There were no surprises. Jessie Buckley completed tonight’s award spree and, after the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice, the BAFTA, and the SAG, she added the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film in which she portrays Agnes, William Shakespeare’s wife.
And anyone who has seen the film based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel could tell that although the career of the Irish actress has been brief but intense, she has specialized in portraying women who bear a tremendous burden on their shoulders, whether in the form of trauma, addiction, or family conflict.
And she does it so well that, in this decade, she has accrued award nominations every year (except 2024). Not bad, considering she debuted in cinema in 2017.
From an Irish village to fame
Born in 1989 in Killarney, a tourist town in the southwest of Ireland, Buckley is the eldest of five children of a couple: the manager of a hotel bar who wrote poetry and a musical psychotherapist who played the harp and sang professionally. It was her mother’s musical vocation that drew her toward the arts, first by playing the same instrument, then the clarinet and the harp.
Jessie Buckley encarna en Hamnet a Agnes, un papel que le ha servido para ganar su primer Globo de Oro.
That Buckley grew up in a television-free home was also key to cultivating the actress’s interpretive impulses, first by playing dress-up with her brother and later participating in school musicals. At 17 she applied to the London theatre school, but was rejected and two years later, in 2008, she decided to participate in I’d Do Anything, a BBC talent show whose winner became the star of a musical. Buckley did not win, but she sparked the interest of two jurors, the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the producer Cameron Mackintosh.
Both encouraged her to attend a course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, after which the young woman spent some time living in London, auditioning and surviving on musical performances. After entering the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and discovering her acting abilities beyond music, Buckley found that her means of survival was incompatible with the center’s policy. Something that almost caused her to abandon her studies and that led her to avoid a professor and a book, Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way, a self-help manual about the importance of listening to oneself.
Music and small roles in well-known series
After graduating in 2013, Buckley worked in several theatre productions that took her along the path of the classics: Henry V, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, while taking small roles in series such as Endeavour or participating in her then-longest project portraying Marya Bolkonskaya in War and Peace. During the filming of the Tolstoy adaptation she met James Norton (whom we have recently seen in The Guinness House) with whom she had a romantic relationship for two years.
Jessie Buckley en una imagen del Globo de Oro al Mejor Drama, Hamnet.
In 2018 she landed, in Wild Rose (Netflix), her second film role and the most important to date, that of Rose-Lynne Harlan, a woman who has just been released from prison and dreams of reaching fame as a country singer, though she must take care of her two children. A role that also gave her the opportunity to perform the film’s soundtrack at the massive Glastonbury Festival and even composed one of the songs.
Taboo with Tom Hardy, the adaptation of The Woman in White, the incomparable Chernobyl, where she portrayed the wife of the first firefighter who attended the nuclear plant, or the Judy Garland biopic alongside Renée Zellweger were other of her works during the past decade. The present, as for the rest of humanity, did not start well for Buckley, who saw her most important theatre project, playing Romeo & Juliet opposite Josh O’Connor at the National Theatre, turn into a film due to Covid.
The prodigious decade
Hamnet is her tenth film since 2020, because cinema has been the leading medium in her résumé since that year. The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s, Women Talking, Sarah Polley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman with Jesse Plemons in the cast, and Fingernails, with Riz Ahmed and Jeremy Allen White, were her most popular works and the first three earned her nominations for various guild awards.
Jessie Buckley y su compañero de reparto Joe Alwyn en un descanso del rodaje de Hamnet.
In 2021 she stepped into the skin of Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the London West End, which earned her an Olivier Award, the most important theatre prize in Britain. In 2022 she was nominated, alongside Bernard Butler, for the Mercury Prize for Best Album for her record For All Our Days That Tear The Heart. A year later it was announced that she would be Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare in the adaptation that Chloé Zhao was preparing of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. Those of us who had read it, and knew Buckley’s work, knew the choice could not have been more apt.
With her Oscar for Best Actress Buckley becomes the first Irish actress to win the most coveted prize in the world of cinema. An achievement she attains on her first nomination and that her compatriot Saoirse Ronan had failed to achieve on three occasions. With the five major awards of the season in her possession, Buckley matches the feat that Renée Zellweger accomplished in 2020 thanks to her role in Judy, a feature in which Buckley also participated. What would she have thought back then if someone had told her that, six years later, she would also be taking home a truckload of accolades?
