From Bond girl to a double Nobel Prize winner, Rosamund Pike´s acting versatility has taken her from acting in massive blockbusters to two Golden Globe wins. This year she is nominated again for her performance in I Care A Lot.
Pike was introduced to the world as Miranda Frost, a blue-blooded fencing champion turned double agent, in Lee Tamahori´s James Bond thriller Die another Day, a role which catapulted her into the spotlight. Despite being labeled as “icy blonde” and “English rose”, Pike showed she was unafraid to tackle challenging roles, which she did during a decade, up until the psychopathic Amy Dunne she played in the 2014 thriller Gone Girl. The David Fincher adaptation of Gillian Flynn´s bestselling thriller marked a turning point in the arc of her career and not only because it scored her first Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination but because since them her work has gotten even more diverse and interesting.
In recent years she has developed a penchant for playing historical figures. In 2016 she portrayed Ruth Williams Khama, the wife of the first President of Botswana in A United Kingdom. Following that she played the wife of SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in The Man with the Iron Heart. She continued with Brigitte Kuhlmann, a German left-wing militant who hijacked an airplane carrying 250 passengers from Paris to Tel Aviv to force the Israeli government to negotiate issues concerning the Palestinian people, in 7 Days in Entebbe. The next project, A Private War, posed a further challenge for Pike who left the past for a more contemporary story, the one of Mary Colvin, the celebrated war correspondent who died covering the siege of Homs in Syria in 2012.

These characters seem to be far removed from Pike´s own idiosyncratic upbringing. Born in London in 1979, the actress spent her childhood travelling the continent with her opera-singing parents and learned to speak French and German in her spare time, which definitely came in handy when filming movies.  Later she attended boarding school on a badminton scholarship and, when she was 17, landed an agent thanks to a National Youth Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. She kept doing theater while studying English Literature at Oxford which also came handy when she was called to play Jane Bennet, the sweetest and older sister of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright´s adaptation of Jane Austen´s Pride & Prejudice. “That was far more me in my element”, she said, comparing this role to her Bond girl debut. 
And she must also have been in her element last year when she embodied Nobel Prize-winning chemist Marie Curie in Marjane Satrapi´s drama Radioactive. “I do have a love of Science because the idea of making the invisible visible, what great scientists do, that adventure of going to the unknown is something that really inspires me”, said the actress who loved Curie herself because “she is a rebel, a woman who was unruly, I suppose- a bit like radioactivity”.  From an unruly woman to a fearless one who does whatever it takes to get ahead, like Marla Grayson, a court-appointed legal guardian of old people who extorts and steals the assets of her elderly wards, in I care a lot. A role for which she has been nominated for a Golden Globe for the Best Performance by an actress in comedy. “When I read this part, I thought: wow!! I want to give it a go at this, because this is the kind of role that usually is written for a man. I was very keen to see where and how far I could push this character and still be fun to watch. I wanted to go to the edge of making her do some very unpleasant things”. 
Another character that usually is written for a man is the lead character in a fantasy film. But Rosamund managed to find one, written as a woman, and now she is having fun stepping into the fantasy world of the TV series Wheel of Time. Based on 14 passionately beloved novels by Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time is about a group of young people that leave the world they´ve known all their lives to go on a perilous and life altering world-saving adventure. She plays the mysterious character Moiraine Damodred. “It is a fantasy world grounded very much in a reality. It is a world in which there is tremendous power, but they are also very human”, says the actress who claims not having any relationship to fantasy at all. “That´s why it interested me because it´s something completely out of my pen. A new experience I ´ll tackle with relish”.