Over the course of her 23-year career, Rosamund Pike has defied categorisation. After making her big-screen debut as a frosty Bond girl in Die Another Day (2002) at the age of 23, the now 42-year-old Londoner seemed to take pleasure in confounding critics and audiences alike.
She zipped from ravishing period dramas and charming comedies to action movies, and then became a global superstar and Oscar nominee with Gone Girl (2014), the steely adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestseller. However, the actor didn’t let its success define her. Since then, she’s gone on to play a gun-wielding frontierswoman, a German revolutionary and two real-life icons: journalist Marie Colvin in A Private War (2018) and physicist Marie Curie in Radioactive (2019).
Fittingly, her latest role is another surprise—that of a devious legal guardian who secretly robs her clients in the deliciously dark satire I Care A Lot. Ahead of the film’s release on Netflix and Amazon Prime on February 19, we look back on Pike’s most memorable performances to date.
1. Die Another Day (2002)
As the porcelain-skinned swordswoman who presides over a melting ice palace, Pike holds her own alongside Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Lee Tamahori’s rip-roaring blockbuster. Poised, inscrutable and deadly, she seduces and betrays him, proving he was wrong to underestimate her.
2. Pride & Prejudice (2005)
So often dismissed as Elizabeth Bennet’s dutiful older sister, Jane is brought to life with warmth, compassion and touching vulnerability by Pike in Joe Wright’s sun-drenched romance based on Jane Austen’s enduring classic. Skipping across ballrooms and dodging suitors, she’s simply radiant.
Streaming on Netflix
3. An Education (2009)
Impeccable comic timing and an extraordinary wardrobe of glittering cocktail dresses and pillbox hats help Pike steal the show in Lone Scherfig’s 1960s-set coming-of-age saga. She plays the foil to Carey Mulligan’s studious heroine—a vivacious but vacant party girl with all the best one-liners.
4. Gone Girl (2014)
To many cinemagoers, Pike will always be the psychopathic Amy Dunne from David Fincher’s tense thriller, thanks to a towering turn that combines cool reserve with a penchant for manipulation and murder. It’s a perilous tightrope walk that few others could have managed with such insouciance.
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video
5. A United Kingdom (2016)
In telling the true story of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, an African prince and a British clerk who fell in love in 1940s London, Amma Asante relies on two deeply moving performances: one from the graceful David Oyelowo and the other from Pike, as his courageous and resourceful wife.
6. Hostiles (2017)
Still reeling from the death of her family, a 19th-century settler joins a troop tasked with returning a Native American chief to his homeland in Scott Cooper’s poignant western. As the sole woman in a band of brooding men, Pike commands the screen with grit, resilience and simmering rage.
7. A Private War (2018)
For Matthew Heineman’s brutal biopic, Pike embodies the fearless war reporter Marie Colvin as she heads for the Syrian frontline. With an eye patch, wild hair and an irrepressible sense of joie de vivre, we see her confront her demons at home and abroad in her tireless search for the truth.
8. I Care A Lot (2020)
Providing Pike with one of her juiciest parts to date, J Blakeson’s pulpy romp casts her as a ruthless businesswoman who defrauds the elderly people she’s been appointed to care for. Whether she’s dazzling judges in court or threatening her wards with a placid smile, her presence is electrifying.
Streaming on Netflix
Also read:
Rosamund Pike on her Golden Globe-nominated role in I Care A Lot
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