Movie Actors/Directors Who Made TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2013

[JamesG]

Jennifer Lawrence
by Jodie Foster






You’ll remember where you were when you first felt it, how you were stuck to one spot like a small animal considering its end. The Jennifer Lawrence Stare. It cuts a searing swath in your gut. A reckoning.

I remember going to the cutting rooms of Winter’s Bone. I thought, Sure, this girl can act. But, man, this girl can also just be. All of those painful secrets in her face, the feeling that there’s some terrible past that’s left impossibly angled bone and weariness in its wake. She’s worn from the pain of living — something none of her characters would ever have the energy to articulate. It’s just part of her, like skin and muscle.

The good news is that Jen, her good-humored, ballsy, free-spirited alter ego with the husky voice and a propensity for junk food … Jen, the spritely tomboy from Kentucky — that Jen’s got it together.

A hoot. A gem. A gem with a killer stare.









Steven Spielberg
by Tom Brokaw






The first time I heard of Steven Spielberg was at lunch with a friend of Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws. “My God,” the friend said, “this kid director thinks he can build a great white shark. I don’t think so.”

That was the last time anyone underestimated Spielberg, who quickly became a legendary master of creating memorable, instructive and daring stories on the big screen and small. What other director in the history of cinema has given us such a range of indelible films — Lincoln, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan to go with E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind mixed in with the Indiana Jones series and that seminal classic Jaws?



However different their subjects, Spielberg’s productions have a common thematic DNA of humanity, so we are enlightened as well as entertained.

His work on Lincoln alone was worthy of enduring acclaim, for it brought to life as no other film has this quintessential American President struggling with the greatest moral dilemma of our history. We were there in the mid–19th century, at Lincoln’s side, and it was thrilling.

The power of the film remained long after the closing credits, and so it is with Steven’s career.









Daniel Day-Lewis
by Tony Kushner






In person, in interviews and on the screen, inhabiting the characters by which he’s become the world’s most celebrated actor, Daniel gives the impression of an uncanny interiority. It fills us with admiration, and it makes us nervous; it’s the origin, most likely, of our obsessive and alarmed interest in his method, in his legendary discipline and effort.

The power and grace of Daniel’s performances seem to emanate from something he’s made contact with, deep within, intensely private and specific to his experience but also mysteriously universal.



There’s something in the innermost human heart that our greatest artists connect to and, in making that connection, manage to sublime — the process of causing a substance or a quality to take to the air, to infuse the atmosphere and then to condense, to solidify, attaining greater palpability through the impalpable.

Daniel carries his talents and achievements modestly, charmingly and generously. Like the President he brought to life in Lincoln, he’s a deep-sea creature who’s unexpectedly approachable and thoroughly delightful company.

He’s a concerned and active world citizen, a spectacular husband and father. But when Daniel acts, he makes the physical metaphysical, and vice versa. He’s an actor-creator whose performances aren’t just great — they’re essential.

http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/all/