The Essentials
OLIVIA COLMAN
HANNAH TYRANNOSAUR
(2011)
The fact that Colman wasn’t nominated for any major award for Paddy Considine’s soul-shaking drama verges on criminal. As a woman stuck in an abusive marriage, she gives not just the best performance of her career, but one of the best performances of the 21st century so far. It’s a turn that shows you don’t have to play to the gallery to convey the force of emotion a character is feeling. She keeps years of pain roiling, devastatingly, just below the surface.
QUEEN ANNE THE FAVOURITE
(2018)
Playing Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’ slippery comedy-drama asks a lot of Colman. As she allows two of her subjects to seduce her, she has to be funny, imperious, childish, vicious and a little bit heartbreaking. She switches between them all with no perceptible effort. It’s an all-timer of a performance, the kind of thing students should study to see how good it’s possible to be. Of course she won the Best Actress Oscar for it. God save the Queen.
Alamy, MPTV, Shutterstock
LEDA CARUSO THE LOST DAUGHTER
(2021)
The centre of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directing debut, Leda is a strange character: someone who both yearns to be alone and can’t help inserting herself poisonously into other people’s lives. Colman has to convey Leda’s depths — her disdain for motherhood, her obsession with a stranger — with minimal dialogue. She doesn’t need words to keep the audience’s sympathy shifting.
OLLY
RICHARDS