Olivia Colman has revealed she has been locked in a battle with Wikipedia over her birthday after the website listed her as eight years older than she is.
The Oscar-nominated star took on the online encyclopedia after googling herself and finding out that it had her down as 52.
Not wanting to seem “vain”, Colman contacted the site and posed as a “friend” who just wanted to correct the honest mistake.
“Once, on Wikipedia, they had my birthday as the wrong day, the wrong month, and eight years before I was born,” the actress explained on David Tennant’s podcast.
She told her Broadchurch co-star: “I emailed them, pretending it wasn’t me. [I wrote,] ‘I was at school with her and that’s not her birthday.’ I didn’t want them to think I was being so vain.
“I didn’t get a reply, and wrote again going, ‘Sorry guys, but I know it’s wrong.’ And they didn’t reply.”
Exasperated at the lack of cooperation, Colman admitted that she was forced to come clean and tell the site that it was “really upsetting” that they had aged her almost a decade.
The 44-year-old continued: “And they said, ‘We’d have to see a birth certificate to prove it,’ and I went, ‘Whose f****** birth certificate have you looked at in the first place to make me eight years older?”
Wikipedia did eventually change Colman’s date of birth to the correct date, January 30, 1974, although the actress joked that she should have made herself younger.
Despite roles in Broadchurch, Les Miserables and soon-to-be The Crown, Colman also revealed that her career is haunted by an advert she starred in for the AA back in 2004.
The Norwich-born star admitted that she “lost some jobs” after playing the role of Bev in the iconic Kev and Bev adverts.
Colman said: “AA! That has become the bane of my life. I thought they were going to run that for about a week but they ran it for what felt like four times a day for a year.
“They ran it for a year having just given me a buy-out. It was really annoying. I lost some jobs.”
Colman was last week nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Queen Anne in The Favourite.
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