Carey Mulligan is the leading English star of her generation – Maestro confirms it

Have the Oscars started taking Carey Mulligan for granted? It’s a measure of how highly the British actor is regarded that her latest nomination – her third – has been met with so little fuss. No one is expecting her to win Best Actress on Sunday night, for her performance as Felicia, Leonard Bernstein’s glamorous, long-suffering South American wife, in Maestro. She is a 50-1 outsider with the bookies.

Nonetheless, such long odds arguably say more about the type of character she is playing than the quality of her performance. Next to Emma Stone’s commedia dell’arte pyrotechnics in Poor Things or Lily Gladstone’s saturnine turn as Mollie Burkhart, the wealthy Osage woman whose family are being killed off in Killers of the Flower Moon, Mulligan’s upper-middle-class Manhattan socialite seems the picture of restraint. It’s not a showy role but one defined by quiet emotional power. Mulligan captures superbly Felicia’s fieriness, jealousy and fatalism as well as her devotion to her brilliant but unreliable composer husband (played by Bradley Cooper, also directing). In one memorable scene, she spots him with a male lover at the end of a corridor. She turns her back and doesn’t say much (“fix your hair, you’re getting sloppy”) but audiences know immediately how wounded she is feeling. Maestro is a biopic and a love story, and Mulligan gives it its heart.

Her very British self-deprecation hasn’t helped her cause either. There doesn’t seem to have been much of an awards campaign behind her. It’s as if the publicists have decided in advance that she isn’t going to beat Gladstone or Stone so they may as well keep their powder dry for next time. But there’s little doubt that there will be a next time. Even if she is overlooked, Mulligan is fast establishing herself as the leading English female star of her generation. In her late 30s, she is already the natural successor to such formidable figures from an earlier generation as Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. She has their poise and presence. Like them, she is endlessly adaptable, capable of working on stage in a Chekhov production one day and appearing in a blockbuster the next; of playing either monarch or femme fatale.