About
Abbey Lee Kershaw—known professionally as Abbey Lee—is an Australian model-turned-actor and occasional musician whose career has leapt from haute-couture catwalks to big-screen genre epics. Born in Melbourne on 12 June 1987, she first dazzled the fashion world in the late 2000s, walking for Gucci, Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and 29 shows in her very first New York Fashion Week season. V Magazine crowned her a new “supermodel” and Models.com still lists her among its “Industry Icons.” After a decade of campaigns and covers, Lee pivoted to acting and broke through as the sharp-tongued Dag in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Since then she has traded runways for scripts, turning up in projects as varied as the mythic blockbuster Gods of Egypt, the arthouse horror The Neon Demon, HBO’s genre-bending Lovecraft Country, and Netflix’s pulpy caper Florida Man. In 2024 her Dag returned—via archive footage—in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, confirming that George Miller’s wasteland hasn’t forgotten her.
Before Fame
Lee grew up in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Kensington, sandwiched between an Australian-rules-football-playing dad, Kim Kershaw, and a psychologist mum, Kerry. Hospitals were almost a second home: she survived meningitis at four, dealt with a knee tumour, and broke enough bones climbing trees to decide jujitsu lessons might be useful. Money was tight, so teenage Abbey juggled fun-fair jobs, supermarket shifts, and a stint at McDonald’s. In 2004, on a whim, she entered—and won—the Girlfriend magazine Model Search, a win that whisked her to Sydney’s beaches and then to New York by 2007. There she signed with Next Management, and within months the lanky 5′ 11″ newcomer was closing Rodarte in Manhattan and opening Gucci in Milan. That high-speed ascent set the tone for a restless career built on saying yes to new challenges.
Trivia
- Runway record-setter: Her 2008 runway marathon—29 shows in New York alone—ended with a fainting spell at Alexander McQueen when a leather corset proved tighter than advertised.
- Martial-arts advantage: Seven years of jujitsu helped her land the warrior goddess role of Anat in Gods of Egypt, since she could already throw a convincing punch.
- Musical detour: Between shoots she played bass in the indie band Our Mountain, gigging in Brooklyn bars with boyfriend Matthew Hutchinson.
- Style rebel: Lee once dyed her hair neon-pink for an editorial. Back home, the look sparked a brief pink-hair boom in Melbourne, a story she still tells with a grin.
- Archive cameo: Though not on the Furiosa set, she re-appears in the 2024 prequel’s end-credits montage via Fury Road footage, one of five “wives” glimpsed in silhouette.
Family Life
Abbey is the middle child in a tight-knit trio. Her father, Kim Kershaw, played for Richmond and Hawthorn in the Victorian Football League, so athletic grit runs in the family; her mother, Kerry, balances the clan as a practicing psychologist. The siblings stay out of headlines, and Lee herself prefers low-key living—often in Los Angeles for work but back in Melbourne whenever homesickness strikes. In interviews she credits her parents’ “say yes, work hard” mindset for giving her the nerve to jump from modelling into acting, and she still calls her mum for advice before every big career step.
Associated With
On set and on stage, Lee has shared space with a striking mix of talent:
- George Miller, the visionary who cast her in Fury Road and immortalised her in Furiosa.
- Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, her wasteland comrades in the Mad Max universe.
- Elle Fanning and Nicolas Winding Refn, with whom she explored the dark side of fashion in The Neon Demon.
- Gerard Butler, who swapped swords with her in Gods of Egypt.
- Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett, opposite whom she unravelled arcane mysteries in Lovecraft Country.
