European Actor NOMINATIONS 2011
From a humble shoe-shiner to a movie star, a king and a pope, the performances nominated for EFA’s best actor prize are united in their mesmerising talent
JEAN DUJARDIN THE ARTIST When French actor Jean Dujardin picked up the best actor prize at Cannes this year for The Artist it was a particularly impressive win because his performance is in a silent film. Dujardin’s talents are perfectly harnessed as
silent film star George Valentin, whose career is blighted by the advent of talkies but who might yet find salvation through a young starlet on the rise, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). To prepare for the film Dujardin watched all of
the films of Douglas Fairbanks, and director Michel Hazanavicius showed him many silent films, including F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and City Girl, and King Vidor’s The Crowd. “At first I dreaded those sombre, more serious
scenes, for which I had no lines to hold on to, but finally I discovered that silent film was almost an advantage,” Dujardin says of his physical per- formance. “You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines come to pollute it. It doesn’t take much — a gaze, an eyelash flutter — for the emotion to be vivid.” Dujardin, who also learned to tap dance for
The Artist, starred in Hazanavicius’ successful OSS 117 spy spoofs. Other credits include Guil- laume Canet’s Little White Lies and Bertrand Bli- er’s The Clink Of Ice.
COLIN FIRTH THE KING’S SPEECH Colin Firth’s elegant performance in Tom Hoop- er’s The King’s Speech cemented his stature as an international star. Firth plays George VI, a tightly wound king battling to control a stammer as he takes the throne on the eve of the Second World War. He begins seeing unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) and the two form an unlikely bond. A versatile actor, Firth is just at home in weighty character- based dramas (A Single Man) as he is in historical pieces and even broad comedy (Mamma Mia!). Firth previously won a People’s Choice Award
for Best European Actor in Bridget Jones’s Diary at the EFAs in 2001, and was nominated for the same award for Girl With A Pearl Earring in 2004. His performance in The King’s Speech won him the Oscar for best actor this year, as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
32 n European Film Awards 2011
MIKAEL PERSBRANDT IN A BETTER WORLD (Hævnen) Charismatic Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt is a strong anchor for Susanne Bier’s drama In A Better World, which is set between the apparent safety of Denmark and the stark horrors of an African refugee camp. Persbrandt plays Anton, a doctor who spends
several months each year working at a refugee camp in Africa. The rest of the time he is with his wife (Trine Dyrholm) and two sons in a beautiful house in Denmark. But the couple are teetering
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