Rebecca Hall's new film Christine, about the American newsreader Christine Chubbuck who in 1974 blew her brains out on live television, shows at the London Film Festival on October 6. (Read Newsweek's interview with Hall here.) Here are five of Hall's finest moments.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona 2008
On paper, Scarlett Johansson's is the part that sucks up all the attention: the rumpled blonde who catches the eye of Javier Bardem in a Barcelona café. But it was Rebecca Hall's performance as the bookish Vicky, giving her dull fiancé the slip in the heat of the Catalan sun, that earned a Golden Globe nomination. It was a breakthrough role in every sense: She shows us a wary soul daring to be bold.
Red Riding 2009
Hall won a BAFTA award for her role as a haunted young widow in this TV movie based on David Peace's books about the Yorkshire Ripper. The mother of one of the murdered girls, she is damaged goods—a film noir siren gone off the rails. Hall makes her an intelligent, lost woman trapped in a life gone wrong, using casual sex with the cocky young reporter who is digging into the story to avoid unbearable emotions.
Please Give 2010
In Nicole Holofcener's loose, quirky comedy about guilty New Yorkers, Hall plays a mammogram technician who calls breasts "tubes of potential danger" and suffers the ill temper of her vinegary grandmother with good grace. Living with her sister Mary (Amanda Peet), the two squabble about how many dishes to put in the microwave at once. So another plain Jane fighting against salon-tanned competition. It could have been doleful caricature—Hall bites her lip, blushes and doesn't smile for a long time—but when she does, it's like a flash of sun.
Parade's End 2013
Graham Greene once called Sylvia Tietjens, the manipulative socialite in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End , " surely the most possessed evil character in the modern novel . " In the British television adaptation, Hall makes her absurdity enjoyable and not just in the so-bad-she's-good way: Unfaithful, selfish, callous, demanding, devious, Hall's Sylvia is also wounded, vulnerable, and unexpectedly good-humored, capable of laughing at her own absurdities—a complex, cruel narcissist. Even as he is dragging himself to the altar, Benedict Cumberbatch's Tietjens can't help finding her "glorious."
The Gift 2015
It looks like a straightforward yuppie-in-peril movie. Hall plays one half of a couple besieged by her husband's weird high school friend "Gordo" (Joel Edgerton), but as the plot spirals around her, Hall's character takes center frame: fragile, vulnerable, recovering from miscarriage and pill addiction, she plays a variant of Mia Farrow's character in Rosemary's Baby —a woman slowly made to believe she is losing her mind, but trying to trust her gut.
Uncommon Knowledge
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