This winter, we’ll see her as Felicia Montealegre, Costa Rican actress and wife of Leonard Bernstein, in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, available from December 20 on Netflix. But over the past fifteen years, Carey Mulligan has carved out a special place for herself in American cinema.
We sometimes forget that Carey Mulligan is British. Indeed, we’ve seen her as a resident of 1960s Greenwich Village in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), as a star New York Times journalist in Maria Schrader’s She Said (2022), as a young Montana mother in Paul Dano’s Wildlife (2018), or, of course, as the irresistible Long Island socialite Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby the Magnificent (2013).
Yet it was in London that Carey Mulligan, daughter of a Liverpool hotel manager and a Welsh academic, grew up. And it was in the most British of ways that she took her first steps in the cinema: in 2005, she landed a small role in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, alongside Keira Knightley and another debutante, Talulah Riley. All three were twenty years old at the time.
Like Keira Knightley – whom she reunited with five years later on the set of Never Let Me Go – Carey Mulligan’s first films were in costume, in Brian Kirk’s My Boy Jack (2007), with Daniel Radcliffe – a new adaptation of Jane Austen – then in Michael Mann’s Public Ennemies the same year. But it was in the role of a London teenager manipulated by an older man in Lone Scherfig’s An Education that the general public discovered the full extent of the young actress’s talent. Her subtle interpretation of a complex, fragile character – her first major role – earned her a flurry of awards, including the BAFTA for Best Actress. But above all, thanks to an American co-production, the film was celebrated on the other side of the Atlantic. Carey Mulligan was even nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, just five years after giving up her job as a barmaid in a West London pub – she will be nominated again for an Oscar in 2020, with Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman.
After that, it’s the usual fairytale: Hollywood rolls out the red carpet for her. However, the actress, who had previously worked in the theatre, stayed away from blockbusters and their glitterati. Instead, she turned to auteur cinema, and became a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, climbing the steps for Wall Street: Oliver Stone’s Money Never Sleeps and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. Twelve years after her stint at the Venice Film Festival for Steve McQueen’s Shame, she returned to the Mostra last September with Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. A film in the continuity of Carey Mulligan’s filmography, demanding yet accessible, to be discovered soon. We look forward to seeing her alongside Adam Sandler as a cosmonaut’s wife in Johan Renck’s intriguing Spaceman, also on Netflix in 2024.
Maestro de Bradley Cooper
On December 20th, on Netflix