The Danish Girl

Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl (2015) followed the director's Oscar-winning The King's Speech with another handsomely mounted true story, this time drawn from the lives of the Danish painters Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. A British-American production adapted from David Ebershoff's novel, it premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the Queer Lion, and went on to a prominent awards season.

Eddie Redmayne plays Einar Wegener, a celebrated landscape artist in 1920s Copenhagen whose sense of self begins to shift, and Alicia Vikander plays Gerda, the portraitist whose love and ambition are bound up with her spouse's transformation. Vikander's performance — fierce, generous and quietly heartbroken — won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, while Redmayne earned a Best Actor nomination. Hooper and cinematographer Danny Cohen render the period in soft northern light and the muted tones of the Wegeners' own canvases, with Paco Delgado's costumes and Eve Stewart's production design both Oscar-nominated.

The film arrived as one of the first major studio-backed dramas to centre a transgender life, and its reception was correspondingly debated — admired for its craft and its performances, and discussed for how it told the story. Whatever the arguments, it remains a significant landmark in mainstream cinema's engagement with gender identity, and a showcase for two of the finest actors of their generation working at full stretch. Above all it is a portrait of a marriage tested by the deepest kind of change.