British actress Rosamund Pike

Rosamund Pike got an incredible amount of favorable attention as the missing wife in the 2014 film adaption of the novel Gone Girl, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

The British actress first came to people's attention in the James Bond movie Die Another Day but soon defied that rule that Bond girls only go on to become former Bond girls. She soon distinguished herself in movies such as An Education (2009) an Made In Dagenham (2010), both sixties-period films.  She played a con man's girlfriend in the former movie, which was set in 1961, and, in the latter, played a sewing machinist in the upholstery section of the Ford of Europe car factory in Dagenham, England.  The movie was about the 1968 women's strike there that led Parliament in 1970 to pass a law guaranteeing equal pay for women in Britain, a concept Americans still have a problem with.  (American and British attitudes toward pay equality are as different as the Fords made in either country.) 

Ms. Pike more recently played Queen Andromeda in 2012's Wrath of the Titans, and she's played the title role in a 2010 production of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.