Earlier this week Jason posted the full trailer for the upcoming blockbuster pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in Body of Lies. The movie looks pretty good and there absolutely no way you can go wrong with those two guys plus director Ridley Scott.
However, the most interesting aspect of the trailer for us at Pop Critics wasn’t the traffic we got from fans of Leo or Crowe.
It was the massive following that Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani has that really surprised us. From Yahoo groups, to emails, to blogs, we’ve gotten a ton of viewers who are absolutely in love with this award-winning actress.
When we started getting comments on that trailer in languages we in no way understand, I figured it was worth seeing what all the fuss was over Farahani. And there isn’t much out there about her in English, and finding a Persian to English translator proved difficult. But I was able to scrounge up some stuff about her background.
She started acting at age 6 in theater, but filmed her first movie at 14 in which she won Best Actress at the Fajr International Film Festival, Iran’s annual film festival.
That rocketed her to one of the top stars in Iranian cinema and since then she’s starred in more than 15 films, with many of them being submitted to various world film festivals. She’s won quite a few other acting awards and has been nominated for even more.
Her recent movie M For Mother was up for Best Foreign Film at the 2008 Academy Awards.
She’s fluent in French and English and plays the piano along with a number of other instruments. Farahani actually started on the piano at the young age of 5 and was accepted into the Vienna Conservatory at 14, but the Best Actress win led her to stay in Iran and further her film career.
Next up for Farahani is Body of Lies, which will be out on October 10th. Of course people will be going to see Leo and Crowe, but at least I have another reason now. She’s highly praised for her ability to take tough roles and turn them into spellbinding performances, and while her part in Lies might be small, it will be great to see what she does with it.



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