Celebrating women
With awards season in full swing, we take a look at the women shaking up the film industry
Margot Robbie
After starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, the 33-year-old Australian actor founded production company LuckyChap Entertainment. She went on to make a slew of hit films including I, Tonya and Bombshell, receiving numerous nominations for Academy Awards, BAFTAs and Golden Globes along the way. Barbie, which she produced and starred in, was the first film directed by a woman (Greta Gerwig) to make a billion dollars.
When Barbie won a Golden Globe Award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, Margot said, ‘This is a movie about Barbie, but it’s also a movie about humans. We made it for you and we made it with love.’
Emma Stone
As one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, 2024 is surely Emma Stone’s year. At just 35, she’s already won a string of awards, including an Academy Award, BAFTAs and Golden Globes. She’s best known for her roles in The Help, The Amazing Spider-Man, La La Land, The Favourite and Cruella, but it’s her remarkable performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ science fantasy Poor Things that has propelled her to the top of the recent awards lists. In it she plays Bella Baxter, a woman artificially reborn who gradually discovers the wonders and dangers of the world.
Accepting her Golden Globe award for Best Actress to a standing ovation, Emma said, ‘She was a character unlike anything I’d ever played or read or seen before. It was about unlearning things more than tapping into things from my past, which was really beautiful and very freeing. Playing Bella was unbelievable.’
Emily Blunt
From her roles in The Devil Wears Prada, The Young Victoria, Sicario, The Girl on the Train and A Quiet Place, the 41-year-old London-born actor has made her mark playing a series of strong, independent women, and has bagged numerous awards along the way. In the biographical film Oppenheimer, she plays Kitty, a scientist who’s sidelined by her husband Robert, the American physicist who led the development of an atomic weapon during World War II. The character is quite a departure for Emily, but she delivers a powerful performance that has won her huge critical acclaim.
‘I tried to empathise with the woman who was in possession of a phenomenal brain herself, who is having to contort herself into the good housewife-y,’ she said. ‘It must have been agony for someone like her who was so wild, so brilliant, should never have been a mother, and clearly had huge depression after the kid was born. For me, it’s never important if someone is likeable. I just have to understand them.’
America Ferrera
As Gloria, a mother and disgruntled Mattel employee in Barbie, her speech on the perils of womanhood in a patriarchal society wa
