Was the best actor of last year Anthony Hopkins? Daniel Day-Lewis? Tom Hanks? Not according to the New York Film Critics, who gave the honor to David Thewlis for his role as a London drifter in Mike Leigh’s “Naked.” We can’t argue. As the charming, sadistic Johnny, Thewlis, 31, created an unforgettable antihero self-destructive and savagely eloquent. The verbal brilliance is very much his own, for Thewlis imprevised his dialogue. Since “Naked.” Thewlis has played a cabdriver in a new version of “Black Beauty.” Now Hollywood is in pursuit. “I will work wherever there is good work,” says the Blackpool-born actor, “whether in Britain or China or Hollywood.”
ARTIST
Rachel Whiteread is lying low these days, but in her native Britain her controversial work has been hard to miss. Known for her haunting plaster replicas of such household artifacts as mattresses, Whiteread, 30 (below right), managed to make a concrete cast of an entire Victorian row house in London–just before the real thing was demolished–and left her work up on the site as a public sculpture. It drew raves from the intelligentsia, hoots from the tabloids and won her the _GCP_20,000 Turner Prize, awarded annually to a British artist under 50. Karsten Schubert, Whiteread’s dealer, says the artist is “down-to-earth” and unfazed by early fame–and that 1994 “will be a year of withdrawing into the studio and not committing herself to shows.” Well, not quite: the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland, will stage a survey of her work next summer.
ACTOR
Few young actors get the chance to star in a breakout film role like the one Jason Scott Lee had last year playing martial-arts master Bruce Lee (no relation) in “Dragon.” “Breakout” in this case applied to both young Lee’s dazzling physical dexterity (above) and the kind of critical buzz generated by his intense performance.
Lee, 26, was a struggling actor in L.A.–keeping it together, he says, as a “gardener, housecleaner, waiter, busboy. I cleaned lobster tanks.” He had small parts before “Dragon,” and his starring role last spring in the under-appreciated “Map of the Human Heart” put him over the top. Next Lee dons a “severe” loincloth in the Easter Island epic “Rapa Nui,” produced by Kevin Costner. With his exotic looks–his heritage is Chinese-Hawaiian–Lee is breaking out from the bland brat pack of young actors, too.
MUSICIAN
I’m not much of a believer in genetic musical talent," says saxophonist Joshua Redman. But since the 24-year-old son of the avantgarde saxophonist Dewey Redman has been playing jazz seriously for only a couple of years, the best other explanation is that he’s channeling Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, early John Coltrane and a few other classic tenor men. Which would be wildly out of character for a summa cum laude Harvard graduate who started jamming a little to “regroup” before the rigors of Yale Law. In 1991, on a whim, he entered the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition, and a jury including Benny Carter, Jimmy Heath, Jackie McLean and Branford Marsalis gave him first prize. In 1993, he released his first two albums and won a Down Beat critics’ poll. “In ‘94,” he jokes, “I’m trying to regain my sanity.”
WRITER
Once upon a time, a former schoolteacher named Laura Esquivel wrote an offbeat first novel called “Like Water for Chocolate,” a mystical romance set during the Mexican revolution in which mouthwatering recipes were as integral to the story as plot, character or setting. Subsequently filmed by the Mexican author’s husband, director Alfonso Aran, the book and the movie were double-whammy surprise hits last year. Still on The New York Times bestseller list after 38 weeks, the novel has 700,000 copies in print. (On the San Francisco Chronicle best-seller list, it competed with itself, appearing simultaneously in English and Spanish editions.) Esquivel (above) attributes her success to the public’s newfound respect for “femininity, for maternity. People are remembering what we have lost, and they are looking at the kitchen as a generator of life and peace, a sacred place.”
Esquivel, 43, is currently at work on two screenplays, and Doubleday plans to publish her next novel, “The Rules of Love,” in the fall. But success has brought one big problem: Esquivel no longer has time to cook. so she’s hired a helper. Now her family has begun complaining about the food.
COMPOSER
The early-music boom has put a terrible strain on the Baroque repertoire (can you stand one more rendition of Pachelbel’s canon?). So the most surprising thing about Johann David Heinichen isn’t the richness of his music, but that it took so long for anyone to rediscover it. Born in 1683, two years before Bach and Handel, he was a highly regarded theorist and composer. But after his death, at 46, he virtually disappeared. Then, a few months ago, Heinichen popped up on two major recordings. In a spirited two-CD set on Archiv, Musica Antiqua Cologne performs 12 of his concertos; on Sony’s new “Christmas Concertos,” the C.P.E. Bach Chamber Orchestra plays two short works. Heinichen had a genius for color and texture; since his output was vast, we may well hear more of him soon.
DIRECTOR
As Sally Potter (bottom right) discovered in the four frustrating years it took her to raise the money to film “Orlando,” nearly everybody was afraid of Virginia Woolf. But her ravishing and witty adaptation of Woolf’s gender-bending and century-hopping novel–starring Tilda Swinton as a man who becomes a woman–turned into both a popular and critical sensation. For the 44-year-old British director–who is also a choreographer, composer, singer and lyricist–it catapulted her out of the obscure nether world of London experimental filmmaking into the mainstream. “‘Orlando’ got to the world through blood, sweat and tears. Now it’s just wonderful to be able to do what I want without so much struggle.” She’s working on three original scripts–a musical, a thriller and a love story–and hopes that one will go into production this summer. This time, the backers are queuing up.
The things we know about love, we’ve learned largely from places like Detroit or the Bronx, where young people used to gather on street corners to harmonize on the relevant questions of the day. Question like why do fools fall in love, or what becomes of the brokenhearted. Before we had Sally Jessy Raphael, this corner effervescence of sensuality and innocence shaped our practice of the ars amatoria. Then last year, SWV rekindled the days of pristinely sassy hit singles and sold 2 million copies of “It’s About Time.” Sisters With Voices–Cheryl Gamble, Leanne Lyons and Tamara Johnson–say they learned to sing in church in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but clearly they learned their way around the block elsewhere. Part Motown girl group, part hip-hop-around-the-way girls, they smothered radio with their assertive pillow talk.
WRITER
One of the least likely titles to make the best-seller list last fall was “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” a thriller by Danish novelist Peter Hoeg. Set amid the bleak streets of wintry Copenhagen and the ice floes off Greenland, “Smilla” knocked the socks off critics and readers alike, in part because of its sharp, gutsy heroine, who can decipher a snowy footprint as easily as if it were a map. Hoeg, 37 (right), is a former sailor, actor, athlete and ballet dancer who lives almost reclusively in Copenhagen (he has no telephone, television or car) with his wife and two children. His latest novel, just published in Denmark, is already a huge hit there. “It’s completely different from “Smilla’,” says Hoeg. “It’s about three children in Cophenhagen who find out about an experiment conducted at their school, an experiment in controlling children.” Watch for the English-language edition in late 1994 or 1995.
ACTRESS
I knew it was my first big part,” says Gwyneth Paltrow, 21, “but I had no idea it was going to turn out like this, for God’s sake.” Steve Kloves’s stark, black-hearted thriller “Flesh and Bone” was meant to be a vehicle for Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, but Paltrow (right) did the driving. The Manhattan-bred actress had played Wendy in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” and boosted the body count in “Malice.” She’d even appeared in plays with her mother, Blythe Danner (her lather is TV producer Bruce Paltrow): “It’s kind of great. You have this brilliant actress to work with and you also have your mommy onstage with you.”
In “Flesh,” Paltrow played a gloriously bitchy Lolita who bluffed her way into wakes to relieve corpses of their jewelry. Hollywood is sure she’s the next Julia Roberts–“Isn’t that silly?”–but Paltrow is no eternal ingenue. In ‘94, she’ll be a lesbian radical (John Singleton’s “Higher Learning”), a cocktail waitress (Paul Anderson’s “Sydney”) and a Tallulah Bankhead clone (Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker and the Round Table”). “I’m on the upswing,” she says, “but I’m well aware that everything that goes up must come down.” Paltrow may just defy gravity.
ACTOR
As the twisted, terrifying Nazi Amon Goeth in “Schindler’s List,” English actor Ralph Fiennes has indelibly made his name–if only one knew how to pronounce it. (It’s “Rafe Fines.”) He’s already won Best Supporting Actor from the New York Film Critics, and an Oscar nomination is likely to follow.
Fiennes, 31, may be new to U.S. audiences, but in England he’s already been touted as the “next Olivier.” The son of a Suffolk farmer, he won notice onstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company; Steven Spielberg first saw him playing T. E. Lawrence in a British TV movie. In person, the thin, boyish Fiennes seems an unlikely villain. “He’s like a flower,” says Spielberg, “a dandelion.” To play the self-indulgent Goeth, Feinnes put on 26 pounds: “it was a rather dark experience.” His range will be apparent when “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford, arrives next fall; Fiennes stars as Charles Van Doren, the Brahmin brought down by the TV game-show scandals of the ’50s. Nothing is likely to bring down Fiennes’s rising star.
ACTOR
IT’s frustrating turning in one of I the heavyweight performances of the Broadway season only to find that all anyone talks about is your featherweight physique. Even Diana Ross grabbed one of Stephen Spinella’s legs at a party to feel how skinny it was. For the record: Spinella (above), who plays Prior Walter, the AIDS-stricken hero of “Angels in America,” does not have AIDS. He has a hearty appetite, though he’s working to put on a few pounds. What no one questions is his talent. Tony winner Spinella, 37, fuses anger, black-comic zest and determination into a frail character of amazing power. Spinella would love to do Robert Altman’s movie of “Angels,” but in any case, he’ll stay with the show until the summer. It will be a hard act to follow: Spinella has been playing Prior since the play’s first reading in 1989.
WRITER/ACTRESS
There seem to be as many I one-person shows onstage in New York as there are Elvis impersonators in Vegas, but occasionally a performer stands out. In the dynamic “Pretty Fire,” Charlayne Woodard (above ) plays her entire extended family, starting with her mother, who gives premature birth to her in a bathroom. It’s a personal but surprisingly universal story–which is exactly the point. “If everyone could share a little bit of their lives, we could see how we are absolutely the same,” says the 30-something actress.
A 1978 Tony nominee for “Ain’t Misbehavi’,” Woodard all but disappeared from the theater because musicals didn’t give her enough “plain acting.” She did some TV, then created this show. Now it will tour. Woodard is writing a sequel. “You can try and get away, but the theater is where I live.” Welcome home.
GUITAR POP
Last year, as heavily hyped new bands beat on America’s front door, Belly came in through the bathroom window. The group’s debut album, “Star,” was charming and disarming: a surprisingly intimate and poetic bit of guitar-pop that made a world of sense in what singer Tanya Donelly calls “a world of noise.” Donelly had hoped “Star” would sell 100,000 copies. Instead, it sold 400,000, came within shouting distance of the Top 40 and logged a record-breaking tenure atop the college rock chart. Donelly, a native of Newport, R.I., spent a half dozen years as a side-woman with an occasionally brilliant post-feminist guitar band called Throwing Muses. She had no desire to open her own franchise, “I was a wreck when I was young,” says the singer, now 26. “I couldn’t pull the hair out of my eyes, let alone lead a band.” This spring Belly will go into the studio to record its second album, due out this fall. More of the same would be fine by us. “Star” was a haunting record and, frankly, we were surprised Donelly had it in her. “A lot of people have said that,” she admits. “I was surprised I had it in me, too.”
ARTIST
Of all the scores of politically oriented, theatrically inclined installation artists running all over the country creating scandals last year, Daniel J. Martinez, 36, of Los Angeles, was the best at it. His infamous museum tags were the sharpest thom at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Each button contained all or part of the statement “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.” His installation, “The Castle Is Burning,” blocked the most scenic view on Cornell University’s campus and provoked a pitched battle among students. This year, the earnest, wiry Martinez will construct installations in Moscow and Santa Fe. “The [New Mexico] project will analyze the geographical and social situation,” the artist says. He pauses. “There’s no telling what it might be.”
WRITER
Despite rave reviews and a five-page author profile in New York Magazine, Jeffrey Eugenides’s first novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” wasn’t a best seller. Maybe people thought a story about five girls killing themselves might be a downer? It wasn’t. Eugenides, 33, wrote part of it while living in Brooklyn, working 9 to 5 for the Academy of American Posts, “editing the newsletter, trying to fix computers. I’d write two hours a night. If you’d get home by 7 and be done by 9, you could have a little bit of a life. It seems very difficult in retrospect.” He’s still living in Brooklyn, but with his earnings and a $30,000 Whiting Award, he can work full time on a next novel, about “a mutated gene as it’s passed down through five generations of a Greek family.” Honest. “I still don’t understand how to write novels,” says Eugenides. “I am getting a little more comfortable with the chaos of it.”
