Emily's parents divorced when she was two. She and her younger sister Charlotte grew up with their mother. Emily's desire to become an actress was inflamed when she saw Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.

At age 15 she was taking acting lessons at the famous Italia Conti School in London but then she received her big chance: director David Leland chose her for the title role in his movie Wish You Were Here. The movie was based loosely on the youth memoirs of British scandal Madam Cynthia Payne.

Wish You Were Here was a surprising success at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and Emily Lloyd was celebrated as new and fresh talent. She received the Evening Standard Film Award and the Award of the National Society of Film Critics in 1987. She was also nominated for a BAFTA award.

In 1988 Hollywood knocked on her door. She played in Cookie by Susan Seidelman and In Country by Norman Jewison but both movies were flops. In Cookie, she played the freaked-out daughter of a Mafia don. Peter Falk, Jerry Lewis and Dianne Wiest were her co-stars. In Country was an adaption of the Bobbie Ann Mason novel of the same name. In this movie she played Samantha, a young girl from the 1980s who has tried to find out and understand the role her father played before he died in the Vietnam war. Bruce Willis played her uncle Emmett, a Vietnam veteran who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder.

Her next film was Chicago Joe and the Showgirl. Director Bernard Rose and writer David Yallop adapted the essay Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell, where he described the well-known Cleft chin murders case from war-torn London. Two young people - Elizabeth Jones, an underaged waitress (who has dreamed of a moviestar career) and Karl Hulton, a deserted American GI - went on a 5-day spree where they killed three people. The GI, played by Kiefer Sutherland, was the only American soldier who was executed in Great Britain.

In 1992 she played in her most successful movie to date. A River Runs Through It is Robert Redford's screen adaption of the novel by Norman MacLean. Two uneven brothers, played by Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt grew up in rural Montana in the 1920s. Their father (played by Tom Skerritt) taught them the high art of fly-fishing. Emily Lloyd was seen as Jessie Burns, the girlfriend and later wife of Norman MacLean.

In the following years her movie career went silent. She was seen in B-movies or in films which were either ignored by the audience or received poor reviews.

1997 was a fateful year for her. She received a fine supporting role in the critically acclaimed film Welcome to Sarajevo by Michael Winterbottom but in the same year she went to India. She was scheduled to make a film about a blind girl and she had an audience with the Dalai Lama. While waiting for the audience she was bitten by one of the temple dogs. The combination of this bite and the fact that she had taken too many malaria tablets (aka Lariam) led to a mental illness which was later diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Arduously she recovered from the illness and in 2003 she made her stage debut as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Shakespeare Festival in Leeds and Brighton.