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For many actors, it can take years of plugging away to get the breakout role they deserve and the recognition that their talents demand. And then, there’s a star like Saoirse Ronan. While awards bodies have always had a fondness for an ingenue, Ronan’s Oscar darling status is downright enviable, as the young Irish star has received four nominations from the Academy across her career, before even turning 30.
Even more impressively, all of those nominations have felt perfectly deserved. A child star who transitioned smoothly into adult acting after her breakout role in 2007’s “Atonement,” Ronan has quickly built up a reputation as one of the greatest performers of her generation. While the quality of the projects she’s chosen has fluctuated (remember “The Host?” No, we don’t really, either), overall the star has shown both great taste and an impressive commitment to every part she takes on. In 2020, The New York Times ranked the star as the 10th greatest movie star of the 21st-century.
What makes Ronan such a skilled performer is harder to pin down than you’d expect. She’s not particularly showy as an actor, never really undergoing the physical transformations awards bodies associate with major performances or taking on showy, explosive roles. Her best roles are often very modest, young women who don’t go through anything particularly traumatic or unusual beyond the regular pains and sadness of growing up. What makes Ronan so good is her ability to melt into her characters, to portray their evolution and thoughts with a quicksilver clarity. While all of her roles have an innate intelligence and spirited disposition, they all feel distinct and fully formed in their own ways. Ronan isn’t necessarily a chameleon — you can feel her within each part she plays — but her ability to embody her characters and their swirling, conflicting emotions are near unparalleled. It’s what made her such a good canvas for coming-of-age stories for so long: she could make the messiness of youth feel lived-in and real.
While Ronan hasn’t been out of the spotlight for too long a period since her first Oscar nomination, 2024 is a banner year for the actor, who is starring in two Oscar hopefuls. The first is “The Outrun,” an intimate addiction drama that sees Ronan commit while playing a young woman going through the painful journey to sobriety. The second is “Blitz,” Steve McQueen’s highly anticipated war film, which sees her play a young mother searching for her son across a ruined London during the titular World War II bombing campaign. Given Ronan’s consistency and high bar for excellence, don’t be surprised if one (or, perhaps even both) see her make a return back to the Oscars this year.
With “The Outrun” in theaters now, we’re taking a look at Ronan’s filmography to see which of the star’s films best showcase her talents. Read on for Saoirse Ronan’s greatest roles, ranked.
10. ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (2018)
A film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbit feels like it would be a lot more memorable than ‘Mary Queen of Scots.’ And yet, Josie Rourke’s look at the rivalry between the titular Queen of France and her cousin Elizabeth is flimsy and forgettable, too lacking in real character drama or sharp insight to linger in the mind. Still, none of that is Ronan’s fault, and the actor is predictably quite good as Mary, bringing a welcome bit of steel and sharpness to play the defiant Mary. And yet, the movie is probably best remembered for what it did for Ronan’s personal life rather than her career — the film set is where she met actor Jack Lowden, who she eventually married in 2024.
9. ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ (2014)
Ronan is one of many, many big names who pops up in ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ Wes Anderson’s nostalgic portrait of a ski lodge where a concierge (Ralph Fiennes) is framed for murder as a fascist regime slowly grows in power. But her part is one of the most substantial: She plays Agatha, an apprentice baker that becomes the girlfriend of young bellhop Zero (Tony Revolori) and helps him solve the central murder mystery. It’s a supporting part rather than lead, but she’s still terrific, taking on a droll affect that fits Anderson’s world like a glove.
8. ‘The Lovely Bones’ (2009)
Maybe the worst film of Ronan’s career, ‘The Lovely Bones’ is a sickeningly sentimental look at child murder that proves more cloying than insightful. Still, as the murdered child in question, a 14-year-old Ronan ably proved that her ‘Atonement’ breakthrough role wasn’t a fluke. She’s heartbreaking as Susie, a freshman murdered by a serial killer and forced to watch over her family as they grieve. She never overplays the emotions, making the devestation that Susie goes through all the more unbearable.
7. ‘Hanna’ (2011)
As an adult, Ronan has almost completely forgoed franchise work or big budget films, in favor of smaller dramas or auteur-driven work that she thrives in. The closest thing Ronan has ever done to a mainstream work — well, aside from ‘The Host’ — is ‘Hanna,’ which saw her reunite with ‘Atonement’ director Joe Wright for a lean action thriller. At 17, Ronan played the central character, a teen girl raised in the wilderness by her father to be the perfect assassin, before being sent out into the world for the first time as several agents close in on her trail. Ronan throws herself into the action with gutso, and her portrayal of Hanna’s emotional isolation and slow opening up gives the very silly thriller some real grounding.
6. ‘Ammonite’ (2020)
Francis Lee’s ‘Ammonite’ received mixed reviews upon its pandemic release, with many finding its romance between fossil collector Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and the wife of a geologist Charlotte Murchison (Ronan) to be too passionless and wet to have much of a lasting impact. That’s sort of the point, really, to the whole affair: It’s less a romance and more a portrait of a woman too cold and detached to form a real relationship. The star of the show is Winslet, but Ronan is still subtle and effective as Charlotte, depicted as a depressed and meek wife to a bore. Watching Ronan open up as Charlotte through the woman’s friendship and affair with Mary to reveal a clever, passionate woman is quite moving and beautiful — which makes the heartbreak when it all falls apart far more devestating.
5. ‘The Outrun’ (2024)
Despite its inherently emotional premise, Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s ‘The Outrun’ never quite manages to hit the right emotional buttons. Its nonlinear approach to telling the story of Rona’s slip into alchoalism and her slow recovery threatens to uproot us from her perspective, while the narration’s attempts to place her struggles in a broader context make the whole thing feel more pat than it should. To the extent that the film works, its because of Ronan, who’s extraordinary as the young woman attempting to heal and rebuild the pieces of her life. She’s fiercely committed to showing the ugliest nature of Rona at her lowest, portraying her mood swings and depencency on alchoal with unblemished accuracy. Even more impressive is how magnetic and watchable she is during the slow road to recovery, playing her character like her mind is moving a mile a minute even as she’s seeking inner peace and calm. The film isn’t great, but Ronan is near perfection.
4. ‘Atonement’ (2007)
A good child actor can be the difference that makes or breaks a film. Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ has its virtues: that iconic dress, or that impressive tracking one-shot. But it would fall apart with a bad, or even mediocre, performer as young Briony, whose misinterpretation of the romance between her sister Cecillia (Keira Knightley) and the son of their housekeeper (James McAvoy) is the reverberating action that lingers across the entire film. Briony needs to be precocious but not unbearabley cutesy, and sympathetic in spite of her horrific mistakes. At just age 12, Ronan delivers. She’s remarkably belivable as the younger Briony, capturing the narcissicm of youth without overly broadcasting the innate arrogance that drives her. It’s perhaps the greatest child acting performance of the 21st-century, and the film loses a lot when Briony grows up and Ronan gets lost in time.
3. ‘Brooklyn’ (2015)
Made when Ronan was 20, ‘Brooklyn’ feels like the first time Ronan played a true adult role. And it was a knockout, earning her the first Best Actress Oscar nomination of her career and helping to cement her reputation as one of the great performers of her generation. And deservedly so; she’s capitvating as the romantic lead of John Crowley’s immigration drama, playing Irish immigrant Eilies who navigates 1950s Brooklyn and a love triangle between two men while trying to carve out a place that feels like home. She’s utterly lovely in the role — sensitive, open, shy, with a core inner strength that peaks open as she’s swept off her feet. What’s most remarkable is how brilliantly Ronan conveys the coming-of-age journey, slowly transforming Eilies from a girl into a more mature woman, both entirely different and the same as the person she once was before.
2. ‘Little Women’ (2019)
Jo March of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ is a part that has been played by plenty of great actresses, from Katharine Hepburn to Winona Ryder. And yet, when Ronan was cast in Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation in the part, it felt like a role that was made just for her. It’s a classic Ronan part: a spirited, independent young woman stumbling in her attempts to grow up and figure out who she truly is. She’s terrifically funny and smart in the role, ably juggling Jo’s conflicting desires for love and independence with a deft touch that only she could bring to Jo. In many respects, it’s the most showy role of her career, as Gerwig provides Ronan with some major melodramatic scenes that she utterly kills, from the rejected proposal of Timothée Chalamet’s Laurie to the ‘Women, they have minds, and souls, and talent, and ambition’ monologue. What makes her so good is the work never feelsshowy; Ronan perfectly calibrates herself to an emotional wavelength that feels true to Jo, in all of her brash, impish glory.
1. ‘Lady Bird’ (2017)
At 23 when ‘Lady Bird’ was in production, Ronan didn’t actually look much like the gawky, awkward high school outsider she was supposed to be in ‘Lady Bird,’ her first collaboration with Greta Gerwig; on paper, she’s far too beautiful, with far too much innate movie star glamour, to really convince as a borderline social outcast from a poor Sacremento family. And yet, watching Gerwig’s masterpiece, which tracks Ronan’s teenage protagonist across the peaks and valleys of a turbulent senior year in high school, you never seem to notice the discrepency. That’s just how good Ronan is at melting into Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson, embodying everything about this tempermental, bratty teen so thoroughly that she feels like someone you could know in your real life. There’s the Cali accent that she nails, and the awkward mannerisms. But it goes deeper: Ronan infuses a palpable longing to grow up, and yet a simultaneous fear to do so, into her performance that gives clarity and weight to all of Lady Bird’s impulsive, immature decisions. It’s an unnervingly accurate and unfiltered portrait of what growing up really feels like, and all that makes teenagers so charming and unbearable. ‘Lady Bird’ might seem like a typical high school film on its surface, but it wouldn’t work at all without Ronan’s hilarious, heartfelt, ferocious performance at its core.