|
Neubauer Artists LLC Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... |
As the star of ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ draws career-best reviews for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster ‘Disclosure Day’, Patrick Smith salutes a woman who’s unfussily, and often quietly, become one of our finest exports.
He’d been in awe of Emily Blunt, he said, ever since she stole the show in The Devil Wears Prada back in 2006. “This is a force of nature and one of the nicest people in the world,” he added. “I’m so lucky that she liked our script.”
He is far from the only one so smitten. Adored by everyone from teenage boys to their grandmothers – and claimed by the Americans as one of their own, after she obtained dual citizenship in 2015 – Blunt has parlayed that affection into a reported $80m (£60m) fortune and a stint among Forbes’s highest-paid actresses.
Part of her appeal may be the absence of fuss: no tabloid melodramas, no whiff of the diva. The rest is sheer reliability. Who else could have travelled from the period swoon of The Young Victoria (2009) to the alien invasion of Disclosure Day, by way of musicals, weepies and the life-or-death hush of post-apocalyptic survival thrillers, with only one real failure (2020’s Wild Mountain Thyme)?
Hollywood, which prizes a safe pair of hands above almost everything, has turned her into a mainstay: Denis Villeneuve made her the lead in Sicario (2015), Christopher Nolan steered her to an Oscar nomination in Oppenheimer (2023), and now Spielberg has built an entire narrative around her.
Blessed with a pair of sleepy, half-mast eyes that can switch from drowsy to mesmerising in a heartbeat, she harnesses a clipped RP voice with a teasing lilt. At her disposal is an arsenal of technique most actors would kill for. But it is shading that truly sets her apart – an ability, honed in everything from The Devil Wears Prada to Oppenheimer, to locate the desperation beneath the disdain, the tenderness that makes each character plausibly human.