EXCLUSIVE: Helen Mirren may be returning to the Oscar race.
The Best Actress Academy Award winner for 2006’s The Queen and four-time nominee will be campaigned by Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment for Lead Actress at the upcoming 99th Oscars as well as other awards shows this year for her performance in A Talent For Murder in which she plays another icon, author Patricia Highsmith whose best sellers and eventual film adaptations included Strangers On A Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Co-star and recent Tony Award winner Alden Ehrenreich will be campaigned for Lead Actor, while another co-star, Olivia Cooke, will go for Best Supporting Actress.
After its world premiere at the recent Toronto Film Festival Deadline, critic Damon Wise’s review praised her performance. “Mirren, playing wildly against type, is a revelation here, perfectly inhabiting the troglodyte genius who seduced the public with their own dark reflections and resented them for the success they gave her,” he wrote.
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Although featuring Mirren as the popular author, director Anton Corbijn, working from a screenplay by Joanna Murray-Smith, has created a fictional encounter set in 1995. Highsmith, in her 70s and in poor health, has retired to the Swiss Alps, where she largely confines herself to her study, surrounded by her books, her cats and her collection of antique weapons. Enter Edward Ridgeway (Ehrenreich), emissary for a New York publisher sent to persuade Highsmith to craft one last installment in her bestselling series of mysteries featuring the murderous antihero Tom Ripley. Irritated by this youthful, overly eager visitor, Highsmith refuses the offer — unless, that is, Ridgeway can dream up the perfect murder along with her.
Ehrenreich takes on two roles, the other in imagined sequences as Ripley himself, as does Cooke both as a girl he meets on a train and another involved in the story he is helping Highsmith create.
In addition to her role as Queen Elizabeth in The Queen, Mirren’s other Lead Actress Oscar nomination came for 2009’s The Last Station. She was also nominated as Supporting Actress for 2001’s Gosford Park, and for 1994’s The Madness of King George. Among her many other honors are four Emmys, four BAFTAs and four Golden Globes.
A Talent For Murder will open in theaters October 23.
