page_title: Amy Adams
section_title: 2013–2017: Established actress
hierarchical_section_title: Amy Adams / Career / 2013–2017: Established actress
caption_attribution_description: English: Amy Adams at the premiere of the film Her at the 51st New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, on 12 October 2013.
context_page_description: Amy Lou Adams is an American actress. Known for both her comedic and dramatic performances, she has placed three times in annual rankings of the highest-paid actresses in the world. Her accolades include two Golden Globes, and nominations for six Academy Awards and seven British Academy Film Awards.
  Born in Vicenza, Italy, and raised in Castle Rock, Colorado, Adams is the fourth of seven siblings. She trained to be a ballerina, but at age 18, she found musical theater a better fit, and from 1994 to 1998, she worked in dinner theater. She made her feature film debut with a supporting part in the 1999 satire Drop Dead Gorgeous. After moving to Los Angeles, she made guest appearances in television and took on "mean girl" parts in small-scale features. Her first major role came in Steven Spielberg's 2002 biopic Catch Me If You Can, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, but she was unemployed for a year afterward. Her breakthrough came in the part of a loquacious pregnant woman in the 2005 independent film Junebug.
  The 2007 musical Enchanted, in which Adams played a cheerful princess, was her first major success as a leading lady.
context_section_description: After losing out on the role of Lois Lane in two previous films about Superman, Adams secured the part in Zack Snyder's 2013 reboot, Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill as the titular superhero. She played Lane with a mixture of toughness and vulnerability, but Peter Bradshaw thought that the character was "sketchily conceived" and criticized her lack of chemistry with Cavill. The film earned over $660 million to become one of her biggest box-office hits. Adams next featured in Her, a drama from the writer-director Spike Jonze about a lonely man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson); Adams played his close friend. She had unsuccessfully auditioned for Jonze's 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are and was hired for Her after Jonze looked back at those tapes. Adams was drawn to the idea of portraying a platonic male-female friendship, which she believed was rare in film.
  Further success came to Adams when she reteamed with David O. Russell in the crime film American Hustle, co-starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence. Inspired by the 1970s Abscam scandal, the film featured Adams as a seductive con artist, though she played it so that "everything felt justified and it didn't feel like she was just a sexy sociopath". She collaborated closely with Bale to build their characters and made off-screen suggestions to Russell, including for a scene in which she is aggressively kissed on the lips by her lover's wife (played by Lawrence). The work was grueling for Adams, who later confirmed reports that Russell had been hard on her and had made her cry frequently; she said that she feared bringing such a negative experience home to her daughter. American Hustle was acclaimed by critics; Manohla Dargis of The New York Times believed that Adams "goes deeper here than she's ever been allowed to" and wrote that she had successfully "turn[ed] an unpredictable character into a thrillingly wild one". She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical and received her fifth Oscar nomination (her first for Best Actress). Her and American Hustle were deemed by critics to be among the best films of 2013, and they were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
  Following an appearance in the poorly received drama Lullaby, Adams starred in Big Eyes (2014), a biopic of the troubled artist Margaret Keane, whose paintings of "big-eyed waifs" were plagiarized by her husband Walter Keane. When she was first offered the part, she passed on it to avoid playing another naïve woman. The birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted Adams to find strength in the passive character, and she drew upon experiences in her life where she had not stood up for herself. In preparation, she practiced painting and studied the way Keane worked. Keane liked Adams's portrayal of her, and Mark Kermode of The Guardian termed her performance a "potent blend of intuitive fire and sensitive vulnerability". She won a second consecutive Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical and received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress.
  After a one-year absence from the screen, Adams had three film releases in 2016. She first reprised the role of Lois Lane in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which marked the second installment in the DC Extended Universe after Man of Steel. Despite a negative critical reception for favoring visual effects over a coherent narrative, the film earned over $870 million to rank as her highest-grossing release. In her next two releases—the science fiction film Arrival and the psychological thriller Nocturnal Animals—Adams played "emotionally guarded, fiercely intelligent" women to critical acclaim. Based on Austin Wright's novel Tony and Susan, Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals tells the story of an unhappily married art dealer named Susan (played by Adams), who is traumatized when reading a violent novel written by her ex-husband (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). Adams found little resemblance between herself and her "poised" and "aloof" character, an
caption: Adams at the premiere of Her at the 2013 New York Film Festival
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