Margot Robbie launches new gin brand

Margot Robbie attends the "Barbie" European Premiere at Cineworld Leicester Square

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Margot Robbie “defines any attempts at lazy categorisation”, says Roisin Kelly in The Times. “Blonde Aussie bombshell and global pin-up? Yes, of course. But she has also become a mogul”: a producer, investor and, as of last month, “now a liquor baron too” – she has started her own gin brand, Papa Salt.

Robbie, 34, is perhaps best known for her starring role in the hit film Barbie, which brought in $1.4 billion, and was produced by a company she founded, LuckyChap, which has racked up 25 Academy Award nominations, 18 Bafta nominations and raked in billions in box-office takings worldwide. Robbie first won fame playing Jordan Belfort’s wife in The Wolf of Wall Street and for her Academy Award-winning role as figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. Forbes puts her estimated net worth at £46 million.

She has come a long way from humble beginnings, says Julianna Cabili for Tatler Asia. Before making her way to the US, Robbie made a name for herself as a recurring actress in the long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours. She left the series in 2011 to pursue a career in Hollywood. Making it there was more challenging than launching a gin brand, says Robbie. There, you’re basically selling an unproven idea. Gin is at least a tangible product.

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Robbie is, of course, “far from the first A-lister to stick her name on a booze brand”, says Kelly. Everyone from Brad Pitt to Ozzy Osbourne has “waded into” the gin industry, a global market worth £12.7 billion. Gary Barlow and Snoop Dogg are making wine, Kendall Jenner has backed a tequila and Cate Blanchett is the creative director of a saké brand. But Robbie and her husband and business partner have no further plans for conquering this world. “Our passions are movies and drinks,” says Robbie. “And now we’ve ticked them both.”

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.