74th Golden Globe Awards. Nominations 2017

At the peak of her career, Amy Adams is easily among the most accomplished actresses of her generation.  She is also one of the busiest and most versatile performers working today.

A rare gem who does not go with the flow, this Danish-American actor simply insists on being himself whether Hollywood likes it or not. Making his film debut in Peter Weir’s 1985 crime thriller Witness as Moses Hochleitner, Mortensen then did a variety of roles that also gained him critical acclaim – as small-town diner owner Tom Stall in David Cronenberg’s crime thriller A History of Violence (2005), deputy Everett Hitch in the western Appaloosa (2008), Nikolai Luzhin in the gangster film Eastern Promises (2007), founder of the discipline of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud in the historical film A Dangerous Method (2011) and Daru in the French drama film Far from Men (2014).

For years the most surprising thing about Ryan Reynolds was his sense of irony, if not sarcasm. Journalists knew this from interviewing him, but very few fans were aware of this character trait.

She might be a petite woman (just 5'2"), but she's a giant as an actress. Octavia Spencer has earned her second Golden Globe nomination with Hidden Figures (she won in 2011 for The Help and doubled with an Academy Award for that same supporting role).

If there is one thing that British born Naomie Harris remembers being sure about from the beginning was her desire to become an actor. Her mother Liselle Kayla, a television writer might have had something to with that, enrolling her in the prestigious Anna Sher Theatre School when she was just a child.

"I'm from a relatively small town and a rural place, and I think you see that in my hands and my face," says Australian actor Joel Edgerton, a Golden Globe nominee as Best Actor for his part in the interracial drama Loving. It's this earthbound quality that appealed to Loving's director Jeff Nichols, who also cast Edgerton in another 2016 movie, Midnight Special.

Hailee Steinfeld bids goodbye to her teenage years with a fittingly memorable performance in writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen. The California native, who turned 20 last December 11, has blossomed into a stunning young woman, no longer the kid we first met when she made her major screen debut in the Coen brothers’ western, True Grit.

Ryan Gosling has gone a long way from the Mickey Mouse Club days when he first appeared as a child performer on the popular Disney Channel kid show with fellow cast members that included Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Keri Russell and JC Chasez. The 36-year-old Canadian actor has done a number of notable and critically-acclaimed roles such as the love-struck Noah Calhoun in the romance tearjerker The Notebook (2004), a drug-addicted teacher Dan Dunne in Half Nelson (2006), an inept loner in Lars and the Real Girl (2007), the young high school dropout Dean Pereira in Blue Valentine (2007), the junior campaign manager Stephen Meyers in the political drama The Ides of March (2011), the driver-part time movie double in the neo-noir crime film Drive (2011) and the salesman Jared Vennett in the financial drama The Big Short.

Is there anything Meryl Streep can’t do? The world’s preeminent actress has astonished us with her chameleon-like transformations, assuming various nationalities and mastering accents from Polish, Irish, German, British, Italian, Danish, Australian to yes, even Bronx. Streep has been acknowledged as having mastered more accents than perhaps any other actor in the history of cinema.

Viola Davis is arguably one of the greatest actresses to have ever hit the scenes, on stage and on the screen. She is now nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress for her role of Rose Maxson in the big screen adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences, which Davis performed with Washington on Broadway.