''THE ROLES THAT GOT AWAY''

Since we’re talking about a great actress, she would surely have been considered for the best female part of the last few years – Carrie Mathison in the TV series “Homeland”. She’s a bipolar CIA fanatic who thinks an American soldier just returned from imprisonment in Iraq may have been turned by al-Qaeda. So she gets so close to him she has an affair with him. But we know this part is so good now because Claire Danes (above) is phenomenal in it. Who has done a smarter, more emotional, or more disturbed woman in a cockpit of suspense? Cate Blanchett would have been ecstatic and nerve-jangling, but Danes went beyond that by being such a surprise.

Tilda Swinton played the mother of a teenage serial killer in Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, and she was remarkable. No one relishes a contest with Tilda. But if you’d seen the novel or the script in advance and been asked who you thought was right for it, Cate Blanchett would have been an obvious answer. And she has something in common with Swinton: they can go from posh to trash, and smart to dumb, with ease.

If I were Lars von Trier (and it’s a relief that I’m not), my only indecision over “Melancholia” would have been which part to offer to Blanchett – the stunned victim of depression (played by Kirsten Dunst, who won the acting prize at Cannes) or the other sister who is worrying herself sick over the end of the world (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg). Cate could have done either part – she could have done them both. Suppose the sisters are twins. Now, for the first time, I wonder if I wouldn’t mind being Lars von Trier, finding ways to make Blanchett manic as well as depressive....