THE CHANGELING
Photographed by Tim Walker in London.
Helena Bonham Carter
Actress
Who’d have guessed, when she debuted as a demure little E. M. Forster heroine in 1985’s Merchant Ivory frock-fest, A Room with a View, that we’d even still be watching Bonham Carter, much less savoring her versatility? Back then, she seemed merely a well-cast pretty young thing, a Spandau Ballet-era ingénue. But in the last year alone we’ve seen her unleash her sexy inner Death Eater as Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I; go all-out gonzo as the shrieking Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland (directed by the father of her two children, Tim Burton); and, most affectingly, play a queen of more tender inclinations, as Elizabeth to Colin Firth’s George VI, in The King’s Speech. Exquisitely marcelled but sensibly dressed, Bonham Carter’s queen consort is a pistol equipped with her own silencer—determined yet discreet in her mission to undo her husband’s speech impediment. Bonham Carter also gives the character a certain sense of devilish mischief: the way she thrills in her furtive scouting trip to a dodgy neighborhood and revels in the “good fun” of resting her bottom on her husband’s royal chest as he goes through his breathing exercises. It’s an utterly convincing performance, and utterly consistent with the lovable, gin-and-Dubonnet-tippling Queen Mum that the real Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon became later in life.
THE STAR
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy at Hidden Trace Farm, Franklin, Tennessee.
Nicole Kidman
Actress
Numerous other actors have won awards and plaudits and fame and money. Of the current generation of bona fide stars, however, only Kidman has also earned the tribute of having a book of serious criticism devoted to her—written by esteemed film historian David Thomson, who gushed, “I suspect she is as fragrant as spring, as ripe as summer, as sad as autumn, and as coldly possessed as winter.” After years of giving herself body and soul to terrific movies (To Die For, The Others, The Hours, Margot at the Wedding), risky oddities (Dogville, Eyes Wide Shut, Birth), an epic flop (Australia), and an international hit (Moulin Rouge), she has made a dramatic return to the screen with an intense, focused performance as a grieving mother in Rabbit Hole. Far removed from the grand trappings of her recent work in big-budget extravaganzas, Kidman makes use of this straightforward adaptation of a Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play to remind moviegoers just how good she can be with nothing but a well-made script and her own ferocious commitment to a difficult character.
THE SHAPE-SHIFTER
By Matt Sayles/A.P. Images.
Christian Bale
Actor
Bale, who has worked in films since playing a major role at age 13 in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, is world-famous without seeming to be a movie star. He’s an actor’s actor who happens to be bankable. He’s a shape-shifter, with almost no discernible public image (aside from an on-set tirade that went viral). He famously shed 60 pounds to play a part in a small-budget indie, The Machinist, before bulking up to play Batman. He has been a fixture in blockbusters (The Dark Knight, Terminator Salvation) but has not turned up his nose at smaller roles (I’m Not There, Public Enemies). His latest on-screen transformation, for David O. Russell’s The Fighter, saw him drop 30 pounds to play a real-life figure: hard-luck welterweight Dicky Eklund. The Fighter belongs mainly to Mark Wahlberg, who spent years developing it and plays its hero, “Irish” Micky Ward. But in the role of his crack-addicted half-brother Bale gives the story kick and conflict, while also providing his co-star with someone to lean on and play against. Now it’s back to blockbustering: Bale says he has been working out with the man he played—Eklund, who is now a trainer—to build himself up again for the next Batman outing.
THE RARE BIRD
By Peggy Sirota/TrunkArchive.com.
Natalie Portman
Actress, Adventurer
Having long ago sloughed off the caul of child stardom—via her Oscar-nominated role as a stripper in 2004’s Closer, her shorn-look portrayal of a freedom fighter in 2006’s V for Vendetta, and that swear-y S.N.L. Digital Short in which she vowed to “roll up on NBC and smack the **** out Jeff Zucker”—Portman, in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, proves conclusively that there’s nowhere she won’t let acting take her. Put aside the physical demands of training to play a prima ballerina and the titillation of her all-you-can-eat sex scene with Mila Kunis. It’s the way Portman surrenders herself to Aronofsky’s loony, Robert Aldrich-like vision (for aren’t What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte more the templates for Black Swan than The Red Shoes or any of Antonioni’s cinematic fever dreams?) that underscores her bravery and mastery. This diary of a spooked girl’s crack-up is, let’s face it, as silly as it is visually and narratively audacious—and Portman manages this seeming tonal contradiction with aplomb, neither kitsching it up nor disappearing faintheartedly into Aronofsky’s vortex of blood, sweat, blister pus, spite, and pink icing. She’s the new doyenne of art-sploitation.
THE DRAMA QUEEN
Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier at Woodland, producer Robert Evans’s Beverly Hills home.
Halle Berry
Actress
Early in a career that has spanned nearly 30 films, Berry surprised everyone with her dramatic chops. It seemed almost strange that a creature so lovely had the ability and willingness to throw herself with such abandon into emotionally charged territory, as she did with her intelligently raw performance in Monster’s Ball, which earned her an Oscar. The Academy is now grappling with another Berry star turn, this time as a 1970s stripper with multiple personalities in the based-on-a-true-story Frankie & Alice, which she also co-produced. But while she has always excelled at bringing desperation to the screen, a part of her likes to mix it up in genre pictures, as she did to critical and audience puzzlement in Catwoman and with great success in the blockbuster X-Men: The Last Stand. She has also been longing to show off her comedic talents and will have the chance in another project, Shoe Addicts Anonymous. The co-creator of a $90 million fragrance line, and a spokeswoman for Revlon, Berry is showing the world she’s not all about the drama.
THE GRIEVERS
Photographed by Mark Seliger in Brooklyn, New York.
A Reunion of the Cast and Director of 1980’S Ordinary People:
Timothy Hutton, Elizabeth Mcgovern, Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Judd Hirsch, And Robert Redford
Thirty years after it won four Oscars, including best picture, best director, and best supporting actor, for Hutton, Redford’s soft-lit, autumnal group-therapy session holds up as both a terrific film and an elegiac capper to the feelings-attuned 1970s. Upending her lovable sitcom image, Moore shocked viewers with her country-club frost queen, Beth Jarrett. Sutherland, as her husband, Calvin, is the surrogate Redford figure (complete with tousled blond hair and shawl-collar cardigan), an evolved man who understands that psychoanalysis might be the way forward for his suicidal son, Conrad (Hutton), a sensitive boy doubly devastated by his older brother’s death in a sailing accident and the legitimate hunch that his mother regards him as little more than a whimpering consolation prize. McGovern, as the sympathetic girlfriend, and Hirsch, as everyone’s fantasy of the benign Jewish analyst (“How long you gonna punish yourself? When you gonna quit?”), are the support group. But the core of the movie is Hutton. Fetally youthful in his first feature film (he was only 19 at the time), he rewarded the trust of Redford, himself debuting as a director, with a performance of shivery fragility. It’s still painful watching Hutton hunch those skinny shoulders inside that fleece-lapeled prepster suede jacket—against the cold, his guilt, and his mother’s withering contempt.
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