ISLA

At five-foot-three with her heels kicked off, Isla Fisher knows how to embrace her shortcomings. On the set of our photo shoot, she emerges from the dressing room in an ice-pink Chanel suit that swamps her tiny frame. But no matter for the star, who smiles coyly, crosses her arms and cinches in the blazer at her waist, swaying to the beat of Beyoncé’s “Grown Woman” as the camera clicks away.

It’s a trick, she tells me with a raspy laugh, that she picked up at clown school. “I studied at Jacques Lecoq theatre school in Paris and one of the things we worked on was embracing our [so-called flaws],” says Fisher. “Because I’m short, I’d wear very big clothes that would drag on the floor – and I turned that into a side gag. I learnt to embrace my size. The things I once tried to hide have ended up being the things that differentiate me.”

Years later, on the set of 2005’s , she shunned suggestions to in the mid-’90s – has worked widely and steadily, filling her résumé with romcoms ( and ), period dramas (), thrillers () and action-comedies ( and ). In she shared the screen with her husband, actor and satirist Sacha Baron Cohen; together they’ve been dubbed a Hollywood power couple, a label that Fisher laughs off shyly.