Getting to Know: Amy Adams

Although she's one of Hollywood's finest actors, Amy Adams is a reluctant star. She shuns the celebrity limelight and much prefers taking her daughter to the park than parading along a red carpet. In a career of admirable diverseness and enviable consistency, she has received six Academy Award nominations and seems to get better the more she challenges herself. CinemaParadiso.co.uk invites you to get to know her a little better.

It sometimes comes as a surprise when the credits roll at the end of a film and you remember that you have just been watching Amy Adams. Such is her ability to vanish into a role that she never seems to be giving a performance. She becomes her characters and inhabits the spaces they occupy.

Few major stars have this capacity and Adams puts it down to her refusal to play the fame game. As she told one interviewer, 'I feel like if I lose touch with humanity by only surrounding myself with privilege then I won't be able to play my roles honestly any more.' Such dedication to her craft and her cosy domesticity may not make for great tabloid tittle-tattle. But they give Adams the security she needs to take risks on screen.

Amy Lou and Fancy Butt Freddie

On 20 August 1974, Amy Lou Adams was born in the north-eastern Italian city of Vicenza. Her father, Richard, was stationed at the US Army base at Caserma Ederle and Amy, mother Kathryn and her six siblings (four brothers and two sisters) spent the next few years living wherever the next posting took them.

When she was eight, the family settled in Castle Rock, Colorado, where the demobbed Richard pursued his dream of becoming a nightclub singer. Money was often tight, but life was never dull for the Adams family, as they used to amuse themselves by acting out improvised scenarios such as 'Booky Booky Betty And Fancy Butt Freddie', in which the five year-old Amy Lou took a starring role.

Despite being raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Adams never felt particularly religious. However, she did learn the value of closeness and compassion and remained in touch with Richard after he relocated to Arizona following his divorce in 1975. Now a single mom, Kathryn became obsessed with bodybuilding and her children were so often left to their own devices at the gym that Adams has joked that she sometimes felt as though she was living through Lord of the Flies because she often got into scraps with other kids.

It didn't help that she hated Douglas County High School, as she wasn't academically inclined. She did enjoy athletics and gymnastics, however, and even sang in the school choir. But her ambition was to become a ballerina and she trained with the David Taylor Dance Company before realising at the age of 18 that she preferred musical theatre. Adams has since conceded that performing can still feel difficult for such a private person, but she has always felt confident that she had found the best way to make her living.

Musical Theatre With a Side of Fries

Having enjoyed the experience of appearing in a community theatre production of Annie (which had been memorably filmed by John Huston in 1982), Adams joined a dinner theatre in Boulder, Colorado. She made her professional bow in A Chorus Line (which Richard Attenborough had filmed in 1985), but had to wait tables before each performance. To make ends meet, she also worked as a part-time greeter at The Gap. But her stay proved short-lived, as an envious member of the company started spreading false stories about her.

Adams moved to Denver to join the Heritage Square Music Hall and Country Dinner Playhouse. However, she so impressed artistic director Michael Brindisi during a 1995 production of the Cole Porter musical, Anything Goes , that he offered her the chance to move to Minneapolis and work for his Chanhassen Dinner Theatre. She would spend the next three years there, honing her technique while serving patrons who often rattled their cutlery during the show.

For a while, Adams also doubled as a waitress at Hooters, although she managed to avoid having to wear the demeaningly revealing uniform. The job did enable her to buy a secondhand car, however, and she has always been thankful for the stability that the theatre offered her. It also afforded her the time to make James Stanger's monochrome short, The Chromium Hook (2000).

The schedule was punishing, however, and Adams endured a string of recurring injuries. She also lost a close friend, whose death in a hiking accident at the age of 23 reminded her that she only had one shot at life and that she needed to start thinking about her future. Thus, when she spotted a movie casting notice while nursing a pulled muscle, Adams attended the audition and landed the role of flirtatious cheerleader Leslie Miller, alongside Kirsten Dunst, Brittany Murphy and Denise Richardsin in Michael Patrick Jann's comedy, Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999).

It was only a minor part and Adams had to juggle the shoot with evening performances of Brigadoon, in which Vincente Minnelli had paired Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse back in 1954. But she made the most of her moment in the spotlight when she made a suggestive gesture using her Washington Memorial headdress during a beauty pageant.

Moreover, co-star Kirstie Alley recognised Adams's potential and encouraged her to move to Los Angeles. In January 1999, she set off in a battered car with one of her brothers. They broke down in New Mexico and had to stay with a cousin while seeking accommodation. Nevertheless, Amy Adams was on her way.

Catch Her If You Can

Within days of arriving in America's entertainment capital, Adams landed the role of Kathryn Merteuil in the newly commissioned series, Manchester Prep. Sarah Michelle Geller had taken the part in Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions (1999) and Adams was required to tap into her inner mean girl. However, the show got off to a sticky start and was scrapped after Kumble had filmed only three episodes. These were re-edited to make Cruel Intentions 2 (2000), which was released directly to video.

Moreover, they led to Adams being typecast in a slew of TV projects. Cinema Paradiso users can catch her in That 70s Show , Charmed , Buffy the Vampire Slayer (all 2000), Smallville (2001) and The West Wing (2002). They can also gauge some of her early feature outings, as Marvel Ann competes for the affections of a college dropout surfer dude with the mentally unstable Florence 'Chicklet' Forrest in Robert Lee King's take on Charles Busch's off-Broadway play, Psycho Beach Party (2000).

Adams can also been seen as Ryan Gosling's classmate Doreen in Alex and Andrew J. Smith's Drive to Dream, a gridiron rite of passage that is set in Blue Springs, Montana and also goes under the name The Slaughter Rule. She's more blink-and-missable in Christina Ricci's class in Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson's Pumpkin and as Bruce Campbell's new girlfriend in Reginald Hudlin's Serving Sara (all 2002), which sees Matthew Perry's process server join forces with British socialite Elizabeth Hurley to secure a bumper divorce settlement from her love rat husband.

Few reviews of these films mention Adams in any detail. But she came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who cast her as Brenda Strong, the nurse who takes a shine to Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the comic biopic, Catch Me If You Can (2002). The critics purred and Adams seemed primed for lift-off. However, she didn't get another role for over a year and started to wonder if she had made the right career choice after all.

She has acknowledged in magazine interviews that she had 'choked' in audition after audition and only found the key to unlock her potential when she signed up for acting classes at Warner Loughlin Studios. Here. she learned the technique of 'Emotion With Detail' that enables an actor to acquire a psychological understanding of a character by inventing their backstory from the age of three.

Supported by new artist boyfriend Darren Le Gallo, Adams relaunched herself with the role of Alice Doherty opposite Rob Lowe in the TV series, Dr Vegas, She was replaced after five episodes, but Adams had regained her confidence and she returned to features alongside Fred Savage in Jonathan Segal's The Last Run (both 2004), albeit in the small part of the dream girl who breaks our hero's heart. For good measure, Adams completed the year by doing some voiceover work on Mike Judge's cartoon series, King of the Hill . But everything was about to change.

As If By Magic

Being fired from Dr Vegas hit Adams hard and self-doubt was creeping in when Phil Morrison rescued the 30 year-old with the role of chirpy mother-to-be Ashley Johnsten in Junebug (2005). Adams revelled in researching the role and its milieu during what she has called the 'summer I grew into myself' and has never returned to her natural blonde since dying her hair red for the picture.

Having received a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Adams was showered with awards and even snared an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The acclaim somewhat immunised her against the brickbats hurled at her next two assignments, in each of which she played a bride-to-be. As Amy, she forces sister Debra Messing to hire escort Dermot Mulroney so that she has a partner for the big day in Claire Kilner's The Wedding Date , while as Elise in Matthew Cole Weiss's Standing Still (both 2005), she comes to regret inviting the neurotic Mena Suvari and lesbian ex Laura German to her bachelorette party.

It wasn't all bad, however, as Adams also got to savour the atmosphere at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania for three episodes of The Office. Her growing reputation for comedy also led to a teaming with Will Ferrell, as Susan, the assistant and potential sweetheart of a fiercely competitive NASCAR driver in Adam McKay's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (all 2005). She's off screen for long periods, but her diner speech makes the waiting worthwhile.

Having repaid her debt to Warner Loughlin by playing a waitress prepared to do anything to protect her daughter in the short, Pennies (which can be found in the 2010 portmanteau film, Love & Distrust), Adams cameo'd as the 'Glorious Woman' opposite Jack Black in Liam Lynch's Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. She also popped up as Abby March in Jesse Peretz's The Ex (all 2006), which sees Zach Braff discover that his new boss at an Ohio advertising agency was wife Amanda Peet's high-school beau.

In Frederik De Chau's Underdog , Adams voiced Polly Purebreed, the King Charles spaniel who steals the heart of Shoeshine (Jason Lee), the beagle who acquires superpowers and starts fighting crime in Capitol City. But it was another 2007 feature that would transform Adams's fortunes, as she excelled as Giselle, the fairytale princess from Andalasia who finds herself adrift in Manhattan with only cynical lawyer Patrick Dempsey for a guide in Kevin Lima's Disney romcom charmer, Enchanted, which is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso on both DVD and Blu-ray.

As she handled her three songs (two of which were nominated for Oscars) with such aplomb, comparisons were made with Julie Andrews (who acted as narrator), as Adams drew a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. Yet, despite her performance helping to bring in global receipts topping $340 million, she was yet to be considered an A list star in Hollywood.

A Step Up in Class

Although she largely remained in supporting roles, Adams increasingly found herself rubbing shoulders with acting royalty. She played Tom Hanks's assistant, Bonnie Bach in Mike Nichols's Charlie Wilson's War (2007), which was set in the 1980s and followed a Congressman's bid to help the Afghan freedom fighters resisting the invading Soviet army. Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman co-starred and Adams would reunite with the latter in John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play, Doubt (2008), in which Sister James (Adams) alerts Sister Alyosius (Meryl Streep) to the fact that Fr Brendan Flynn (Hoffman) might be paying to much attention to a male student at their elementary school in the Bronx of the mid-1960s.

By the time she was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category at the Oscars, Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, Adams had also held her own against Frances McDormand in Bharat Nalluri's adaptation of Winifred Watson's novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, in which she shines as Delysia Lafosse, an aspiring actress whose whirlwind existence is whipped into some form of order in 1930s London by her new social secretary, Guinevere Pettigrew (McDormand), a prim governess who is living out her own daydreams.

Thirtysomething Rose Lorkowski's ambitions are much more modest in Christine Jeffs's Sunshine Cleaning (both 2008). But Adams makes you believe that she has always longed to make a living clearing up crime scenes in a quirky comedy drama that also features Emily Blunt and Alan Arkin as Rose's unreliable sister and eccentric father. She exhibited even more confidence as aviatrix Amelia Earhart in Shawn Levy's Night At the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), which again allowed her to use her deft comic gifts as a foil to Ben Stiller and Robin Williams.

In order to ensure she convinced in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (2009), Adams took classes at the Institute of Culinary Education before playing Julie Powell, the government secretary who decided to spice up her life by making the 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which had been written by Julia Child (Meryl Streep), who had introduced America to Gallic cuisine in the early 1960s. But no amount of preparation could have helped Adams soup up a couple of mediocre romcoms, Giancarlo Tallarico's Moonlight Serenade (2009), in which she plays a jazz club cloakroom attendant who forms a double act with wannabe pianist Alec Newman, and Anand Tucker's Leap Year (2010), in which Adams's efforts to follow boyfriend Adam Scott to Ireland in order to propose marriage go awry and she winds up travelling with the grouchy Matthew Goode.

This failure to find worthwhile leading roles was offset by plum character parts like Charlene Fleming in David O. Russell's The Fighter (2010), which cast Adams against type as the pugnacious barmaid who stands by Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), as he prepares for a title bout with half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). Once again Adams snagged an Oscar nomination (as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA), but she missed out to co-star Melissa Leo, who stole every scene as the boxers' no-nonsense mother, Alice.

Adams had taken a course in erotic dance to help her tap into Charlene's sensuality, but she relied on more traditional forms of hoofing in James Bobin's The Muppets (2011), as Mary (Adams) and Gary (Jason Segel) seek to get the old gang back together again in a last-ditch attempt to prevent grasping oil tycoon Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) from demolishing the Muppet Theatre. Perhaps reminded of her dinner theatre days, Adams next opted to make her New York stage debut at the open-air Delacorte Theatre in a revival of Stephen Sondheim's The Baker's Wife, which was based on a 1938 French film by Marcel Pagnol. Frustratingly, this isn't currently available on disc in the UK, but it really should be.

Whether on high-quality DVD or Blu-ray, Cinema Paradiso users can, however, marvel at Adams's exceptional performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012), which confirmed once and for all that she was capable of so much more than winsome girl next door roles. Once again, she received Best Supporting nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes for her display as Peggy, the ruthlessly manipulative wife of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of The Cause, a religious cult that lures in Second World War veteran, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix).

Although she likes to keep in character during filming, Adams admitted to finding it difficult to shake off Peggy at the end of a day's shooting and she was glad to recalibrate with the minor role of Jane, alongside Viggo Mortensen's Old Bull Lee in Walter Salles's take on Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which charts the cross-country jaunt taken in 1947 by aspiring writer Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), car thief Dean Moriarty (Hedlund) and his teenage wife, Marylou (Kristen Stewart). Adams also hit her marks as Mickey in Trouble With the Curve (both 2012), in which director Clint Eastwood also starred as Gus Lobel, the veteran Atlanta Braves scout who is joined on a last road trip by his estranged daughter.

The Oscar Bridesmaid

Adams had given birth to a daughter, Aviana, in 2010 and she had lightened her workload while getting used to her new role as a mom. But she upped her schedule in 2013, with three very different projects that epitomised the new directions she was exploring.

Back in 2006, Adams had reportedly gone up against Keri Russell, Keira Knightley and Claire Danes to land the coveted role of Lois Lane in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006). They had all lost out to Kate Bosworth, but opportunity came knocking a second time in 2013 and Adams finally got her desk at The Daily Planet, alongside Henry Cavill's mild-mannered Clark Kent in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel .

So well matched were the pair that they went on to reprise their roles in the same director's Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017), which was reissued in a new version as Zack Snyder's Justice League in 2021. Sadly, Adams seems set to bow out of the DC Extended Universe, but she has left her mark, as her Pulitzer-winning journo is a resourceful woman with a role model mind of her own, who was never remotely close to being a mere damsel in distress.

Another failed audition, this time for Where the Wild Things Are (2009), led to Adams being cast in Spike Jonze's Her, as Amy, the married college friend of Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix), who falls in love with Samantha, an artificially intelligent virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. However, Adams was always David O. Russell's first choice to play con artist Sydney Prosser in the 1970s crime comedy American Hustle (both 2013), as she was also required to play scamming alter ego Lady Edith Greensley in partnership with Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), who would much rather be married to her than his unstable spouse, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence).

All three stars, along with Bradley Cooper as FBI agent Richie DiMaso, were Oscar nominated for their performances. But Adams lost out in the Best Actress category to Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013) and her disappointment at being overlooked for a fifth time was compounded by the fact that she knew she could never work with Russell again after the treatment she had received on his set.

She did win a Golden Globe, however, and was able to ease her way back into stress-free acting with a minor role in Andrew Levitas's Lullaby , in whch she plays Emily, the long-lost love of a Jewish man (Garrett Hedlund) facing the imminent loss of his father (Richard Jenkins). However, she was reluctant to take on the part of 1950s artist Margaret Keane in Tim Burton's Big Eyes (both 2014), as she didn't want to play another put-upon woman.

Kate Hudson and Reese Witherspoon had previously been linked with the role. But Burton succeeded in persuading Adams to co-star with Christoph Waltz, as Margaret's unscrupulous spouse Walter, and Adams was rewarded with a second consecutive Golden Globe win and a BAFTA nomination. She also appeared in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world, as well as the Forbes listing for the best-paid stars in Hollywood. Yet, despite the accolades, Adams felt the need to duck out of the limelight and married Darren Le Gallo during a year off.

Squeezed between two more outings as Lois Lane, came two of the most challenging roles of Adams's career, as she played linguist Louise Banks in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival and art dealer Susan Morrow in Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals (both 2016).

Adapted from Ted Chiang's short fiction, 'Story of Your Life', the former sees linguistics specialist Louise come to terms with the loss of her teenage daughter while attempting to communicate with the heptapoid aliens hovering in the skies over Montana. The former took its plot from Austin Wright's novel, Tony and Susan, and paired Adams with Jake Gyllenhaal, as the ex-husband who has based a psychologically aggressive novel on their often tempestuous relationship.

Garlanded with further Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for Arrival , as well as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Adams returned to television for the first time in over a decade. Based on a novel by Gillian Flynn, who has scored a bestseller with Gone Girl (which had been filmed by Ben Affleck in 2014), Sharp Objects (2018) was directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and allowed Adams to both produce and star, as Camille Preaker, the self-harming alcoholic reporter who returns to her home town of Wind Gap, Missouri to cover the killing of two young girls. Once again, however, she found it difficult to switch off away from the camera and suffered with bouts of insomnia.

Having secured an Emmy nod and yet another Golden Globe nomination, she had no such problems while playing former Second Lady Lynne Cheney opposite Christian Bale in Adam McKay's eviscerating satire, Vice (2018). Dubbed by some the Lady Macbeth of the White House, Adams accrued the hat-trick of Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations for the fifth time.

Now level with Thelma Ritter and Deborah Kerr (whom she often resembles) in being a six-time Oscar bridesmaid, Adams has continued to seek parts that audiences might not have expected her to take. In Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy (2020), she played addict mother Beverly in an adaptation of J.D. Vance's memoir, while she gave an arresting performance as agoraphobic counselor Anna Fox in Joe Wright's thriller, The Woman At the Window (2021), which makes overt reference to two Alfred Hitchcock classics, Spellbound (1945) and Rear Window (1954).

In addition to forthcoming roles in Stephen Chbosky's musical, Dear Evan Hansen, and Adam McKay's mini-series, Kings of America, Adams has also signed up to play Princess Giselle again in the Disney sequel, Disenchanted. Moreover, she has joined longtime manager Stacy O'Neil in forming her own production company, Bond Group Entertainment. Among the first announced projects are adaptations of novels by Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible) and Claire Lombardo (The Most Fun We Ever Had), as well as Suzanne Simard's memoir, Finding the Mother Tree. Maybe somewhere in that slate is the picture that will deliver the elusive Academy Award.