Caitriona Balfe

Advertising campaigns featuring Balfe include those for Calvin Klein, Levi’s, Max Mara, Oscar de la Renta, Bally, Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Costume National, Escada, Bottega Veneta, Hush Puppies, Mango, Neiman Marcus, BCBG Max Azria, Blumarine, Dries Van Noten, Wella, Roberto Cavalli, Victoria’s Secret and H&M. She appeared in the 2002 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and on the cover of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and ELLE magazines. In a three-year period Balfe walked in more than 250 runway shows. Often credited professionally as simply Caitriona, at the height of her career she was considered to be among the twenty most in-demand models in the world.

Caitriona married Anthony McGill in August of 2019.

She is a patron of the organisation World Child Cancer. In April 2018 Caitriona ran the London Marathon raising over $41,000 in support of the organization.

Balfe co-starred in the film Money Monster (2016), directed by Jodie Foster and starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. She played the head of PR of a company whose stock bottoms out, causing a man to lose all of his savings and subsequently take hostages on a live TV show. Eric Hills of The Movie Waffler wrote "But it's relative newcomer Balfe who leaves the greatest impression; she's magnetic, stealing scenes even when her character is only glimpsed reacting to the situation on a background monitor. Expect to see a lot more of this Irish actress in the coming years."

In April 2015, Balfe received Best Actress in a Lead Role Drama and Rising Star Award nominations for the 12th Irish Film & Television Awards, and was named one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World". She won Saturn Awards for Best Actress on Television in 2015 and 2016. In November 2016, Balfe won the Scottish BAFTA award for Best Actress on Television and in February 2018 she won the Irish IFTA for Best Actress in a Lead Role Drama. Balfe also received four nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for her role in Outlander.

In December 2014 Entertainment Weekly named Balfe one of its 12 Breakout Stars of 2014; that month she was also voted "Woman Of The Year" at BBC America's Anglophenia Fan Favorites tournament.

As of 2014, she was based in Glasgow, having previously lived in Los Angeles when she started acting professionally, and in New York City, Paris, London, Milan, Hamburg, and Tokyo while she worked as a model. In addition to English, she is a fluent speaker of the Irish language and is conversant in French.

Reflecting back on her career in 2013, Balfe commented: "Modelling wasn't a passion of mine so that made it get old kind of quickly. I was getting very frustrated." She has stated that she will not return to modelling full-time, but did not rule out occasional jobs with people with whom she has previously worked.

In September 2013 Balfe was cast as the lead character, Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser, on the Starz television series Outlander, based on the novels written by Diana Gabaldon; the series premiered in August 2014. She plays a mid-20th-century nurse who is transported back in time to the war-torn mid-18th-century Scottish Highlands. Both the series and her performance have received critical acclaim, with Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair saying "it helps immensely that Balfe is such an appealing actress, [she] makes Claire a spirited, principled, genuinely heroic heroine". Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Balfe is "reason enough to watch; she's a confident actress who brings various shades to her character". James Poniewozik of Time labelled Balfe's portrayal as "wry, [and] infectiously engaging". Angelica Jade Bastién of The New York Times called Balfe "one of the most stunning actresses on television".

In 2012 she portrayed Alex #34 in The Beauty Inside, a social film divided into six episodes telling the story of a man named Alex (Topher Grace) who wakes up in a different body every day. In 2013 she starred in the music videos for "First Fires" by British musician Bonobo and for "Chloroform" by French band Phoenix, the latter directed by Sofia Coppola.

Balfe was part of the main cast of the Warner Bros. web series H+: The Digital Series during 2012 and 2013, in which she played Breanna Sheehan, one of the executives of a biotechnology company that develops an implanted computer which allows people to be connected to the Internet 24 hours a day.

While living in New York, Balfe played the minor role of an employee of the magazine Runway in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. In 2009, after a decade-long modelling career, Balfe returned to her initial career choice and moved from New York to Los Angeles, spending her first year and a half in the city exclusively taking acting classes, first at the Warner Loughlin Studios and then at the Sanford Meisner Center and the Judith Weston Studios. Balfe has appeared in the films Super 8, as the protagonist's mother, Now You See Me, as Michael Caine's character's wife, and Escape Plan, as the CIA lawyer that hires Sylvester Stallone's character.

For her work in Milan in the 2002 and 2003 seasons, Balfe earned close to $300,000, but after her Italian agency Paolo Tomei filed for bankruptcy, she and the other models who were represented by it lost all the earnings they had made during that time, with the agency's financial backers allegedly keeping them. Due to models being considered freelancers under Italian law, her lawyer discouraged her from filing a lawsuit. Years later, in 2009, working for the company BCBG, Balfe faced a similar situation, with the company first delaying its payments and then refusing to pay the models altogether alleging financial problems, but still booking them after privately reassuring their agencies that they would be paid. Against her agency's advice, Balfe decided to stop working for BCBG until she was reimbursed all the money she was owed; the company eventually complied. Incidents like the aforementioned led to the creation of The Model Alliance.

In 1999, while studying Drama at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Balfe was offered work as a fashion model in Paris. She was featured both in advertising campaigns and on runways for brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli, Max Mara, Bottega Veneta and Oscar de la Renta over ten years before refocusing on acting. She had leading roles in the web series The Beauty Inside (2012) and H+: The Digital Series (2012–2013), and appeared in the films Super 8 (2011), Now You See Me (2013), Escape Plan (2013), Money Monster (2016), and Ford v. Ferrari (2019).

Caitriona Balfe (/k ə ˈ t r iː n ə ˈ b æ l f / ; born 4 October 1979) is an Irish actress, producer and former fashion model. She is best known for her starring role as Claire Fraser in the Starz drama series Outlander (2014–present), for which she has won two People's Choice Awards, two Saturn Awards, and an Irish Film and Television Award, and received four Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress in a Television Series – Drama.