Emily Blunt - England's biggest Hollywood star
If the Oscar statuettes were awarded based on merit and not least on an overall artistic assessment of an actor's achievements, then Emily Blunt would undoubtedly have a whole collection sitting at home on the mantelpiece in her large New York apartment. But despite an Oscar nomination for her role as Kitty Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster, which premiered last year, she did not manage to crown her career with an Oscar.
It’s actually a bit strange. Since she made her debut in the play The Royal Family in 2001, she has appeared in a long series of blockbuster successes. Who doesn’t remember her as the overambitious secretary in The Devil Wears Prada (2006)? A film where she, alongside stars like Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep, simply delivered a top performance. And not least, a film that is considered her true breakthrough.
Emily Blunt's early career mostly consisted of roles as the shy ‘English rose’ in more or less artistic films. The alternative was the star-studded Hollywood productions. And she chose – without looking back – Hollywood. With a fortune of around 80 million dollars, most would agree that it more than makes up for the trophies she might be missing in the trophy cabinet.
It has been 20 years since we first saw Blunt on the big screen after some TV appearances. Pawel Pawlikowski's bittersweet My Summer of Love (2004) depicted a brief, intense romance between two teenage girls from opposite sides of the class divide. The two young starlets – Emily Blunt and Natalie Press – created a cool and crackling chemistry on screen. It may have been a low-budget film, but it featured a performance that led critics to predict a brilliant future for Blunt as British cinema's new leading lady.
Just two years later, she was spotted by Hollywood producers. On paper, her role in The Devil Wears Prada didn't seem like much. Nevertheless, Blunt made the most of it. And not only by firing off snappy one-liners to Anne Hathaway. One-liners like: “Do you have some prior commitment? Or some hideous skirt convention you have to go to?” Snarling, yet delivered with a touch of sadness in an otherwise very biting character. Her acting became a precise reflection of the many young women who were willing to accept any form of exploitation for a step up the ladder in the fashion world. She was witty and poignant enough to earn BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations along with the more long-term reward of lasting pop cultural quotability.
In the next few years, Blunt appeared in a range of films from horror to more romantic productions. Films that made her well-known – and meant that she could now reach for the bigger films. They included the horror film Wind Chill (2007) and The Young Victoria (2009). But she didn’t seem like the born ‘scream queen’ of the horror genre, and in the royal film about Queen Victoria, she didn’t quite manage to bring life to a story that, while containing a beautiful historical legacy, was also marred by a rather dull script.
This led her toward the independent American indie films, where she garnered acclaim for her acting alongside Amy Adams in Your Sister’s Sister (2011), the film Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), and The Five-Year Engagement (2012). Unfortunately, these were also films that premiered just as mainstream interest in the genre was waning.
But it was Looper from 2012 that pointed a clear path forward for Emily Blunt. Until then, action films with a high octane had not been an obvious choice. Rian Johnson’s brilliantly intertwined sci-fi thriller portrayed her as a tough Kansas farmer and single mother who knows how to wield a shotgun. In return, she gave the film the kind of warm human touch that its male leads, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, did not.
It was a film successful enough that she went straight back to the genre in Doug Liman's smart 2014 blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow, where she played a futuristic army sergeant opposite another male lead (Tom Cruise, no less), and she brought a welcome emotional transparency to what could have been yet another gritty sci-fi thriller. “There’s a tendency in action films with 'strong female characters' to flatten them by taking too literal an approach to the 'strong' element while giving little depth to the character elsewhere,” says film critic Hanna Flint in the British newspaper The Guardian. “What I love about Blunt in films like Edge of Tomorrow is that her characters are not just action-babe facsimiles of one another or gender-swapped male characters, but multifaceted individuals.”
In 2015, Emily Blunt became a naturalized American citizen after her marriage in 2010 to American sitcom star John Krasinski. Hollywood was now her hometown, where her career continued with new blockbuster films like The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016) and The Girl on the Train (2016). While the films sold relatively many tickets, it was in the film A Quiet Place (2018) that she again delivered something unexpected in the form of a very intense birth scene. The sequel two years later reportedly delivered more money but less drama. And just this past spring, the film received a third installment in theaters with A Quiet Place: Day One.
The trilogy is directed by her husband, John Krasinski, and Emily Blunt herself. The most surprising thing about Emily Blunt is perhaps that despite many awards and an Oscar nomination, she has never played a leading role in a superhero film. But that says something about her quality as an actress.
“That Blunt has earned nearly 2 billion dollars as an actress without playing the lead role in a superhero film shows her box office appeal. So it would be bad business to keep her out of the blockbuster space. I can’t see her being sent out to pasture just yet, but there is still a lack of big-screen stories that women can truly lead and deliver a cinematic punch,” says film critic Hanna Flint. She dreams of seeing Emily Blunt in an action film without a male lead. “I would love to see her use her star power to support female filmmakers breaking into the blockbuster space.”
