Promising Young Woman

Like Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith before her, the ‘Promising Young Woman’ star Carey Mulligan is endlessly adaptable, capable of working on stage in a Chekhov production one day and appearing in a blockbuster the next; of playing either monarch or femme fatale.

Have the Oscars started taking Carey Mulligan for granted? It’s a measure of how highly the British actor is regarded that her latest nomination – her third – has been met with so little fuss. No one expected her to win for her performance as Felicia, Leonard Bernstein’s glamorous, long-suffering South American wife, in Maestro.

Next to Emma Stone’s commedia dell’arte pyrotechnics in Poor Things or Lily Gladstone’s saturnine turn as Mollie Burkhart, the wealthy Osage woman whose family are being killed off in Killers of the Flower Moon, Mulligan’s upper-middle-class Manhattan socialite seems the picture of restraint.

It’s not a showy role but one defined by quiet emotional power. Mulligan captures superbly Felicia’s fieriness, jealousy and fatalism as well as her devotion to her brilliant but unreliable composer husband (played by Bradley Cooper, also directing). In one memorable scene, she spots him with a male lover at the end of a corridor. She turns her back and doesn’t say much (“fix your hair, you’re getting sloppy”) but audiences know immediately how wounded she is feeling. Maestro is a biopic and a love story, and Mulligan gives it its heart.

Her very British self-deprecation hasn’t helped her cause either. There doesn’t seem to have been much of an awards campaign behind her. It’s as if the publicists have decided in advance that she isn’t going to beat Gladstone or Stone so they may as well keep their powder dry for next time.

But there’s little doubt that there will be a next time. Even if she is overlooked, Mulligan is fast establishing herself as the leading English female star of her generation. In her late 30s, she is already the natural successor to such formidable figures from an earlier generation as Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Mulligan’s inexorable rise is all the more impressive when you consider the entirely unprepossessing start to her acting career. She didn’t even go to drama school – having tried and failed get in.

When she wrote a fan letter to Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes soliciting advice on how to make it as an actor, he suggested sardonically she “marry well”. (She would eventually marry her childhood pen pal, banjo-rock musician Marcus Mumford – but only after already finding success on screen.) Two decades ago, a sceptic may have looked at Mulligan and seen just another not very promising young English woman with stars in her eyes.

By her own account, Mulligan’s career was a matter of fortunate breaks and sliding-door moments. Profiles never forget to mention the rejections, the months she worked in a pub, her time as a runner at Ealing Studios, and those bit parts in TV shows like Marple and Waking the Dead.

She makes it seem that she simply lucked out. Of course, that’s not how her collaborators see it at all. You don’t sustain a career like hers for 20 years, the array of diverse roles in films including Drive (2011), Shame (2011), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Suffragette (2015), Wildlife (2018), and The Dig (2021) unless you have both an uncanny, chameleon-like talent and ruthless determination.

Finola Dwyer produced Mulligan’s breakthrough effort, An Education (2009) alongside her partner Amanda Posey, and has very vivid memories of encountering Mulligan for the first time. The movie is based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir dealing with her affair as a schoolgirl with a much older man.

Look at Mulligan’s recent screen roles and you find a surprising number of secondary characters. In Saltburn, she is in comic groove as an Ab Fab-style hanger on, “poor dear” Pamela, whose world comes crashing down after she is banished from the country house where she had previously been an honoured guest. It’s a poignant and unexpectedly funny performance. You can understand why she wanted to work with writer-director Emerald Fennell again after their runaway success with Promising Young Woman (2020), in which Mulligan excelled as a feminist vigilante. Nonetheless, it isn’t the star at full throttle.

For her new Netflix movie Spaceman, Mulligan was again cast as a beleaguered wife. This time, her husband (played by Adam Sandler) is a Czech astronaut, not a philandering New York composer. While she is pregnant and facing life-changing decisions on Earth, he is thousands of miles away in outer space, communing with a giant spider (voiced by Paul Dano). Even the insect is baffled that Sandler isn’t spending more time with Mulligan. She is fine but it’s a relatively thankless role with little of the depth found in Maestro.

Mulligan may have temporarily sidestepped the spotlight, but she’s always likely to be near the top of any director’s wishlist.