Joanne Froggatt and Eddie Redmayne both take home gongs
Joanne Froggatt won the Golden Globe Award on Sunday for Best Supporting Actress on TV for her work on the costume drama Downton Abbey – and looked like the most surprised person in the room.
“Wow! Oh, my goodness! This is the most shocking moment of my life,” Froggatt declared before giving a shout-out to actress Kathy Bates for being so gracious when she approached her as a fan earlier in the evening.
She then thanked the show’s creator and writer Julian Fellowes for giving her “the responsibility of this storyline,” referring to how her married, 1920s-era housemaid character Anna Bates was raped in Season 4 of the series.
“After this storyline aired, I received a small number of letters from survivors of rape and one woman summed up the thoughts of many by saying she wasn’t sure why she had written, but she just felt in some way she wanted to be heard,” Froggatt said. “And I’d just like to say I heard you and I hope saying this so publicly means in some way you feel the world hears you.”
THE OTHER big British winner at the Globes on Sunday night was Eddie Redmayne. The rising star got the nod for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and is now considered a front-runner for the Best Actor Oscar following his nomination on Thursday.
The 33-year-old has dazzled both the critics and the general public with his portrayal of the world’s most famous living scientist crippled by an advanced form of motor neurone disease.
He is also nominated for a BAFTA award next month.
Among his fellow Oscar nominees is his friend and fellow British thespian Benedict Cumberbatch, who also played a troubled genius, Alan Turing, in “The Imitation Game”.
Redmayne has won plaudits for his theatre work over the past decade, and has had parts in a number of big films, but this was his first leading man role – and it has propelled him into the big league.
The film tells the story of Hawking and his wife Jane, starting in the 1960s at Cambridge University – before he was diagnosed at the age of 21 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Redmayne said he was “terrified” that Hawking might not like it, but that it was an honour to spend time with him — even if the first meeting started badly.
Lost for words, the star-struck actor blurted out that they were both Capricorns, to which Hawking replied: “I’m an astronomer, not an astrologer.”
The son of a London banker with four siblings, Redmayne took acting classes from a young age and was a child extra in the West End production of “Oliver!”.
He attended the elite Eton school alongside Prince William and studied History of Art at Cambridge – the same university where Hawking still works.
Barely a year after graduating, Redmayne had a part in an all-male production of “Twelfth Night” by Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, and by 2004 had won his first theatre award.
A few years later he picked up both a Laurence Olivier award and a Tony award for his role as artist Mark Rothko’s fictional assistant Ken in the play “Red”.
He has also appeared in a number of hit films including “The Good Shepherd”, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” and “The Other Boleyn Girl”. He also played Marius in the Oscar-winning 2012 musical “Les Miserables”.
Like Cumberbatch, Redmayne is blessed with chiselled good looks that always had the potential to make him a star, and indeed, has seen him model for luxury brand Burberry.
Both men have a legion of fans on Twitter, dubbed respectively the “Redmayniacs” and the “Cumberbitches”, undaunted by Redmayne’s recent marriage and Cumberbatch’s impending nuptials.
While the Hawking biopic has won him an Oscar nomination, the next film on his CV is set to send Redmayne’s profile stratospheric.
Next month will see the release of the latest offering by “The Matrix” trilogy’s Andy and Lana Wachowski, the sci-fi movie “Jupiter Ascending”, in which Redmayne plays a villain with a six-pack.
