Nominee Profiles

If the first rule of ‘acting club’ is to lie to filmmakers when you really want to get a part, Simon Helberg proudly displays his entry card with aplomb. During the auditions for Florence Foster Jenkins, director Stephen Frears asked the 35 year-old actor if he was adept enough to play opera pieces on the piano.

Commenting recently about one of his fellow actors, Tom Hanks said, “Jonah Hill is probably the busiest actor on the planet. He was great in War Dogs.

After winning the Tony Award in 2010 for playing the lead character, Troy, in August Wilson’s Pulitzer winning play, Fences, Denzel Washington reprises the role in the play’s film adaptation, which he also directed. Yet again, his performance was greeted with critical praise and garnered him an 8th Golden Globe nomination (Washington has won twice and received the Cecil B.

As an adoptive mother, Nicole Kidman felt a special connection with Sue Brierley, whom she plays in the Golden Globes nominated Lion, which tells the story of an Indian child, Saroo Brierley (played by Sunny Pawar), who gets lost in the country’s vast train system and is unable to return to his family. He ends up being adopted by an Australian couple, Sue and her husband, John Brierley (played by David Wenham).

Following a space detour on Mars in The Martian, a transcendental inter-galactic experience in Interstellar, and a detour in a fantasy world with The Huntsman 2, Jessica Chastain returns to Earth with the very political and ever so current Miss Sloane, directed by John Madden, which brings her fourth Golden Globe nomination (following her win for Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow). In Miss Sloane, for which she is nominated as Best Actress, Drama, Chastain plays top Washington lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane, whose will power and drive to win don't stop for anything or anybody.

Jeff Bridges was introduced to acting as a child by his actor father Lloyd Bridges, as was his older brother Beau Bridges. “My dad was very enthusiastic about show business and wanted all his kids to go into it,” he told the HFPA.

Which actor can go from Dead Poets Society to Reality Bites, and then morph into such diverse characters as those in Before Sunrise and Boyhood? The answer is simple: Ethan Hawke, one of those artists whose persona blends perfectly in every film he has starred in. The Austin, Texas-born artist started his career as a young promising actor, and has certainly become an accomplished one.

He almost didn’t take the role in The Judge as he thought the character had too many negatives, but once he committed, he did so fully, and the result is a fully dimensional portrait of an irascible unlikeable old man bitterly estranged from his son (played by Robert Downey, Jr. who also produced) who for the first time in his life has to ask for help and show his vulnerability.

Meryl Streep may have given one of the best performances ever put on film as Sophie in Sophie’s Choice, one that cemented her place in cinema history, yet it was only the second leading role of her illustrious career. The peerless Meryl who has been nominated 29 times for a Golden Globe and keeps beating her own record for these nominations (she has won eight times, another record), is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s choice for the Cecil B.

Some great actors are as comfortable in front of a press line as they are in front of the camera; others, not so much. No one for instance has ever accused Joaquin Phoenix of answering journalists’ questions as effortlessly as he disappears into the characters he portrays onscreen.