Nominee Profiles

Idris Elba is a double nominee for a Golden Globe this year for Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or TV Movie for the intense British TV crime thriller Luther, and Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama for his compelling portrayal of Nelson Mandela in the expansive biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. These two distinct and riveting performances mark the versatility of this British born actor, whom American audiences first got to know as the centrifugal drug lord Russell "Stringer" Bell in HBO’s critically acclaimed series, The Wire.

Two years ago, with his widely lauded A Separation, writer-director Asghar Farhadi announced the arrival of a new wave of Iranian cinema: intimate and complex, exquisitely sculpted with the emphasis on family and relationships. Farhadi’s film gave us a glimpse into modern Iranian society, and some of us may have been surprised to find that Iranians are a people with much the same issues and problems that we all have to deal with.

In the role of enslaved fieldworker Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, Lupita Nyong'o triumphs in her first big-screen role and gets her first Golden Globe nomination as Best Supporting Actress in director Steve McQueen's acclaimed movie. Nyong’o was born in 1983 in Mexico City from Kenyan parents, then raised in Kenya and educated in the U.

Since she erupted onto international consciousness and cinema screens in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky in 2008, Sally Hawkins has become synonymous with a kind of lightness and ease that belies serious insight and wisdom. That role won her a Golden Globe as best comedy actress, as well as multiple other awards.

The woman is standing with her daughter in her arms, her son by her side. The officer walks up to her and tells her how beautiful she is, that he’d like to get her in bed.

It has been a good year for seasoned actors. Dame Judi Dench has given us, at age 79, another heartbreaking performance as a mother in search of her son in Philomena.

"In Hollywood they believe I’m retired. Even my agents think so.

It’s been twenty years since Julia Louis-Dreyfus was first nominated for a Golden Globe award. At that time in 1994, she was thirty-something and played a neurotic but intelligent and assertive Elaine Benes on Seinfeld, the hit show that became a cultural phenomenon.

Sandra Bullock, “America’s Sweetheart,” shot to stardom with her role as Annie, the reluctant but plucky driver in Speed. The 49-year-old actress, who grew up singing in children’s choirs in Nuremberg, Germany, was raised in show business by her German opera singer mother and voice coach father.

From his first role, in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun 25 years ago, to his latest character, in David O. Russell’s American Hustle, Christian Bale has always invested body and soul in his work, sometimes pushing himself “a little too far” as this British actor approaching the big 4-0 likes to say.