Celebrating the Living
There's just something about Ridiculously Busy British Actors, isn't there?
That’s Numberwang!
Honestly her Oscar win is, if you want my opinion, category fraud. Or else it’s a movie with three leads, which is also acceptable I suppose. She’s great in the role, and the movie is officially my favourite (ha!) Lanthimos, admittedly a low bar. I’m curious as to what she herself thinks on the subject. She seems like a pretty nice woman, which I have to tell you is quite a relief for this column, and she seemed if anything just embarrassed at having beaten Glenn Close, who’s one of her acting icons. It’s also relevant, given, you know, British politics, that she’s pro-trans rights.
Sarah Caroline Sinclair, “Colly” to her friends, is, yes, another product of the British system. (“Colly” is clearly from Colman, which is indeed her birth surname.) One of the schools she attended actually has a Wikipedia page for “Old Greshamians.” It includes one Nobel Prize winner, W.H. Auden, and Benjamin Britten, among many others.) She went to Cambridge, where she became one of the many members of the Footlights to have become extremely famous. (The list there includes, you know, Charles III.) It was there that she met fellow members David Mitchell and Robert Webb.
From there, she went on to one of those Ridiculously Busy British Acting Careers. She’s barely under three years older than I am and has been in 127 things, with four more in production. It’s also one of those careers where she’s played everything from three historical queens to a character on The Simpsons. She played PC Doris Thatcher in Hot Fuzz and Margaret Thatcher’s daughter in The Iron Lady. She’s been in Great Expectations and Paddington in Peru.
And she’s great. Let’s be very very clear about this. I don’t intend to shame her by either of these categorizations. There are a lot of incredible performers who went to British schools with pages of alumni on Wikipedia. There are probably even more incredible performers with Ridiculously Busy British Acting Careers. There’s a reason they’re so busy. They’re in demand. Colman won an Oscar on her first nomination, and she’s been nominated twice since. (Losing to Yuh-Jung Youn in 2020 and Jessica Chastain in 2021.) So sure, I’ve seen David Mitchell joke about how many of their circle have BAFTAs with Rob Brydon, but she does have four of them in four categories.
If you’re wondering why I haven’t gotten to her sooner if she’s so fantastic, well, there’s two reasons for that. First, there are a lot of great performers out there, and we cover one living one a week in these parts. Second, she’s young. At least by our standards. In recent weeks, we’ve moved several people (including a Footlights friend of hers) because they were so much younger than someone who’d come to my attention. Barbara Bain? Still alive and a bit more urgent, if you get what I mean. But I knew I needed to write about her, because she’s doing great work. Heck, I even liked Empire of Light and thought she was fantastic in it.
About the writer
Gillian Nelson
Gillian Nelson is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a child up for adoption. She fills her days by chasing around her kids, watching a lot of movies, and reading. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the '60s and '70s. She has a Patreon account.
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I wondered what you’d think of The Favourite! That whole cast is fantastic, I think.
Oh my yes! It’s so easy to focus on just the three leads, but even the minor roles are really well done.
Nicholas Hoult does hapless so well!
Well I’m glad you liked The Favourite!
She also plays “Godmother” in Fleabag, and is really the best at the cast at that particularly British type of passive-aggression. (It’s a good show, if not as good as all the hype the critics piled onto it– I mean, I saw a “best TV shows of all time” list a few years ago in Rolling Stone or somewhere that had it ahead of Seinfeld.)
Yeah, today’s article was kind of spoilers for my review but really, I had to watch it before writing this article, and she’s been on the schedule for ages. Right now, the next fully open spot on the schedule is for January 24, 2027. (There are a few gaps in theme months, and Attention Must Be Paid has openings way sooner!) So I don’t know when I put her on the list, but it was a while ago.