2010: the year of the (very) young actresses

Many sites and blogs have argued that 2010 was an amazing year for actresses in cinema, as we witnessed an abundance of marvellous performances in great roles. We are now deep inside the awards season and the most celebrated and critically acclaimed of those performances have already been highlighted; what remains to be seen is who will be the repicients of the awards.
It was quite interesting though that among those performances, a significant amount was by very young actresses: young being below twenty five years old, that is! Some of them are newcomers, some are already established in the film industry; all of them are full of potential and their future looks bright. The list is in descending order by age.

Carey Mulligan in Never Let Me Go
This 25-year old beauty became global sensation last year with the dramedy An Education, which gave her among others an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA award. The competition is really hard this year and it's unlikely she will be among the nominees two years in a row. But that doesn't diminish the fact that she has delivered two spotlight performances, including Oliver Stone's sequel to Wall Street, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; she truly shined though in -famous music video director- Mark Romanek's drama Never Let Me Go, next to fellow Brit Keira Knightley. Carey has also landed the lead female role in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming version of Francis Scott Fitzerald's classic novella the Great Gatsby starring Leo DiCaprio as Gatsby. The highly anticipated project is a remake of the 1974 film with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

Mia Wasikowska in The Kids Are All Right and Alice in Wonderland

Australian-Polish Mia Wasikowska is amazingly at her 20 now the highest-grossing actress of 2010, tied with Johnny Depp and behind only Leo DiCaprio! Although she didn't have a big or impressive resume, Tim Burton gave her the role of Alice in Alice in Wonderland. In the dramedy The Kids Are All Right - a certain Golden Globe winner for best comedy as well as Best Picture Oscar nominee - she is member of what could be the best ensemble cast of the year, playing -spoiler alert!- the daughter of Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo.

Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone
The first American on this list, 20-year-old Jennifer has been in all "Best Female Performances of the Year" lists, for what is undoubtedly a tour-de-force performance: she carries the whole movie on her shoulders, much like she has to support all by herself her whole family through thick and thin in this excellent southern gothic slow indie drama. She won't win the Golden Globe or the Oscar though; this is Natalie Portman's year. But a "best actress of her generation" title will soon look definite.

Imogen Poots in Solitary Man
In what is surely the sauciest performance of this list, this 20-year-old Brit seduces her mother's boyfriend (played brilliantly by Michael Douglas) and initiates his slow but steady existential breakdown. The role was small but meaty and Poots gave us a typical young femme fatale in this offbeat drama which went largely unnoticed despite its all-star cast.

Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank
Fish Tank is English filmmaker Andrea Arnold's second movie and follows the same path of her debut Red Road: hard, unrelenting look at everyday people caught in tough situations, the type of movies which are called "gritty realism". All scenes in Fish Tank were shot chronologically and Arnold showed the script to the actors only before shooting each scene. Katie Jarvis, an 18-year-old who plays the lead role, was discovered on the street by Arnold, on the midst of a heated argument with her boyfriend. She wasn't an actress and had never done any type of work before: consequently her acting is amateurish, non-professional, which works wonders for the atmosphere and the story. She brought to the film teenage lust, anger and an as raw and unpolished performance as anyone could find. Truly captivating.

Saoirse Ronan in The Way Back
In this epic which marks the return of the great Australian director Peter Weir after 2003's Master and Commander, Saoirse Ronan proves her enormous talent for third consequtive year: she was extraordinary and the catalyst of the tragic plot of Atonement; and she played a girl caught in the afterlife in the fantasy drama of The Lovely Bones. Next stop on 2011 for the Irish teen prodigy is action thriller Hanna, (her second collaboration with director Joe Wright after Atonement - perhaps a director-actress steady partnership is on the way?), where she stars as a teenager trained by her father to become a perfect assasin. A second Oscar nomination looks certain in the near future.

Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit
The Coen brothers' remake of the classic 1969 western is a revelation: not for Jeff Bridges performance (who is the favourite for the Oscar, along with Colin Firth in The King's Speech, repeating their last year's battle), but for first-timer, 14-year-old Steinfeld. She will most likely be among the Oscar nominees, either for lead or supporting role; in case of win, she will enter the pantheon of actresses who have won Oscar on their debut film: Julie Andrews (for Mary Poppins), Barbara Streisand (for Funny Girl), Louise Fletcher (for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Marlee Matlin (for Children of a Lesser God).

Elle Fanning in Somewhere
Sofia Coppola cast 12-year-old Elle Fanning in the lead role of her latest feature, which has already won the Golden Bear in Venice Film Festival as well as the National Board of Review's Special Achievement Award. Fanning is a young girl who is forced to live with her father (a partying, drinking Hollywood actor, played by Stephen Dorff) at the legendary Chateau Mermont Hotel in L.A, after her mother leaves town. The talent obviously runs in the family: Elle is Dakota's little sister. Coppola's female characters are always very young but mature, whose disconnection and out-of-place feeling with their living environment and the persons who are close to them drives the whole movie. In Somewhere, Fanning joins this group, along with Kirsten Dunst (The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette) and Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation); and Coppola proves once more she has a keen eye for finding young actresses who can shape these characters into movie life.

For the end, the disappointment:

Ellen Page in Inception

The diminutive 23-year old Canadian wowed us in 2007 with Juno; not that impressive though in a supporting but crucial role in Inception. Perhaps the biggest problem was that she simply looks too young for the role; an almost miscast.