Saoirse Ronan

With four Oscar nominations clocked up before she’d turned 30, Saoirse Ronan has established herself as one of the most prodigious young talents to emerge onscreen over the past two decades.

After making her screen debut as the daughter of Michelle Pfeiffer in the swiftly forgotten 2007 rom-com I Could Never Be Your Woman, Ronan shot to near-overnight stardom with her remarkably assured turn as Briony Tallis in Joe Wright’s adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel Atonement, a pivotal role that earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination at just 13 years of age.

With a few infamous exceptions, child actors don’t often actually win the Oscars they’re nominated for, and with the attention largely focused on American Gangster’s Ruby Dee and eventual winner Tilda Swinton, Ronan was never much favoured to take the prize. Nevertheless, it was an auspicious introduction.

Ronan continued to establish herself over the next few years, with The Lovely Bones, Hanna and The Grand Budapest Hotel among her most noteworthy performances. In 2016 she received her first nomination in the leading actress category for Brooklyn, a warm-hearted family drama and another literary adaptation. Brie Larson was the ultimate winner that year for her performance in Room.

In 2017 she worked with Greta Gerwig for the first time, taking the title role in Ladybird; a much loved coming of age hit which netted her Oscar nomination number three, again in the leading actress category. This time she lost to Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.

After headlining another McEwan adaptation in 2017’s On Chesil Beach and making a showy turn in the soapy historical drama Mary, Queen of Scots, Ronan teamed with Gerwig again to play Jo Marsh in the near-perfect 2018 adaptation of Little Women. This time there was no question of anybody getting past Renee Zellweger’s turn as the late Judy Garland, but in a relatively thin field Ronan could conceivably have been a distant second.

With her career going from strength to strength, it seems likely that Ronan will have plenty of time to add further nominations to her CV. In 2024 alone she stars in two heavily Oscar-buzzed movies of the season, addiction drama The Outrun and Steve McQueen’s Blitz.