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Mon 9 February 2026 0:30, UK
Sometimes actors really aren’t given enough credit for refusing to take the easy route once they’ve made their name in Hollywood, and Jennifer Lawrence is certainly one of those. For more than a decade, she has chosen challenging, brave roles in films that are anything but guaranteed box office hits, and
Mirroring Robert Pattinson, opposite whom she has just made the Lynne Ramsay-directed Die My Love, Lawrence has now made several movies that have involved her pushing herself to the brink, going against the many of the public’s general perception of her as a slightly kooky comic actor who provides regular memes while eating extremely hot chicken wings.
Again, like Pattinson, Lawrence initially found global fame thanks to a major book series adaptation with The Hunger Games in 2012, although she’d shown her considerable acting chops a couple of years earlier in the bleak drama Winter’s Bone, for which she picked up a Golden Globe nomination.
That led to the opportunity to be painted blue and appear as a mutant in X-Men: First Class in 2011, but it was undoubtedly her lead role as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise that shot her to the A-list category, so successful was it in fact that Lawrence immediately became the highest-grossing action heroine of all time.
To say that 2012 was one for the record books for Lawrence would be putting it mildly, as she showed she could do drama as well opposite Bradley Cooper in David O Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, punching her weight with Robert De Niro at just 21 years old and rewriting history by picking up a Golden Globe and an Oscar for her performance as a young widow.
Once the Oscar was collected, Lawrence was without doubt the most in-demand female lead in Hollywood, and another Golden Globe award followed, thanks to her role in the black comedy American Hustle, another Russell film, again co-starring Bradley Cooper, and she was nominated for another Oscar too.
After more X-Men and Hunger Games, she became the youngest actress in history to pick up four Oscar nominations and won another Golden Globe for her third movie with Russell, 2015’s Joy, but it was after a couple of underwhelming showings that she began to take on some of her more interesting roles, beginning with Darren Aronofsky’s Mother in 2017.
Mother was an excoriating role for Lawrence; in order to play a woman going through the depths of trauma, she spent months in rehearsals, hyperventilated on set and dislocated a rib for the film that proved controversial, sparking audience walkouts. She followed it up a year later with the dark action thriller Red Sparrow, in which she stripped completely naked and was tortured, and then took a break from acting for some time.
It was around this time that her close friend and fellow actor Emma Stone also began to receive global acclaim and started her ascent to acting’s hall of fame, winning her first Oscar for La La Land, plus a Golden Globe, and winning a third Oscar nomination for Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite in 2018.
And earlier this year, Lawrence jokingly spoke about how she would happily have taken one of Stone’s best early performances off her, in a 2010 high school comedy full of snappy dialogue. Lawrence revealed: “The one that I wanted that she got was Easy A. I was nuts for Easy A, and I really should have gotten it, right? The movie could have turned out great.”
The teen rom-com was indeed a huge hit on release, earning Stone a Golden Globe nomination and making ten times its budget at the box office. Most recently, Stone won her second Oscar for Poor Things in 2023, and is up again for ‘Best Actress’ for Lanthimos’ Bugonia.
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