Emma Stone: The rise and rise of the dazzling star with the arthouse urge

The ‘La La Land’ star is earning Oscar buzz for her extraordinary performance as a woman with the intellect of a baby (and a voracious sexual appetite) in the forthcoming ‘Poor Things’. It’s the latest peak, writes Geoffrey Macnab, for one of Hollywood’s most irresistible and adaptable actors

‘She is one of those 100 per cent people. If she is into something, she is really into it’: Emma Stone in the 2015 Woody Allen film ‘Irrational Man’ (Shutterstock)

No one ever saw Greta Garbo urinate on screen. There are very few films in which Doris Day takes a job in a French whorehouse. Traditionally, Hollywood movie stars have been celebrated for their poise and glamour. Even when they play desperate characters – alcoholics or mental patients – they retain their sheen. You have to go to Europe to find more extreme performances, in which actors show little embarrassment about bodily functions.

That is why it’s so startling to see Emma Stone in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s bravura new feature Poor Things, adapted from Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s Whitbread Award-winning novel. This is a European arthouse film, albeit one financed by a Hollywood studio (Disney-owned Searchlight). It deals very frankly with everything from incontinence to sex.

Stone, who is also a producer on the film, gives an astonishing performance as the Candide-like heroine, Bella Baxter. (She is already being strongly tipped for a second Oscar, to add to her Best Actress award for La La Land in 2017). This isn’t one of those Method-like turns in which American stars show extraordinary depths of psychological realism. Instead, it’s a highly stylised piece of acting, closer at times to what you might expect from a dancer in some Pina Bausch avant garde ballet. Stone holds nothing back. She is playing an adult who, at the start of the film, has the intellect of a child. She speaks in her own nursery rhyme language and has tantrums.