Photos: From Jennifer Lawrence to Lupita Nyong’o: Hollywood’s Fiercest Women Photographed by Annie Leibovitz
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.JENNIFER LAWRENCE 18 films, including Joy and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2 (2015); one Academy Award, one BAFTA.
With almost more life force than ought to be allowed, Jennifer Lawrence has seized the forefront as a dragonslayer with a goofy streak, a female Lancelot with a playful glint, capable of getting up to no good. It is this champagne tickle beneath her oval surface that has enabled her to scale from the rawboned resilience of Winter’s Bone—the film that first put her in the firmament—to the rallying defiance of the Hunger Games series and mutant agonistes of the X-Men franchise without becoming an ennobled drag. Every emotion shines through her fresh and untinted. The creative threesome with writer-director David O. Russell and the never demure Bradley Cooper—Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle (her tutorial on the dangers of the “science oven” belongs to the ages), and Joy, where she mops up her fourth Oscar nomination at the infernally young age of 25—gave her room to carom and showcased the irrepressible side of her that makes her every red-carpet appearance and awards ceremony a potential Happening, especially if Amy Schumer is in on the caper.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.CATE BLANCHETT 48 films, including Truth and Carol (2015); 2 Academy Awards, 3 BAFTAs.
Is there anything Cate Blanchett can’t do on film? If there is, she’ll probably have done it before next year’s Hollywood Issue appears, knocking it off her checklist. No era is alien to her, no costume unbecoming, no shade of temperament outside her spectrum. She has served in the French Resistance (Charlotte Gray), ascended the throne as Queen Elizabeth I (her first Academy Award nomination), diaphanously shimmered as a Noldorin princess in the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit trilogies, taken the Golden Age of Hollywood out for a spin as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, revived the troubled spirit of Blanche DuBois in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (winning the Academy Award for best actress in a leading role), and, her latest coup, played the title role in Carol, Todd Haynes’s Sirkian romance between two women, which may secure a place in the canon as the first lesbian Christmas classic and earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. Blanchett is also reportedly in talks to be inducted into the Marvel Universe for the next Thor movie, ducking the swoosh of Chris Hemsworth’s golden locks. A superhero movie?—another item to check off the list.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.JANE FONDA (with JENNIFER LAWRENCE) 47 films, including Youth (2015); 2 Academy Awards, 2 BAFTAs, one Emmy.
“Jane Fonda’s motor runs a little fast,” the critic Pauline Kael wrote of Fonda’s portrayal of a call girl in Klute, which won her the Academy Award for best actress in 1971. Fonda’s career has now spanned six decades—wow—without any sign of that precision motor slowing down. Her “quicker responsiveness,” as Kael called it, gave her acting an avid vibrancy driven by need right out of the gate. Not a need for audience love, that bucket of schmaltz, but for something tougher to earn: personal, artistic respect. The daughter of Henry Fonda, Hollywood’s silver-nitrate personification of populist nobility, Fonda felt pressured to prove she wasn’t just trading on her father’s name, preparing twice as much and working twice as hard (as she confided in Jane, a 1962 documentary by D. A. Pennebaker). This propellant was spiked with an appetite for risk. Whether a sexually repressed young widow in The Chapman Report, an intergalactic tigress in Barbarella, a desperate marathon dancer in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a beseeching daughter in On Golden Pond (opposite Dad himself), or a bewigged monstre sacrée in Youth, Fonda has led with her chin—a feminist heroine with a clear gin chill.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.BRIE LARSON 15 films, including Room and Trainwreck (2015).
Brie Larson’s breakthrough was a long time bubbling. Born Brianne Sidonie Desaulniers, a name which would have taken up the entire marquee, she began studying drama at the age of six and was racking up credits in original cable movies and TV series in her early teens, getting a long head start on her contemporaries. Like Elizabeth Banks before her breakthrough, Larson blazed in supporting roles (rock star Envy Adams in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the mouthy daughter in Showtime’s United States of Tara, a bold spirit in the otherwise doodling Digging for Fire, Amy Schumer’s responsible younger sister in Trainwreck), both fitting in and standing out. With Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s novel, Larson proves she can shoulder the hefty demand of lead billing (and now has an Oscar nomination—her first—for best actress as additional proof), not that there was any doubt. Her unbreakable portrayal of the mother held captive for years in a cramped cell with her young son has put Brie Larson in the center of the conversation, where she belongs and isn’t likely to budge from anytime soon.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.HELEN MIRREN 60 films, including Trumbo and Woman in Gold (2015); one Academy Award, 6 BAFTAs, 4 Emmys, one Tony.
It is Helen Mirren’s world, and we are but her loyal subjects—her slightest lip curl is our command. Queenliness becomes her, not only in historical processions such as The Madness of King George and The Queen (for which she won the Oscar for best actress in a leading role in 2006) but also in her portrayals of the bewitching Morgana in Excalibur, the gangster’s mistress in The Long Good Friday, the czarina of capitalism unbound in The Passion of Ayn Rand, and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in Trumbo. Her royal bearing—such storm-proof poise!—has enabled her to portray utter wickedness as if it were just another one of her prerogatives, as in the decadent ooga-booga of Caligula, The Comfort of Strangers, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, where her very dress spun a black-widow spider’s web. Perhaps Mirren’s definitive performance was as D.C.I. Jane Tennison in the Prime Suspect series, where she imported feminist hardball into the traditional police procedural and seemed to run on nothing but nerves, coffee, and cigs. Audiences have been chasing her smoke ever since.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.DIANE KEATON 45 films, including Love the Coopers (2015); one Academy Award, one BAFTA.
Although Diane Keaton has delivered a clean smack in dramatic roles (the singles-bar hopper in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the married-to-the-Mob Kay in The Godfather, the fed-up wife in Shoot the Moon, John Reed’s lover and journalistic comrade-in-arms in Reds), it is her comedic gifts that have put and kept her in the catbird seat. It’s easy to take those gifts for granted now, having enjoyed them for so long (she didn’t get near the praise she deserved for the nifty Diane Sawyer takeoff in Morning Glory), but her title performance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall introduced a new delivery rhythm to American comedy, reaching its screwball peak in Manhattan Murder Mystery, their last, best movie together—an assertive and yet abashed inarticulate articulation in which sentence fragments sputtered out at the speed of thought. It was as if she were speaking in em dashes, and her slapstick was all in the wrists, a flustered whirlwind. When her voice trailed off, something wistful tagged behind, and that attendant sigh is the grace note in her best work. Keaton didn’t re-invent the contemporary rom-com, but it couldn’t have been re-invented without her.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.VIOLA DAVIS 37 films, including Suicide Squad (2016); one Emmy, 2 Tonys; on television, How to Get Away with Murder.
Justice delayed isn’t always justice denied, at least not where show business is concerned. For an impermissibly long time Viola Davis has been delivering supporting performances that pack an outsize wallop, maximizing her screen time not through showy flourishes or scene-stealing gambits but by investing every moment as if it has a lifetime of experience behind it, putting serious money on every beat, often undercutting the solemnity with sly inflection. (She provided the emotional core to the blurring motion of Michael Mann’s techno-thriller Blackhat.) No matter the role or circumstance, her characters are always to be reckoned with, and the consistent high caliber of her work (Doubt, The Help) raises the question “Why is someone this great not getting bigger standing?” And now, after too long, she is, starring in the ABC series How to Get Away with Murder as the criminal-law professor who mind-games her student disciples like a mentor from an Iris Murdoch novel. Next major sighting: Suicide Squad, a DC Comics all-star howdy-do, where she attempts to reform super-villains by giving them something constructive to do: save the world.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.GUGU MBATHA-RAW 6 films, including Concussion (2015).
“Gugu” is short for “Gugulethu,” which is Zulu for “Our Pride,” and if, as some Jungian analysts believe, destiny and identity are kerneled in one’s name, well, here you go—what more proof is needed? Pride defines the aura of her performances, an observant bearing that occupies its own quiet place, even in the frantic thick of a phantasmagoria such as the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending. Born in Oxford, England, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Mbatha-Raw began her climb on popular series such as MI-5 and Doctor Who, achieving first-class status on the movie screen with starring roles in Belle, a drama set in the 18th century about the mixed-race daughter of an admiral in the Royal Navy and her anomalous place in the drawing rooms of the wigged aristocracy, and Beyond the Lights, a pop-music romance about a superstar for whom success is a gilded cage. She also teamed with Will Smith in Concussion, the sports procedural and moral inquiry into the spate of brain injuries in the N.F.L. produced by heavy-impact helmet-to-helmet head butts and the league’s effort to look the other way. There’s no looking the other way when she’s on-screen.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.LUPITA NYONG’O 5 films, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015); one Academy Award.
Only three feature-length movies she has and yet possess us she does, as Yoda might say. Of those three, one could be categorized as kinda so-so (Non-stop, where she played a flight attendant while Liam Neeson went through his dour heroics), but the other two were sonic booms. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Nyong’o made her motion-picture debut as Patsey in Steve McQueen’s unsparing, unrelenting 12 Years a Slave, a portrait of pain, desperation, fortitude, and beatitude that enthralled critics and earned her the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Her incandescence on the red carpet during this 2013 awards season—when she also collected supporting-actress noms from BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild, and those crazy cats at the Golden lobes—established her place in a new constellation about to form. Last year, Nyong’o joined the embattled heavens as Maz Kanata, pirate queen, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, that little movie you may have heard of that all the Jedis have been talking about at the dojo. She will almost certainly trip the lightsaber fantastic in the force awakenings ahead.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.ALICIA VIKANDER 15 films, including The Danish Girl, Burnt, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Ex Machina (2015).
This Swedish-born actress seems to have dived into the movie scene from every direction in 2015: surfacing as a former flame from Bradley Cooper’s yearning, churning past in Burnt; sandwiched between two slabs of beefcake (Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer) in the Continental exploits of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; venturing into uncharted psychosexual terrain as the artist wife of Eddie Redmayne’s transgendering sylph in The Danish Girl (nabbing an Oscar nomination—her first); and, perhaps most strikingly, taking self-actualization to a scary new level as the supermodel of artificial intelligence and robot engineering, Ava, in Ex Machina, the consummation of Henry Adams’s vision of the virgin and the dynamo. Ironic that having woven herself seamlessly into the fabric of history with A Royal Affair, Anna Karenina (as Kitty), and Testament of Youth (not to mention the sword-and-sorcery fantasy-scape of Seventh Son), Vikander would nab the most attention of her career as a gleaming android with a strictly functional torso and bionic legs, but that’s how the dice roll. One of her next films is The Light Between Oceans, with Michael Fassbender, another prodigy who also gives good stare.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.SAOIRSE RONAN 20 films, including Brooklyn (2015).
Lou Reed may not have written the Velvet Underground song “Pale Blue Eyes” picturing Saoirse Ronan (How could he? She wasn’t born yet), but every close-up of this Irish American actress wafts its lyrics toward us. Especially in Brooklyn, adapted from Colm Tóibín’s novel by fellow novelist Nick Hornby, where Ronan’s uplifted glances, snowdrop complexion, and demure poise as Eilis Lacey, an immigrant trying to find her place in the raucous melting pot of New York, achieve the wistful beauty of a ballad and won Ronan an Oscar nomination for best actress. An inspiration figure, Ronan’s Lacey is the Statue of Liberty’s kid sister, back when the American Dream still had a fresh dew. Heartbreak looms in so many of the films Ronan luminates, from Atonement to The Lovely Bones, but she is no maid of constant sorrow on-screen. Twice she has played a teenage assassin, in Violet & Daisy and Hanna, and she took part in the rococo caperings of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. In a bit of dream casting, Ronan plays Nina in the upcoming film of Chekhov’s The Seagull, co-starring Corey Stoll, Annette Bening, and Elisabeth Moss, among others; wake us when it arrives.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.RACHEL WEISZ 34 films, including Youth and The Lobster (2015); one Academy Award.
Rachel Weisz has so much going for her, it would be unfair if we weren’t the beneficiaries of that so-much-ness. Talented, poised, dedicated, experienced, beautiful (those Pre-Raphaelite eyebrows), intelligent (her mother was a teacher turned therapist, her father a mechanical engineer/inventor), one half of a movie power couple (married to the most recent, world-weary James Bond, Daniel Craig), Weisz could be the Elizabeth Taylor of our time if she adopted the dirty laugh and blinding diamonds. (Craig has something of Richard Burton’s rumpled broodiness.) But Weisz is too sensible to board the royal barge, and besides we already have Kim Kardashian West. Accomplished in all film genres—romantic comedy (Definitely, Maybe), popcorn horror (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns), melodrama (The Lovely Bones), art-house (My Blueberry Nights, The Deep Blue Sea), domestic drama (About a Boy)—Weisz perhaps made her deepest impression in the adaptation of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, for which she won the Academy Award for best actress in a supporting role. Her seamless versatility was most recently demonstrated in Youth and The Lobster, two movies—one autumnal, the other absurdist—that couldn’t be less kin.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz; Styled by Jessica Diehl.CHARLOTTE RAMPLING 92 films, including 45 Years (2015).
After decades-long furlongs of being described as “inscrutable,” Charlotte Rampling, as the wife in 45 Years, whose marriage undergoes a late-stage convulsion, has finally become scrutable. Her reactions have become easier to read as Rampling has become subject, as must we all, to the toll and gravity of years. The cat-eyed self-possession (reminiscent of Lauren Bacall in her lustrous rise), the smile that tilted only the corners of the mouth as if refusing to release the canary, the no-trespass zone of her presence even when fully unclothed, have gently subsided into a fragility and vulnerability devoid of self-pity. Such a baroque arc Rampling has had as an actress, from the mod start in Georgy Girl to the S&M Nazi psychodrama of The Night Porter (a film that can stlll deliver the squirmies) to the sultry slow burn of Swimming Pool, the erotic thriller that re-catalyzed her career. That Rampling had never been nominated for an Academy Award was finally remedied by the voting gods for her performance in 45 Years, restoring order to the solar system.
