Andrea Riseborough changes her accent, her posture and her whole bearing for each part, and does it so completely that audiences leave without knowing they have seen her. It has made her a fine actor and a poorly known one.
Fi1m perspective
Andrea Riseborough turns up in Lee (2024) as Audrey Withers, a woman fighting a print ration, and plays her brisk and unsentimental, warm in the way of someone who has not got the afternoon to spare. The scenes are short and she does not waste them. That is how she generally arrives: as a particular person with a voice, a posture and a set of habits that are not hers, and then the film carries on around her as if she had always been there. She changes the accent, the walk and the face for every part, and the change is so complete that people who have seen her a dozen times will tell you they have never seen her.
She left RADA in 2005 and did her early work on British television, as Angelica Fanshawe in The Devil's Whore (2008) and as Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley (2008). Her film debut was Venus (2006), and the next stretch was small British pictures, Brighton Rock, Made in Dagenham and Shadow Dancer (2012), where she played Colette McVeigh, a lead in a hard political drama. Then the larger films: Oblivion (2013), Birdman (2014) for Alejandro G. Iñárritu, The Death of Stalin (2017) for Armando Iannucci. Then horror, Mandy (2018) and Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor (2020), then a lead in To Leslie (2022), then Lee, her third film with Kate Winslet.
Look at the films of hers we rate highest and a pattern shows. Never Let Me Go (2010) belongs to Carey Mulligan; Birdman belongs to Michael Keaton; The Death of Stalin belongs to Simon Russell Beale. Riseborough is in all three, as Chrissie, as Laura, as Svetlana Stalin, and in none of them is she the thing you come out talking about. We will admit that we had seen Birdman before we noticed she was in it, and we are still not sure whether that is the highest compliment a supporting actor can be paid or a warning. The film is built around Keaton and a camera that never appears to cut, and everyone else has to fit into the gaps.
That is the cost of the method. An actor who is a different person every time gives an audience nothing to recognise, and recognition is what gets a name to the top of a poster. She has also spent a good deal of her career being the best thing in films that did not deserve her, W.E. (2011) among them. She seems not to mind. "I think, really, what I'm interested in is whole women, real people," she said, and her choices bear it out: the parts are odd, intense and fully built, whatever the film around them is doing.
Her name is usually some way down the cast list. It is worth reading that far.
Biography
Andrea Riseborough is an English actress. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2005 and received the Ian Charleson Award in 2006 for her stage performances in Miss Julie and Measure for Measure.
She made her film debut in Venus (2006) and has appeared in Never Let Me Go (2010), Oblivion (2013), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), Nocturnal Animals (2016), The Death of Stalin (2017), Mandy (2018) and Lee (2024), in which she played Audrey Withers. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for To Leslie (2022).
On television she was nominated for a BAFTA for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley (2008) and appeared in Black Mirror (2011).
