Swedish newcomer Alicia Vikander has a face and screen presence the camera loves, writes Geoffrey Macnab
Twenty-three-year-old Swedish actress Alicia Vikander has been earning rave reviews for her role as Kitty in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina. Vikander is on screen for far less time than Keira Knightley's Anna but some critics are suggesting she outshone the British star. "Modulates stunningly from flighty impulse to a chastened, trembling realisation of what love can mean," enthused one British paper - and it's true, Vikander undergoes a startling transformation during the film. In the early scenes, flirting with Vronsky, whom she hopes will marry her, Vikander's Kitty is a flighty, immature coquette. She seems oblivious to the unhappiness she causes Levin, her suitor from the country she so casually brushes off. She is very pretty, very immature. However, later on, in the frozen limits of Russia tending the ill, Kitty shows steeliness and tenderness. There is more to her - and to the actress who plays her - than we could have guessed.
"From tomboy to temptress, from street kid to secretary, Vikander shows a sheer range in her big-screen debut that's utterly hypnotic," the jury that chose her as a "Shooting Star" at the Berlin Festival last year observed of her performance in her 2010 film, Lisa Langseth's Pure. In the film, she plays a young woman from a troubled background "prepared to do whatever it takes to acquire a new identity."
Directors and cinematographers who have worked with her talk of her extraordinary screen presence. Her voice, too, is utterly distinctive - lower and more powerful than you would expect "I think Alicia has something which is very uncommon. Maybe it's a cliche but I think it's true that some people have faces that the camera loves. You can look at her face and you can see so many different levels of her soul at the same time," Langseth says of Vikander's qualities. "Her face tells a story in every picture."
When I meet the young actress at a film festival lunch where she and Langseth are announcing their new film, Hotel, the young Swede doesn't exactly seem the new Greta Garbo. Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, she is friendly and politely spoken but comes across more the girl-next-door type than the aloof diva. She isn't surrounded by a phalanx of agents and publicists. She chats away happily about meeting Tom Stoppard, one of her idols, on the first day of shooting Anna Karenina, and of her admiration for the film's British director, Joe Wright.
