Richard Crouse

By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

In The Light Between Oceans, Michael Fassbender, plays a stoic World War I veteran, who falls truly, madly and deeply in love with Alicia Vikander as Isabel. It’s not uncommon, it seems all of Hollywood adores the twenty-seven-year-old Swedish actress.

The New York times praises her “the gamin bone structure, that sullen pout, those velvety fawn eyes,” and producer Lionel Wigram declared, “She’s a star. You can’t take your eyes off her on screen or in person.”

Her talent and versatility have made her so in demand it’s hard to believe that in her late teens drama school twice rejected her. According to her those dismissals were a blessing in disguise as they allowed her earlier access to “an industry that prizes youth in women.”

This weekend she takes on the romance of The Light Between Oceans as a precocious woman who asks a man she has just met to marry her. Based on an acclaimed and bestselling book by M. L. Stedman, it’s a story about choices, honour and true love that plays like a highbrow Nicolas Sparks story in period clothes. It also showcases Vikander’s range. In the last two years she has played everything from the personification of artificial intelligence to the estranged daughter of Hitler’s favourite rocket scientist.

After success in Swedish language film and television, Vikander made an impression in under seen films like the lushly beautiful Anna Karenina opposite Keira Knightley and Testament of Youth, a World War I era story of one woman’s voyage into pacifism.

It was Ex Machina, however, that made her a star. She played an automaton named Ava created by tech wiz Nathan “The Mozart of Code” Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Programmer Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is hired to evaluate if the robot’s ability to show intelligent behaviour equal to, or undifferentiated from, that of a human being. Ex Machina is presented as sci fi, but it really is a human drama; a human drama where the main character has a fibre optic nervous system. Vikander is equal parts warmth and chilly precision as a robot who wants more than to be a machine.

Next Guy Ritchie cast her in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and if he had Frankensteined an actress for the role of Gaby in the mould of 1960s starlets, he could not have topped Vikander as a picture perfect representation of mid-century cool. She looks like she was born to wear the oversized sunglasses and Mary Quaint frocks but she’s more than just the romantic interest.

In The Danish Girl Eddie Redmayne plays the title role, transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, and while he has the showier part it is Vikander, as Elbe’s ex-wife, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for holding the screen as the film’s emotional core, a woman who valued her relationship regardless of the changes that came her way.

Most recently she starred opposite Matt Damon as CIA’s cyber ops head Heather Lee in Jason Bourne and soon we’ll see her in the thriller Submergence with James McAvoy, Eva Green’s Euphoria and in the period piece Tulip Fever with Christoph Waltz. Perhaps the biggest indication of her industry clout is that she recently announced she’d be stepping in for Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft in the rebooted Tomb Raider series.