland Award.

Joining Clarke on the Official Competition judging panel are “Mamma Mia” star Dominic Cooper and actress Andrea Riseborough, whose credits include “Birdman” and “Black Mirror.” Also on the jury are Daily Mail journalist Baz Bamigboye; Cairo Cannon, the producer of Carol Morley’s “Out of Blue,” screening as a Special Presentation in the festival; and Gonzalo Maza, the producer and screenwriter of Oscar-winner “A Fantastic Woman.” Director Lenny Abrahamson, Oscar nominated for “Room,” is the jury president, as previously announced.

Dormer, whose recent credits include “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” is joined on the First Feature Competition jury by jury president Francis Lee, director-writer of the BAFTA-nominated “God’s Own Country”; production designer Maria Djurkovic, who was Oscar-nominated for “The Imitation Game”; Will Poulter, whose recent credits include “Maze Runner: The Death Cure” and “The Little Stranger”; Rotterdam Film Festival programmer Inge De Leeuw; and rapper, comedian, actor, screenwriter and radio presenter Ben Bailey Smith, a.k.a. Doc Brow.

For nearly a decade, Emilia Clarke has ruled the ratings as Daenerys Targaryen on HBO’s Game of Thrones. With the series slated to end next year, the 31-year-old actress has set her sights on new challenges. First up: conquering the Star Wars universe in this month’s Solo.

On a rainy April afternoon, Emilia Clarke enters the bright, airy Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the way so many movie-lovers before her have: quoting Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. Adopting the unsourceable accent Crystal uses opposite Meg Ryan in a famously improvised scene filmed in this very room, Clarke starts stuttering, “Pah-pah-paprikash.” Our amused if bewildered guide, too young to get the reference, adds the 1989 rom-com to her list of movie recommendations from Clarke, who has already gushed about the 2017 religious drama Novitiate. Chuckling over this unlikely double feature, Clarke assures her, “You have two incredible movies coming your way.”

One reference the guide does get: Game of Thrones, the HBO juggernaut which stars Clarke as its most unstoppable heroine, Daenerys Targaryen. In fact, the very tour we’re taking, put together by a company called Museum Hack, is based on the series, and offers a fan-friendly survey of the sometimes inscrutable displays of the Met. You don’t have to be an art historian (our guide is an aspiring actress) to understand what Greek fire, Damascus blades, heraldry, mutilated men, samurai kamon, the dragon-born St. Margaret of Antioch, and an early female pharaoh have to do with wildfire, Valyrian steel, house words, and Clarke’s world-famous alter ego.

And yet, despite her fame, Clarke has managed to spend a full half-hour in the museum sponging up our guide’s trivia without being spotted. For years, Clarke’s brown hair let her hide in plain sight, but she recently bleached it an icy Targaryen blond. So, why the invisibility? Maybe it’s her height. “We both have a thing about our stature not quite being what people expect,” says her co-star Kit Harington, who, at five feet eight, has six inches on Clarke. Maybe it’s her outfit—the gray overcoat, cream sweater, and jeans are a far cry from the cloaks and armor of Thrones. Or maybe it’s her bright, decidedly non-intimidating personality. “When I’m goofing around with my pals, I’m unrecognizable,” she says. Harington calls Clarke’s humor “naughty,” and it’s certainly true that her informal, expletive-laced banter is a far cry from Daenerys’s imperious tones. “Sometimes, if I’m in a really bad mood,” Clarke notes, “people are like, ‘Khaleesi!’ ”