Great Performances

All the stories have been told, and told the same way so often that most new films seem sequels of themselves. In this age of recycled cinema, what’s new? A fresh face, with talent to match–so that seeing, say, Catalina Sandino Moreno in Maria Full of Grace is like stumbling into a great blind date. Or a familiar face matched with an appropriate role. The character that Thomas Haden Church plays in Sideways is such a perfect fit, it seems to have been waiting for him like a twin separated at birth.

Acting is the trade with the highest proportion of qualified people to available jobs. Good actors need directors who can envision their brilliant performances before the cameras roll. So Mike Nichols welcomed Clive Owen into the star-studded Closer cast. Mike Leigh built Vera Drake around Imelda Staunton. Clint Eastwood rescued Hilary Swank from whatever-happened-to status.

Movies are machines; actors are people, with gifts to admire and quirks to fall in love with. Here’s a handful of talents who deserve notice this Oscar season and whose promise fills the coming film year with a little anticipated joy. –By Richard Corliss

Hilary Swank | Million Dollar Baby

I’d venture that she could take about 80% of the women out there,” says Clint Eastwood. He’s talking about how Hilary Swank might fare if she were obliged to box for real instead of for the camera, as she triumphantly, tragically does in Eastwood’s Oscar-worthy Million Dollar Baby.

“Work ethic” is the phrase that keeps recurring to Eastwood when he talks about his star. To play Maggie Fitzgerald, the lower-class waitress who’s all heart turned fighter who’s all gristle, Swank gained 19 lbs.–“all muscle,” says Eastwood. She worked out five or six hours a day for three months. “That eagerness and persistence is natural to her,” says Eastwood. “She brings it to everything she does.”

Even, says her husband, actor Chad Lowe, to cleaning out the basement and other chores the laid-back Lowe tends to duck. “She’s a perfect combination of drive, fearlessness and humanity,” he says. She has had to be, because Swank, 30, grew up in the same sort of trailer-park environment as did Maggie and, for that matter, Teena, the small-town transgendered woman she won an Oscar for playing in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. The difference between them and Swank–and she insists that it’s the crucial difference–is that, unlike those characters, she had a supportive mom, who encouraged her dream of escape via acting.

Pursuing that dream took her through the usual forgettable TV work before she landed Boys, as well as some pretty dismal movies after it. That’s because there are not many parts for authentically tough little nuts like Swank. In most tough-nut movie roles, actors drop their hard edge after a couple of reels so that we can adore their vulnerability. Swank, in her two great roles, allows us to take her to heart eventually–but it’s not quite an unconditional surrender. The wariness, the memories of hard use remain and, in Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby, steel her (and us) for the devastation of their climaxes.

Eastwood, for one, is grateful. “There are just not that many actresses her age with the right combination of discipline and experience for Maggie.” But that’s all right. There is at least this one. And we’re firmly in her corner. –By Richard Schickel

Thomas Haden Church | Sideways

Maybe he could play Lear or Hamlet, but there’s no need for Thomas Haden Church to try when he can so fully inhabit likable doofuses. Could Laurence Olivier have played Jack Lopate, the ex–TV star who goes on a weeklong wine-tasting toot with his pal Miles (Paul Giamatti) in the widely laureled comedy Sideways? For that matter, could Jack find a more engaging explicator than the genial Texan who plays him?

It helps that Church, 43, who commutes from his Kerrville, Texas, ranch to Hollywood, was Jack, sort of. He won TV fame as the mechanic Lowell on Wings, then as the male half of Ned and Stacey before fading out of sight, though not out of sound. “Jack does voice-over work,” he says in his leathery baritone, “which I have done off and on for 20 years, which can provide you with a handsome living. In Jack’s driveway you will see only late-model luxury vehicles. He has his own confidence, financial and otherwise.”

But some things mean more than a fat paycheck. Like a happy kid who has never learned how to play it cool, Church loves–luuuuvs–the acclaim he has received as Jack. “All these years after I moved to L.A.–it’s wonderful!”

You’ve earned all that wonder, Jack. Sorry … Thomas. –R.C. Reported by Desa Philadelphia/ Los Angeles

Javier Bardem | The Sea Inside

Javier Bardem likes being invisible. “It’s great to be able to walk around without people watching you,” he says.Then he can be the studious voyeur, not the “voy??.” He thinks the ability to observe unnoticed is crucial to the actor’s craft. “My work is based on people’s behaviors: to sit down and see people–how they walk, how they talk, how they scream, how they cry.”

He can study the species in Manhattan, which he visited earlier this month, but not in Spain, where he is one of his homeland’s most admired, recognized and, apparently, fondled stars. “Spain is a very impulsive country,” he says. “It’s not only about looking. It’s about touching, grabbing, hugging. It’s exhausting. And you are not allowed to watch anyone else’s behavior because they are watching you. And then you don’t learn anymore.”

Bardem’s anonymity in the U.S. may not last much longer. A Golden Globe and Oscar nominee four years ago for his role as the poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls, he has topped himself with his fierce, tender, near heroic portrayal of Ram??n Sampedro, the quadriplegic who fought the Spanish government for the right to end his life, in Alejandro Amen??bar’s The Sea Inside. Like the real Sampedro, whose quest made him a Spanish saint and celebrity, Bardem mixes sweetness and humor with an implacable resolve to die.

The role of Ram??n, who spends virtually the entire film immobile in bed, was a huge challenge for someone with Bardem’s looming, vigorous physicality. “I’m not a very good technical actor,” he says. “I’m more of an impulsive. I believe in the constant movement of feelings and thoughts and body language. So here I am stuck in a body and only using my voice and my look. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do it–to see if I was able to express a different range of emotions with almost nothing.”

To play a man 20 years older than he is, Bardem, 35, endured five hours a day in the makeup chair. He videotaped himself supine in bed. “It’s not that I like to see myself,” he says, “but when I’m portraying somebody real, I want to know, even if I feel I am getting it, that the camera is getting it. I wanted to see if I was showing that smile, that peaceful attitude that he had. It was helpful because I am 35, and I was full of energy and anger and pain, and he wasn’t.”

He also spent a day with Sampedro’s sister-in-law at her home in Galicia. “She put me in the bed, and she treated me for the whole day like she treated him. It was the real house, the real bed, the real books, the real her, telling me the real things. That was the first day I felt, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not Javier anymore. Today I’m Ram??n.'”

The son of actress Pilar Bardem and nephew of director Juan Antonio Bardem, Javier got his break starring in three ultraweird comedies by the Spanish sensualist J.J. Bigas Luna and later played the paraplegic cop in Pedro Almod??var’s Live Flesh. When he began his acting career, he told himself, “You have a very respected surname. So in the name of that surname, man, break your back, go there, and do the best you can.”

We’re guessing that Mom and the whole Bardem family–and Spain–couldn’t be prouder. –R.C. Reported by Kate Novack/ New York

Catalina Sandino Moreno | Maria Full of Grace

In the signature sequence of Maria Full of Grace, the eponymous heroine, a Colombian drug mule, swallows several dozen condoms stuffed with heroin pellets. If one breaks in her stomach, it will kill her. She has never done this before, and her horror is tangible–perhaps because, before shooting the scene, Catalina Sandino Moreno had never swallowed or even seen one of the enormous pellets either. (The pellets Sandino downed contained sugar.) Rather than rehearse or talk to women who had been drug mules, Sandino went in unprepared on purpose, because, she says, “Maria didn’t know anything about it when she did it.”

This bold choice was the correct one. Sandino does not so much act her role as experience it. The beautiful 17-year-old Maria is a universal adolescent–petulant, proud, innocent, willful, sexy, reserved, angry yet dutiful to her exploitative family. Above all, there moves in her a sort of inchoate idealism, a need to do the right thing, that carries her through the film’s frightening chain of events.

Precisely because Sandino approaches every moment onscreen as she does the drug-swallowing scene–with eyes wide open–writer-director Joshua Marston is able to evade sentimentality. He trusts his actress’s instincts, and that encourages the audience to do the same.

Sandino, 23, had to trust her instincts too. All she has in common with Maria is a Colombian passport. The actress is the daughter of a pathologist and a veterinarian and was raised in middle-class privilege in Bogot??. Her only previous acting experience was in amateur productions, and Marston, who had interviewed hundreds of young women in the U.S. and Colombia for the role, chose her as a last hope after seeing her audition tape.

While she did the heroin-pellet scene blind, she threw herself into the research otherwise. She even took a job cutting roses in a flower factory, as Maria does in the movie. “After two weeks, I understood her frustration”–which was not just with the job or with her family’s lack of appreciation for her sacrifice or with her loser boyfriend. “You don’t have anybody to lean on,” says Sandino. “I understood why she wanted to leave”–however dangerous the circumstances.

Sandino has been careful in capitalizing on her success. She now lives quietly in Manhattan, where she is studying the dozens of scripts that have flowed her way since Maria opened last summer. But too many of the offers are for maids and “spicy” Latinas. “I’m not spicy at all,” she says. “I’m about jeans and T shirts, and I don’t use high heels.” She would like to work for Pedro Almod??var or Alejandro Amen??bar or, failing a Spanish connection, in an action movie like House of Flying Daggers. Whatever she chooses, you can be certain that Sandino will do it with the clarity and force that made her Maria the year’s most insinuating and touching performance. –R.S. With reporting by Carolina A. Miranda

Sharon Warren | Ray

The players in Ray could honorably fill all 10 slots in the Motion Picture Academy’s supporting-actor and -actress categories this year. No joke. But even in this bold, acute ensemble, Sharon Warren stands out. As Aretha, the young single mother of Ray Charles (Jamie Foxx), Warren reveals the pain, strength and ornery resolve we later see in her son. She is the remembered radiance that lights, from within, a blind man’s life.

Warren’s parents–her father a policeman, her mother in administration at the Tuskegee Institute–steeped her in literature and theater. But when she left Auburn University to pursue acting, she soon had a right to sing the blues: for a couple of months she had to live in her car. “That’s just life,” she says. “At least I had a car to sleep in. And if I hadn’t struggled, there is no way in hell I could have given the performance I did as Aretha.”

So far, her exemplary work hasn’t translated into job offers. News reports of a development deal at CBS turned out to be false. Again, that’s life for Warren, 27, who expects much less of show business than she demands of herself. “I don’t really want people to pay attention to me,” she says, “just to get what I’m trying to deliver.” Deliver she does, beautifully, in Ray. Now it’s Hollywood’s turn to get it. –R.C. Reported by D.P./Los Angeles

Clive Owen | Closer

The two men in Closer couldn’t be starker, more lethal opposites–Dan, the shabby-genteel journalist, fickle in his passions, quick to fall into love or loathing, and Larry, the working-class doctor, solid and constant, who shows a slow-fuse brutal streak when he feels wronged. Yet Clive Owen has played both roles–Dan in Patrick Marber’s original stage production at London’s Royal National Theater in 1997, Larry in Mike Nichols’ new film version–and slipped into each like a second skin.

His three co-stars in the film–Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Natalie Portman–have a fame that shuttles from movie pages to gossip columns. Owen is just your basic, semirecognizable, fabulous actor whose gift for exploding out of victim status into ferocity gives Larry a scalding menace. “I’ve never done a movie where I was looking forward to doing every single scene so much,” he says. “The whole experience felt like a gift.”

This working-class lad from Coventry, England, is a steady fellow with a 10-year marriage, two daughters and a lifelong acting vocation. “I did a school play when I was 12 or 13,” he says, “and I knew then that this was what I wanted to do. I’ve never wanted to do anything else.”

In a 20-year career, Owen, 40, has acquired his fans methodically. Two different audiences revere him as a cheeky stud in the car game–the putative savior of an auto company in the BBC series Chancer (1990-91) and the cool-blooded chauffeur in The Hire (2001-02), BMW’s series of Internet films directed by top auteurs. In 2000, America’s art-house habitu??s got to know him as the existential casino worker in Croupier. He can play it stalwart (his title role in King Arthur) or predatory (Matt Damon’s would-be assassin in The Bourne Identity), but he’s always dominant, with a touch of the domineering.

His rugged features, voluptuous mouth and aura of sexual threat suggest a young Sean Connery. So, naturally, he’s being talked up as the next James Bond. But Owen wants his career choices to be instinctive. “I’ve never wanted to get trapped in one type of thing or one type of character. It’s much more interesting if you’re able to explore.” Perhaps in the next Bond film, Owen could play 007–and the supervillain. –R.C. Reported by D.P./Los Angeles

Imelda Staunton | Vera Drake

Imelda Staunton, 49, was getting ready to attend the Golden Globe Awards ceremony for the first time as a nominee, but she didn’t spend too long fretting over what to wear. “I’ve got a [store-bought] top, and Jim Broadbent’s wife has lent me a skirt,” she told TIME briskly. “I know what I like, and I just put it on.”

That’s not quite the way this veteran of the London stage donned the character of Vera Drake, the title role in Mike Leigh’s wonderfully real and curiously moving story about a chipper abortionist in 1950s London.

Unlike most other writer-directors, Leigh brings together his actors for six months of improvisation before writing. Staunton took to the process eagerly. “It was just delicious from start to finish,” she says. “And then to have that piece of work heralded is almost too good to be true.” Vera is a kindhearted simpleton of virtue, which is what makes her arrest–after one of her “procedures” almost kills a woman–so unbearable and Staunton’s portrayal of her so poignant. In lesser hands, this paragon could be a parody, Vera’s collapse into addled silence a ludicrously pitiful plea for absolution. But Staunton’s objectivity, her refusal to generalize from the specifics of her case, makes this an amazingly powerful performance.

Staunton hopes to parlay her acclaim into more film work, though the theater actress avoids long Broadway runs. Basically, she says, “I’m a bit of a homegirl.” Fortunately, not too much of one. Because she’s also basically a superb and completely original actress. –R.S. Reported by Lina Lofaro/New York