Sally Hawkins Low Key Star With Plenty To Smile About

-- If it s true that you can t please all the people all the time then the perky bright eyed British actor Sally Hawkins comes closer than most. Nine years on from Mike Leigh s Happy Go Lucky in which she was Poppy the irrepressible schoolteacher whose approach to life is not so much glass half full as milkshakes all round the 41 year old has reached an enviable stage in her career. She has a Golden Globe and a Silver Bear award from the Berlin film festival both for Happy Go Lucky. She has worked three times with Leigh and twice with Woody Allen first in his unloved thriller Cassandra s Dream and then in Blue Jasmine a loose update of A Streetcar Named Desire in which she was Oscar nominated for her lively funny turn as Ginger the Stella role . Now she is starring in three new films that between them provide a good indication of the breadth of her appeal. First up is Maudie Aisling Walsh s low key drama about the late Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis who painted rural tableaux on walls household objects and whatever came to hand. Hers is a sensitive and finely detailed performance that rejects the sort of easy appeals to sentimentality made in other areas of the film. I showed up a week before filming says Ethan Hawke who plays Lewis s gruff grunting husband Everett. Sally was painting three to four hours a day. She had a dance teacher a body movement person who helped her study juvenile arthritis. She was perfecting her Canadian accent. It became clear to me that I was working with someone who was working on perfection a high level of excellence. After Maudie Hawkins will next be seen in The Shape of Water which premieres this month at the Venice film festival. In this visually striking fantasy from Guillermo del Toro director of Pan s Labyrinth she plays a young mute woman who finds an unlikely soulmate the strange aquatic creature held in captivity at the laboratory where she works. Hawkins had a supporting role in Godzilla and is currently shooting that picture s follow up but this will be altogether weirder early footage from del Toro s film gives the strong impression that Am lie has wandered into The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Finally at the end of this year she will reprise her role as Mrs Brown from Paddington in the eagerly awaited sequel to that idiosyncratic and likable surprise hit. So that s arthouse drama fantasy blockbuster and family favourite all sewn up. Throw in the BBC period pieces that first made her name Tipping the Velvet Fingersmith Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky as well as her increasingly rare but highly regarded stage work and it would be difficult to say that Hawkins doesn t have all bases covered--

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