Mirren Campaigned For Lead Actress Oscar Playing Highsmith — SkimNews
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- Helen Mirren will be campaigned by Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment for Lead Actress at the 99th Oscars for portraying author Patricia Highsmith in "A Talent For Murder," her first Oscar push since her 2009 nomination for "The Last Station."
- The film had its world premiere at the recent Toronto Film Festival, where critic Damon Wise praised Mirren for "playing wildly against type" and "perfectly inhabiting the troglodyte genius" of Highsmith.
- Alden Ehrenreich, fresh off a Tony Award win, will be campaigned for Lead Actor, while co-star Olivia Cooke will be pushed for Best Supporting Actress in the Bleecker Street/LD campaign.
- Director Anton Corbijn, working from a Joanna Murray-Smith screenplay, sets the fictional story in 1995 with Highsmith retired and ill in the Swiss Alps, visited by a publisher's emissary hoping to coax one final Tom Ripley novel.
- Ehrenreich plays dual roles — emissary Edward Ridgeway and Tom Ripley himself in imagined sequences — while Cooke plays two characters: a girl met on a train and another figure in the story Ridgeway helps Highsmith devise.
- Mirren's Oscar history includes a 2006 Best Actress win for "The Queen," a Lead Actress nomination for "The Last Station" (2009), and Supporting Actress nominations for "Gosford Park" (2001) and "The Madness of King George" (1994), plus four Emmys, four BAFTAs, and four Golden Globes.
- "A Talent For Murder" opens in theaters October 23.
Why it matters: Mirren has not won an Oscar since "The Queen" in 2006 and has not even been nominated since 2009, so a four-category Bleecker Street campaign banking on a Toronto-reviewed "wildly against type" performance positions this as her most viable path back to the winner's circle in nearly two decades. The distributor's strategy of pairing her with a Tony-winning co-star and a Supporting Actress contender signals a full awards-season rollout rather than a token submission.
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