The winner of this year’s best actress prize at the Venice film festival has revealed that she is on unemployment benefits and had to fly to back to Copenhagen to report to the job centre before receiving her award. On Saturday night, Danish actor Mathilde Arcel won the prestigious Volpi Cup for her first leading role in a feature film, May el-Toukhy’s post-second world war drama Woman Unknown, which also won the Golden Lion award for best film. Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal said the judges had been able to relax Venice rules around not awarding more than one prize per film because the vote for Arcel had been unanimous.
After her triumph, the 30-year-old actor revealed in interviews with Danish media that she had returned to Denmark after her film’s premiere to sign on at the job centre, as she is on unemployment benefits when not working on films. She then returned to the Lido after being told it would be wise to be present at the awards gala. In the UK, actors’ trade union Equity said in a 2023 report that 63% of its members have been in receipt of social security at some point in their life.
Set in the direct aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Denmark, Woman Unknown tells the story of Marie, a young housemaid and nanny who is about to marry her widowed industrialist employer. But a chance encounter with an old schoolfriend threatens to reveal a shameful secret, exposing Marie to the retributive hounding of female “horizontal collaborators” who had intimate relations with German soldiers. At Venice, Arcel drew wide critical praise for the contained inner anguish she brings to the role of Marie.
The actor said her agent had received several calls with new job offers since she scooped the Volpi Cup, the male version of which went to Hollywood veteran John Malkovich. Speaking in Venice on Saturday night, Arcel joked that her ultimate dream would be to play a part in one long-running British TV detective drama she was particularly fond of.
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