Article taken from Vogue.

Long before she was soaring above chimney tops with her umbrella outstretched for the brand-new Mary Poppins, Vogue’s December cover star Emily Blunt was living a full and rich life of which we’re betting you know very few intricacies. For example, did you know that Blunt’s preparations for her latest role avoided Julie Andrews’s iconic take on the character and instead are “closer to Dorothy Parker, or Katharine Hepburn in those ’30s screwball movies, with a bit of Gene Wilder’s Wonka in there,” as her costar Lin-Manuel Miranda put it? (Blunt told Vogue that she drew inspiration from Rosalind Russell’s rat-a-tat speech cadences as the bulldog reporter Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, and “from the peculiar, frozen-in-the-’30s locutions of Princess Margaret,” which she describes as “incredibly posh and quite strange, yet very light and well placed.”) Did you know that before she became a seemingly infinitely hashtagged one-half of the “couple goals” that is her marriage to actor-director John Krasinski, she dated famous Canadian crooner Michael Bublé? Or that Blunt made her acting debut at 16 in a 2001 stage production of The Royal Family, in which she appeared opposite Dame Judi Dench? Bet you didn’t. Without further ado, five more things you didn’t know about Emily Blunt.

1. She overcame an early speech impediment. “I was a smart kid, and had a lot to say, but I just couldn’t say it. It would just haunt me. I never thought I’d be able to sit and talk to someone like I’m talking to you right now,” Blunt told W magazine in 2008. “I did have a bad stuttering problem as a child. I’d try to push the words out, but it was frustrating. My parents took me to speech coaches and relaxation coaches. It didn’t work. Then one of my teachers at school had a brilliant idea and said, ‘Why don’t you speak in an accent in our school play?’ I distanced myself from me through this character, and it was so freeing that my stuttering stopped when I was onstage. It was really a miracle.”
2. Stanley Tucci, Blunt’s costar from the hit 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, is also her brother-in-law. Tucci met her sister, literary agent Felicity Blunt, at Emily’s wedding in 2010, married her in 2012, and now they have two children together.
3. While studying Spanish, French, and Theater at the private and arts-friendly Hurtwood House School in Surrey, Blunt was offered a record contract, she told British GQ in 2013. She turned it down. “It was just pop,” she said. “The night before we were about to sign a deal, I just knew it wasn’t right and it wasn’t what I wanted to do, and I very unprofessionally pulled out at the last minute and upset everyone. I felt I wouldn’t be taken seriously as an actress if I was up on a stage bumping and grinding.”
4. Blunt has said that she knew “disarmingly soon” that Krasinski was the one for her. “We were discussing how much I was enjoying being single. And then [my friend] goes, ‘Oh, my God, there’s my friend John.’ And that was it,” she told People. “We were engaged within 10 months, but I think we probably knew before that.”
5. Blunt was the deciding vote on Mary Poppins. Director “Rob [Marshall] basically said, ‘If you don’t want to do this with us, we are going to find something else, because we won’t do it if you don’t want to,’ ” Blunt told Vogue’s David Kamp. Marshall, who had worked with Blunt on Into the Woods, confirmed: “For me, there was no one else but Emily . . . There wasn’t even a possible other choice. She’s rare in this world because she’s incredibly warm and funny, and has a great deal of vulnerability as well. And at the same time, she’s British and can sing and dance.” Blunt agreed on the spot, and the rest, as they say, is history.