Golden Globe Awards

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.

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.

Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Theo Kingma and his team have assembled a star-studded line-up of former Golden Globe winners and nominees to present the awards at this year's ceremony on Sunday. So far they include Amy Adams (Golden Globe Award winner; Five-time Golden Globe Award nominee, including this year for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy), Adrien Brody (Golden Globe Award nominee), Robert Downey, Jr.

“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.