Art meets action: how Emily Blunt became Britain's biggest Hollywood star | Emilie Blunt

EEarlier this year, Emily Blunt received her first Oscar nomination, for her sly and brittle supporting role in Christopher Nolan's eventual Best Picture champ, Oppenheimer. It seemed like a long-awaited feat for the British star, who by that point already had a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award under his belt, not to mention four Bafta nominations. At 41, she enjoys an established aura of prestige that sometimes stands out in the films she directs. If they gave out Oscars not for individual performances but for theatrical behavior, she'd probably have several by now.

The wait becomes less surprising, however, when you take a closer look at Blunt's blockbuster filmography, rich in brash commercial entertainments such as Jungle cruise and the Peaceful place films that bring in nearly a billion but are relatively intellectual Oppenheimer something of a recent outlier. While Blunt's earlier career seemed equal parts English-rose arthouse refinement and mainstream Hollywood stardom, she has largely chosen the latter path since and hasn't looked back. Its current value is estimated at $80 million. Most would agree that it's worth a few missing trophies in the cabinet.

It's been 20 years since we first saw Blunt on the big screen, after a few TV appearances. Made for just over 1m, Pawel Pawlikowski is clear, bittersweet My summer of love charted a brief, intense romance between two teenage girls from opposite sides of social class, making waves thanks to its shimmering Goldfrapp-scored freshness and the crackling chemistry between its two new stars. Offbeat Londoner Natalie Press played the biggest role as a clumsy, obsessed Yorkshire girl, marking a career of characters that gradually dwindled. As a callous seductress fresh out of boarding school, Blunt, with her cut-glass performances and magazine covers, was quickly propelled to leading lady status. These are the vagaries and prejudices of the industry.

Only two years later she transferred to Hollywood. On paper, her role as Emily, wasp fashion PA, in the summer 2006 hit. The devil wears Prada Maybe it didn't look like much. Yet Blunt made the most of it, not just by rolling out these sentences with vinegary aplomb. Do you have a prior commitment? Some hideous skirt convention you have to go to? » she growls but detects a vein of sadness in the bitchiness of her character. Her Emily represented a generation of young women eager for internment in the big city, willing to accept any degree of exploitation to rise through the ranks. It was witty and poignant enough to land Bafta and Golden Globe nominations, as well as the longer-term reward of an enduring citation in pop culture.

The following years saw Blunt rise to household name status while expanding his career bets across a range of films, from horror to romantic comedy.

She acquitted herself respectably in a minor, little-seen horror film, Wind Chill, but she didn't seem like a natural scream queen. She did what had to be done as the eponymous monarch Young Victoriabut couldn't quite liven up the beautiful monotony of the film's heritage.

She delved well into American indie, giving fine, carefree turns in Your sister sister and opposite Amy Adams in Sun cleaningbut the films themselves never really took off, and although she turned out to be a romantic game star in Salmon fishing in Yemen And The five-year commitmentthey arrived at a time when general interest in the genre was waning.

But that was in 2012 Looper it pointed to a clear path forward for the actor, which until now hadn't been an obvious choice for a high-octane action film. Rian Johnson's cleverly knotted sci-fi thriller effectively casts her against the grain as a Kansas farm girl and single mother who can handle a shotgun with the best of them. In turn, she gave the film the kind of warm human courage that its male leads, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, failed to provide.

It was a successful enough departure that she jumped right back into the genre with more time-sliding structural trickery in Doug Liman's nifty 2014 blockbuster. Edge of tomorrow. Playing a futuristic army sergeant opposite another male actor (Tom Cruise, no less), she brought a welcome emotional transparency to what could have been just a tough girl cypher.

There's a habit in action films with strong female characters of flattening them by taking too literal an approach to the strong element while providing little character depth elsewhere, says film critic Hanna Flint. What I like about Blunt in films like Edge of tomorrow is that its characters are not simply action-babe facsimiles of each other, or gender-swapped male characters, but multi-faceted individuals.

By the time Blunt credibly anchored Denis Villeneuve's stylish 2015 drug cartel thriller Sicarius, as an FBI agent stymied by systemic corruption, her unyielding composure no longer seemed revelatory but a screen character redefined. By this point, Blunt had become a naturalized American citizen following her 2010 marriage to square-jawed American sitcom star and increasingly jockey John Krasinski. Hollywood was now its home territory, as it continued to produce commercial entertainment of varying quality. The Hunter: Winter's War demanded little of her but regal haughtiness, while its turbulent emotions exceeded the intellectual demands of the silly thriller. The girl on the train, although it earned him another Bafta nod. It was under the direction of Krasinski, against the tense backdrop of the alien invasion. A silent place that she delivered surprisingly visceral physical acting, particularly in a tense birthing scene; a sequel two years later made more money but less drama.

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Perhaps surprisingly, Blunt resisted being drafted into superhero franchises, even though she served time for Disney, thereby reaffirming her English character: she impersonated Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins Returnsand served the primacy of the Edwardian era opposite The Rock in the throwaway Jungle cruise. A rare diversion from the successful model, in absurd Irish romance Wild mountain thyme, was an embarrassment; instead, it was a return to television, in the BBC's terse revisionist western series English, it gave Blunt his fluffiest character in ages. She carried that energy into her tart, calculating performance as Kitty Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's atomic bomb biopic, sealing her Oscar nomination with an extraordinary interrogation scene, irritated nerves creeping into her icy delivery in the middle of the Atlantic.

Next comes a return to action comedy antics opposite Ryan Gosling in The guy who falls just in timealready a hit at last month's SXSW festival, as well as a voice role in her husband's family comedy. IF. Blunt has not yet abandoned his populist instincts.

The fact that Blunt has raked in nearly $2 billion as a leading actress without starring in a superhero movie shows her box office appeal, Flint says, so it would be bad business to age her out of the blockbuster space. I can't imagine her being sent out to pasture just yet, but there's still a dearth of stories on the big screen in which women could truly lead and bring a cinematic feel. An action movie without a corresponding male protagonist is what Flint would like to see. her in the sequel: I would love to see her use that star power to support filmmakers entering the blockbuster space.

Meanwhile, one wonders if Blunt will ever again feel the pull for cinema as small and raw as My summer of loveor whether she will continue to reserve her dramatic talents for projects as large as Oppenheimeras she continues to maintain a rare and enviable career balance between art and commerce.