Amy Adams
Amy Lou Adams (born August 20, 1974) is an American actress and singer. Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy, to American parents, and began her performing career on stage in dinner theaters, before making her screen debut in the 1999 black comedy film Drop Dead Gorgeous. After a series of television guest appearances and roles in B movies, she was cast in the role of Brenda Strong in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can, but her breakthrough role was in the 2005 independent film Junebug, playing Ashley Johnsten, for which she received critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.Adams subsequently starred in Disney’s 2007 film Enchanted, a critical and commercial success, and received a Golden Globe Award nomination for her performance as Princess Giselle. She received her second Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations the following year for her role as a young nun, Sister James, in Doubt. Though she has appeared in a range of dramatic and comedic roles, Adams originally gained a reputation for playing characters with cheerful and sunny dispositions but has since played a wider variety of roles. Adams starred in Sunshine Cleaning with Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin, and the following year appeared as Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. She appeared in Julie & Julia in 2009 portraying writer Julie Powell followed by Leap Year in 2010. Her role as Charlene Fleming in The Fighter earned Adams her third Academy Award nomination, her third Golden Globe Award, second BAFTA Award, and fifth Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. In 2011, Adams appeared in The Muppets alongside Jason Segel. In 2012, Adams portrayed Peggy Dodd in The Master and the daughter of Clint Eastwood’s character in the baseball drama Trouble with the Curve. For The Master, Adams was nominated for her fourth Academy Award, her fourth Golden Globe Award, and her third BAFTA Award. She will soon play Lois Lane in the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel. Alongside Jim Carrey, Alec and William Baldwin, Adams will voice Olive Oyl in the upcoming animated movie, Popeye which will release in theaters September 26, 2014.
Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy, the fourth of seven children of American parents Richard Kent and Kathryn (née Hicken) Adams. She has four brothers and two sisters. Her father was a U.S. serviceman stationed at Caserma Ederle at the time of her birth, and took the entire family from base to base before settling in Castle Rock, Colorado, when Adams was eight years old Thereafter, her father sang professionally in restaurants and her mother was a semi-professional bodybuilder. Adams was raised Mormon, but her family left the church after her parents’ divorce in 1985. Adams said her religious upbringing “… instilled in me a value system I still hold true. The basic ‘Do unto others…’, that was what was hammered into me. And love.”Throughout her years at Douglas County High School, Adams sang in the school choir and trained as an apprentice at a local dance company with ambitions of becoming a ballerina. Her parents had hoped that she would continue her athletic training, which she gave up to pursue dance, as it would have given her a chance to obtain a college scholarship. Adams later reflected on her decision not to go to college: “I wasn’t one of those people who enjoyed being in school. I regret not getting an education, though.” After graduating from high school, she moved to Atlanta with her mother. Deciding that she was not gifted enough to be a professional ballerina, she entered musical theater, which she found was “much better suited to her personality”. She said that ballet was “too disciplined and too restrained and I was always told off in the chorus lines” and her body at the time was “just wrecked from dancing all these years.” Upon turning 18, Adams supported herself by working as a greeter at a Gap store while performing in community theater. For a few weeks after graduating high school, she took her first full-time job as a hostess at Hooters, a fact that became her “entire press career” for a while. Adams left the job three weeks later after having saved enough money to buy her first car. She admitted: ” there was definitely an innocence to my interpretation of what Hooters was about. Though I did learn, quickly, that short shorts and beer don’t mix!”
Adams began working professionally as a dancer at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre and Country Dinner Playhouse. There, she was spotted by a Minneapolis dinner theater director, Michael Brindisi, in 1995. Adams relocated to Chanhassen, Minnesota, and worked at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres for the next three years. While she was off work nursing a pulled muscle, she auditioned for the satirical 1999 comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, which was being filmed in Minnesota, and was cast in her first film role. Persuaded by her Drop Dead Gorgeous co-star Kirstie Alley, Adams moved to Los Angeles, California, in January 1999. Describing her first year there as her “dark year” and “bleak”, she recalled that she would “pine for that time” at Chanhassen because she “really loved that security and schedule”, and said, “The people I worked with there were also a great family to me.” Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, she was cast in Fox Network’s television series spin-off of Cruel Intentions, Manchester Prep, in the role of Kathryn Merteuil.
The series did not live up to the network’s expectations and following numerous script revisions and two production shutdowns, it was canceled. The filmed episodes were then re-edited to be released as the direct-to-video film, Cruel Intentions 2. From 2000 to 2002, Adams appeared in a series of small films like Psycho Beach Party while guest-starring on television series such as That ’70s Show, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville and The West Wing. She then appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can as Brenda Strong, a nurse with whom Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) falls in love. It was, in Spielberg’s words, “the part that should have launched her career” but she was unemployed for a year after that. However, Adams said, “It was the first time I knew I could act at that level with those people. To be believed in by Steven Spielberg… it was a huge confidence booster.” In 2004, she starred in The Last Run as well as voicing characters on the animated television series King of the Hill. She was also cast as a regular in the television series, Dr. Vegas, in the role of Alice Doherty but was later fired after a contract dispute. Prior to leaving Dr. Vegas, she had received the script for the low-budget independent film Junebug and auditioned for the role of Ashley Johnsten, a young, cheerful and talkative pregnant woman. Director Phil Morrison explains his decision to cast Adams: “Lots of people looked at Ashley and thought, ‘What’s the sorrow she’s masking?’ To me, the fact that Amy didn’t approach it from the angle of ‘What’s she covering up?’ was key.” The film was shot in 21 days in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. During that time, Adams turned 30 and was worried about her film career: “I thought maybe I should move to New York, maybe I should do something else. It wasn’t that I was quitting or making a dramatic statement. It was more like maybe this just wasn’t a good fit.” On the experience of making Junebug, Adams said, “It was really empowering. At the end of the summer I was unemployed but I was happy and I was proud. I was like, you know what, I’m done with being pushed around.” Junebug premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival with Adams winning a Special Jury Prize for her performance.After the theatrical release of The Wedding Date, in which Adams appeared alongside Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney, Junebug was released in theaters by Sony Pictures Classics. Adams earned critical accolades for her work in Junebug; Carina Chocano of Los Angeles Times noted, “Adams’ performance in a role that could have easily devolved into caricature is complex and nuanced.” Joe Leydon of Variety commented, “Partly due to her character’s generosity of spirit, but mostly due to her own charisma, Adams dominates pic with her appealing portrayal of a nonjudgmental optimist savvy enough to recognize the shortcomings of others, but sweet enough to offer encouragement, not condemnation”.[27] She received several awards for Best Supporting Actress including the National Society of Film Critics award and the Independent Spirit Award. She was also nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited Adams to become a member in 2006.
Her first theatrically released film of 2008 was the 1939-set film Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, in which she plays Delysia Lafosse, an aspiring American actress living in London whose life is changed after meeting a governess named Miss Pettigrew, played by Frances McDormand. While the film received generally favorable reviews, Adams’ role was noted to be similar to her joyful and naïve characters in Junebug and Enchanted. Carina Chocano of Los Angeles Times stated that “Adams is amazingly adept at playing smart playing dumb”. Similarly, Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “Adams more or less reprises her princess from Enchanted, only with a beguiling touch of ditzy naughtiness”. When asked whether she is in danger of being typecast, Adams responded, “Not at this point… Right now I’m just doing what I enjoy and I’ve done some different films, I’ve done some different types of roles. I’ve done drama this year, we had a film at Sundance (Sunshine Cleaning), but I enjoy playing upbeat characters, I really do because you take your characters home with you whether you intend to or not.” In another interview, Adams said, “I think I just respond to those kinds of characters… They’re so layered, and I love the fact that they’ve made this choice to be joyful… I really identify with that sense of hope.” She also noted that before dyeing her naturally blonde hair red, she mostly played the role of “the bitchy girl”. In late 2008, Adams starred in Doubt, an adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s play of the same name, as the young and innocent Sister James alongside Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viola Davis. After being informed of the project by her Sunshine Cleaning co-star, Emily Blunt, Adams pursued the role of Sister James but was told that it had already been offered to another actor. Shanley eventually cast Adams in the role because “she’s got this Ingrid Bergman thing going on, this luminosity. You see a good person struggling in this complicated world. She’s fiercely intelligent but has this peculiar innocence about her. She has a beautiful face of light.” On acting alongside Streep and Hoffman, Adams revealed that there was “a sense of uncertainty, a sense of doubt, a sense of wanting to please these amazing actors”. The film was well received by the critics, while Adams’ role was noted to be the “least-showy” among the four major parts. Though her performance was criticized by Manohla Dargis of The New York Times as “unsteady”, Todd McCarthy of Variety commented that “Adams does all anyone could with the role of a nice young nun.” Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Adams provides one of the film’s singular advantages. She takes the role of Sister James, which onstage seemed little more than a sounding board for Sister Aloysius, and turns the young nun into someone quite specific and lovely.” Adams was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 81st Academy Awards, the 66th Golden Globe Awards, the 15th Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the 62nd British Academy Film Awards….To be continue
