Whenever a Gwyneth Paltrow-branded candle explodes or another news article speculates on the potential demise of Goop, her oft-mocked lifestyle enterprise, a Brazilian film fan is probably somewhere cackling. Paltrow has largely retired from acting and hasn’t drawn major awards attention since George W Bush was in office, but she is an unexpected presence in this year’s Oscar conversation. For if one particular nominee should take home the Best Actress prize, many will consider it a long-in-the-works redemption for Paltrow’s own 1999 Oscar win for Shakespeare in Love.
To the enduring frustration of more or less an entire country, that year’s prize didn’t go to actor Fernanda Montenegro for her feisty, riveting performance as a jaded letter writer in Walter Salles’s drama Central Station. “There was this feeling in the country that she was deeply wronged,” Brazilian film critic Isabela Boscov told The New York Times recently. The anger was valid: Montenegro, a national treasure with a local renown comparable to Pele’s, was the first Brazilian actor in history to be nominated for an Oscar. It’s taken 26 years for there to be another: Fernanda Torres, this year, for Salles’s new political thriller I’m Still Here. Torres, excitingly, is also Montenegro’s daughter.
I’m Still Here is a powerful, moving drama that uses the true experiences of a fractured family to represent 25 years of military dictatorship in Brazil. It’s been a smash hit in the country, while its success this awards season has been a welcome surprise – as a nominee for both Best Picture and Best Actress at this Sunday’s Oscars, it is one of the rare films not in the English language to claw its way into categories beyond Best International Film. But its success also serves as a celebration of Torres and her mother, stars of different generations who’ve often been overlooked on the world stage, and a reminder that Montenegro’s Central Station performance is far more than just “the one Gwyneth beat”.
In fairness to Paltrow, she’s never quite warranted the backlash she’s long received for winning her Oscar. It was more a case of bad luck; Paltrow’s Oscar win sitting at the nexus of everything people find or found annoying about the Academy Awards: blubbering acceptance speeches, voters’ penchant for pretty ingenues, and the then rampant machinations of Harvey Weinstein, whose company Miramax waged all-out war to ensure Paltrow and Shakespeare in Love secured all the high-profile Oscar wins in 1999. Montenegro didn’t stand a chance – and Paltrow isn’t really to blame for that.
But the story of Montenegro’s loss is a wild one, with the actor herself expressing her disappointment to the press shortly after the ceremony. Describing Paltrow as “this romantic figure – thin, pure, virginal,” Montenegro said that Hollywood saw the star as “an investment”, suggesting that it was far more in the industry’s business interests to give Paltrow the Oscar rather than herself. The claim had legs. Even in 2020, actor Glenn Close recalled being baffled by Paltrow’s win, telling ABC News, “I remember the year Gwyneth Paltrow won over that incredible actress who was in Central Station – I thought, ‘What? It doesn’t make sense’.” (As for Montenegro, she said in 2020 that she felt the Oscar should have gone to Cate Blanchett that year, for her star-making turn in Elizabeth.)
Montenegro was 69 when she travelled to the US to promote Central Station, comparing herself in interviews to “a creature arriving from Jupiter”. She was a relative unknown on American shores who didn’t have an enormous grasp on English, representing a film without a Miramax-style budget behind it. In Brazil, however, she was a superstar, famed for her film and theatre work and for playing elegant matriarchs on TV soap operas. The year she was nominated for an Oscar, she received Brazil’s National Order of Merit for services to the country – more or less the equivalent of a damehood in the UK. “We in Brazil are aware that it is a rare privilege to see her act and speak,” Walter Salles said in 2019. “She is our ethical and artistic compass.”
Torres has had a different kind of career to her mother’s, most notably as the star of TV sitcoms in Brazil. She is so associated with laughter, in fact, that she joked in a recent interview that she assumed she was “lost to Walter” prior to I’m Still Here – that Salles would never choose her to star in one of his serious dramas. But it would have been an extraordinary error if he did: Torres is brilliant in the film, as the real-life wife of a Brazilian congressman “disappeared” by the country’s military in 1971. She bristles with anxiety, oscillating between denial and strength. In a heartwarming flourish, Montenegro herself appears, wordlessly yet powerfully, as an older version of Torres’s character during the film’s climax.
Torres has been by herself on the awards circuit – Montenegro is now 95 and, while still acting, has complained of poor eyesight and occasional bouts of tiredness – but she has repeatedly invoked her mother in interviews and during acceptance speeches. When Torres won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama in January, she dedicated it to her mother. “She was here 25 years ago, and this is proof that art can endure through life,” she said. Now, with both women having been nominated for Oscars, they join an exclusive club of mother-daughter duos to receive Academy Award recognition: Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, Diane Ladd and Laura Dern, Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis, and Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson are the only women to get there first.
And Torres has also dedicated her success to the people of Brazil, who’ve been backing her and her mother on the international stage with trademark enthusiasm for nearly three decades. Paltrow may have unfairly borne the brunt of it at times, but it’s a testament to a country that could never be accused of undervaluing their idols. “In Brazil, we are very proud of our culture and we consume our own culture,” Torres told the Los Angeles Times this month. “But it’s very rare that someone [succeeds] abroad. When it happens, there’s this pride that someone is recognising something that we always knew was a talent. It’s like a confirmation.”
‘I’m Still Here’ is in cinemas
