Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
It’s hard to call an Academy Award–winning actress “undersung,” yet I think we take Rachel Weisz for granted. How else to explain the swift disappearance of Terence Davies’s ravishing The Deep Blue Sea with its to-die-for lead performance? As the adulterous Lady Hester Collyer, she’s pale and luminous, like a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, but something wicked, unruly, modern keeps breaking through the façade. She doesn’t care about the stigma of deserting her older, aristocratic husband for a disastrously unstable ex-RAF pilot. Unlike her namesake, she’ll wear her scarlet A proudly. Weisz’s wide-apart eyes make her seem slightly off-kilter, even otherworldly, but she’s never in the ether. She’s endlessly, exhaustingly reactive. She wears you out in a wonderful way.