Nominees

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.

The year 2011 changed Jessica Chastain’s career. Seven of her movies premiered around the world before mid-October, some of them in respectful film festivals like Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Venice.

Amy Adams, 39, lights up the room. The soft-spoken American actress thanks her parents, Richard Kent and Kathryn Adams, for her good manners.

“Everybody gets boxed in, in some ways,” admits David Fincher. “And I like being the go-to guy for the movies that are hard to make.

There is nobody quite like this dame. Dame Helen Mirren, that is.

“I wanted to make a film about childhood,” recalls Richard Linklater talking about the inception of Boyhood, his groundbreaking opus nominated this year for four Golden Globes. I’d been a parent for a while and when you have a child it makes you think of childhood in general.

It's always fun getting together with Londoner Keira Knightley, the vivacious, gorgeous 29 year-old actress, so young and already an old acquaintance of ours. She first appeared on the scene in 2002, with her role in Bend It Like Beckham, which led to acclaimed films like Pride & Prejudice (2005 – her first Golden Globe nomination as best actress), Atonement (2007, a second Globe nomination), of course the hugely popular Pirates of the Caribbean series and now The Imitation Game (her third Golden nod), in which she plays the math genius Joan Clarke, who helps Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) break the Nazi's Enigma code during WWII.

Quvenzhané Wallis stumbled into a stellar acting career with a lie: back in early 2009, when she was a mere five years old, she assured director Benh Zeitlin that she was, in fact, a mature six year old girl – the minimum age to be considered for a role in Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The production was holding auditions in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, close to Quvenzhané’s hometown, Houma, and her family supported Quvenzhané’s sudden acting urge, taking her to try her luck against 4,000 other aspiring stars.

Shooting a movie for 12 years, with all the ups and downs, the creases and frowns that come with the passing of time, would be a daunting prospect for any actress. But it did not scare Patricia Arquette.

Shooting a movie for 12 years, with all the ups and downs, the creases and frowns that come with the passing of time, would be a daunting prospect for any actress. But it did not scare Patricia Arquette.