Colman just plugs away to the top
Robbie Collin charts the rise and rise of the shy and retiring Brit who’s suddenly an Oscar favourite
Olivia Colman’s victory at this year’s Golden Globes felt less like a lucky break than a long-awaited coronation — perhaps aptly enough, since she won for playing a queen.
Yet six months ago few would have imagined she would be next in line for the Best Actress throne. Let’s take it as read that the Bafta is in the bag: her biggest Oscars rival is likely to be Glenn Close, her fellow Globewinner this week, and six-time former Academy Award nominee.
Close started promoting her turn in with a smooth publicity tour last summer, about the same time Colman, 44, was appearing on the UK’s Channel 5 as the voice of Marion the steam shovel in Thomas
But Colman’s performance as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’ royal farce, The Favourite, has seen her elbow herself — albeit apologetically, in the classic British manner — to the front of the awards season pack. Why? And how on earth did she become a dead cert?
Colman’s profile as an actress is notable for its lack of glamour and pretence. No matter how many podiums she gets called up to, she always looks like a competition winner, or someone’s sister collecting the prize on their behalf. (She began her Globes acceptance speech with “Cor, blimey”.) Some wonder if this is a carefully tended persona, designed to preserve her down-to-earth appeal and persuade casting directors that she hasn’t gone all Hollywood.
But those who have worked with her insist this is what she is like: socially awkward and self-effacing to a fault, without any great ambitions beyond pursuing roles that grip her. When you compare her early career to, say, Kate Winslet’s — both Brits in their early 40s to have crossed the Oscar radar — there is no obvious battle plan. Colman spent her 20s pottering in radio and television comedy, and came to prominence in Peep Show, playing Sophie Chapman for 12 years.
Far from being the show’s calm feminine centre, she was sweet and pitiable one moment and petty, shrewish and manipulative the next: the opposite of the strong woman cliche´, and funnier and more interesting for it. She’s fearless in allowing her characters to be wrecks. No less a figure than Meryl Streep spotted her potential during the making of her Margaret Thatcher biopic, when Streep collected her Best Actress Bafta that year, she described her younger costar as “divinely gifted”. Streep may have been thinking of Colman’s soulwrenching performance the same year in domestic-violence drama Tyrannosaur.
Colman has been busy since in cinema and on television, where her role as Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller in Broadchurch established her in the public mind as a serious actress. But another truly juicy film role didn’t present itself until — which might partly explain why critics and awards bodies are falling over themselves to honour it.
Colman just keeps plugging away in high and low-profile roles, and is worth watching in anything she does. In that respect, her screen career has something in common with those of Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren, whose standing has long been beyond question.