Saturday, September 8, 2018

Actress Saoirse Ronan

Saoirse Ronan is only 24 years old as of this writing, but she's already made a big impression in the movies.


Her first big role was as the young Briony Tallis in Atonement, the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan's World War II novel of the same title, and her character was played at 77 years of age in the same movie by Vanessa Redgrave.  Through several more movie roles in her teenage years, Ms. Ronan worked her way up to Redgrave-like status.  She was part of the huge ensemble cast of 2014's The Grand Budapest Hotel, a comedy about a concierge who is framed for murder and tries to prove his innocence.


She broke through in a big way the following year in Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant in that New York City borough in the 1950s who falls in love with an Italian-American boy.  But it was role as a socially and intellectually ambitious teenager in 2017's Lady Bird, directed by Greta Gerwig (an earlier honoree on this blog), that made her a bona fide star.  The movie set a record on the Rotten Tomatoes movie Web site for the most consecutive "Fresh" reviews without any "Rotten" reviews against it; at the end of 2017, it had gotten 164 consecutive positive reviews. 

A this writing, she's working on playing Mary, Queen of Scots in the movie of the same name, which is now in post-production.

Fun fact:  In a twist on her role in Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan was born to Irish immigrants in the Bronx, but she grew up in Ireland.

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