News for
Hotel Rwanda (2004) More at IMDbPro »

2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004

3 articles from 2010

---

Okonedo Chose Family Over Hollywood

4 January 2010 12:11 AM, PST | WENN | See recent WENN news »

Sophie Okonedo turned down a string of high-profile roles following her Oscar nominated turn in Hotel Rwanda - because she refused to uproot her family from London to live in Hollywood.

The Brit star was nominated for the Best Actress in a Supporting Role honour at the 2004 Academy Awards for her part in the moving drama, and despite missing out on the trophy, she found herself inundated with movie offers.

But Okonedo wanted to keep her young daughter Aoife at school in the U.K. - so passed on the chance to make it big in Tinseltown.

She says, "I could have taken big money at one stage. After the Oscar nomination there were some big things mentioned.

"But it would have meant moving to America. And my domestic life here is set up in a way that I can't move there unless I want to leave my daughter or something ridiculous like that, and she certainly doesn't want to go there. Also, Los Angeles - I'm not thick-skinned enough to live there.

"And some other things here I was offered very good money for - but the parts just felt badly written. I'd be the girlfriend of someone really famous and I'd always be the same - wearing a tight dress and saying the odd slap-piece smarmy (cheesy) line - and I just thought, 'First, I'm not very good at those parts anyway, and second, there are much prettier younger actresses to do them other than me!'" »

Permalink | Report a problem

---

Sophie Okonedo | Interview

2 January 2010 4:05 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Even for an actress of Sophie Okonedo's talent, playing Mrs Mandela was a huge challenge. Here, the reluctant star talks about wearing fat suits, avoiding red carpets, and the trip to Darfur which changed her life

There's a clutch of scenes near the middle of the forthcoming TV film Mrs Mandela where you can hardly keep watching, so grimly intense is the mutual onscreen hatred. Infamous Afrikaans police interrogator Theunis Swanepoel is played, with terrifying greasy-haired intensity, by David Morrissey, who even wields those loveless gutturals of the Sith Efrican accent like a stick. Winnie Mandela is played, grovelling on the floor, by turns terrified and defiant, her psyche altering by the minute, by Sophie Okonedo: and I am asking her how they even met each other's eyes afterwards, once "Cut!" was called: both must have been slumped, torn, empty, choked.

"Those scenes are certainly intense, desperately so. »

- Euan Ferguson

Permalink | Report a problem

---

The Decade in Film: The Ones That Last

2 January 2010 3:15 PM, PST | JustPressPlay.net | See recent JustPressPlay news »

If you watch two films in close proximity to one another, it’s pretty easy to tell which one you liked more. Watch three, and you can still tell pretty easily, but it’s more subject to change. Watch films on a regular basis for about a decade, and it becomes nearly impossible, not to mention pointless and kind of reductive to try and rank them in the way you would sports teams. If you’re in any way engaged with the world, your opinions and attitudes will change somewhat over that course of time, and to try and reduce that entire expanse of time into a trite little list is, well, why would you want to do it?

I’m not going to argue that these films are the absolute best of the decade (though I think that a case could be made for several of them, and I »

- Anders Nelson

Permalink | Report a problem

---

2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004

3 articles from 2010

---