DuJour has published an article listing five actresses and how far they have gotten in their career since they were first covered by the publication. Lily is one of the chosen ladies, and you can read her article bellow!
In honor of awards season, we reflect on how our favorite actresses’ careers have magnified since DuJour first covered them, and why they’re back in Oscars contention today
Lily Collins – To The Bone
Some actors are chameleons, contorting themselves to the contours of each character. Others play to their strengths, drawing on empathy and substance from within. Lily Collins proved she could be both in the Netflix-acquired Sundance hit To the Bone, based on writer-director Marti Noxon’s real-life battle with anorexia and bulimia. Collins shed pounds from her already-petite 5’ 5” frame for the role of Ellen, a transformation that hit close to home. “Because of my history with eating disorders, I was able to understand Ellen’s mindset and internal struggles on a much deeper level,” Collins tells us. “Despite my history with the film’s subject matter, there was still a lot I wanted to learn in preparation for filming. I spoke with doctors as well as nutritionists and even attended an eating disorders anonymous group. It was an absolutely life-changing, freeing experience.”
Collins has portrayed women preoccupied with perfection before. In last year’s Rules Don’t Apply, for which DuJour profiled the 28-year-old, she played Marla Mabrey, a “virtuous beauty pageant winner” and aspiring starlet with whom Collins possessed certain parallels as well. “Marla had wanted everything within her control to be ‘just so’ in order to catch the eye of Howard Hughes. It was important to her to look a certain way and behave in a particular manor in order to fit in, based on common traits she saw among the other girls she was competing with,” says Collins, who, as a one-time deb at Paris’s aristocratic Bal de Débutantes, has survived her fair share of pageantry. “Both women, Marla and Ellen, wanted others to accept them in some way but they had different ways of expressing it,” she adds. “Ellen’s just manifested itself in a more harmful way and was more psychologically challenging to portray.”
