Fernanda Torres Follows in Her Mother's Footsteps in Emotional Surprise 2025 Golden Globes Win: 'Art Can Endure'
Fernanda Torres is this year’s Golden Globe Award winner for best dramatic movie actress.
For her work in I’m Still Here, Torres, 59, accepted the trophy for best performance by a leading actress in a drama from this year's Cecil B. DeMille Award recipient, Viola Davis.
Thanking supporters onstage at The Beverly Hilton on Sunday Jan. 5, she began, "My God, I didn’t prepare anything, because I was glad already."
The Brazilian actress also dedicated the award to her fellow-actress mother Fernanda Montenegro, now 95, who "was here 25 years ago" nominated for her role in 1998's Central Station, which also earned her an Academy Award nod.
"And this is proof that art can endure through life, even in difficult moments," Torres added of her win, saying that I'm Still Here is "a film that helped us to think how to survive in tough times."
Also nominated in the category were Pamela Anderson for The Last Showgirl, Angelina Jolie for Maria, Nicole Kidman for Babygirl, Tilda Swinton for The Room Next Door and Kate Winslet for Lee.
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Anderson, 57, received one of the two Globe nominations for The Last Showgirl, the other being Miley Cyrus’ original song “Beautiful That Way.”
The first-time Globe nominee leads Gia Coppola’s film as a Las Vegas showgirl opposite Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista and more.
Maria, Pablo Larraín’s biopic about the tragic final days of opera star Maria Callas, brings Jolie, 49, her seventh Golden Globe nomination.
The Oscar winner has three Globe trophies to her name thanks to 1997's George Wallace, 1998's Gia and 1999's Girl, Interrupted.
Kidman, 57, is on a roll with a whopping 17 Globe nominations and five wins.
The Oscar winner is the sole nod for writer-director Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller Babygirl, about a CEO engaging in a dangerous affair with a younger employee, played by Harris Dickinson.
Kidman’s acclaimed performance has also earned recognition from the Gotham Awards, National Board of Review and several film festivals this awards season.
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Capping off a busy 2024 is Swinton, 64, who starred in Problemista, The End and The Room Next Door, earning praise and awards for the latter.
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's English-language debut, costarring Julianne Moore, also took home the Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival.
Torres is a newcomer to the Golden Globes — and may also be so for American audiences.
An award winner in her native country for decades of powerful performances, she leads the Walter Salles-directed I'm Still Here, about Brazil's military dictatorship in 1971.
The film was also nominated for a Globe for best non-English language motion picture.
Winslet, 49, is no stranger to the Golden Globes, considering her 14 nominations and 4 wins.
The British Oscar winner leads Lee, an Ellen Kuras-directed biopic about war photographer Lee Miller, as both producer and star.
See PEOPLE's full coverage of the 82nd annual Golden Globes ceremony, broadcasting live from The Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on CBS and Paramount+.
Golden Globes: How shock wins have shaken up the Oscars race
Surprise wins for actresses Demi Moore and Fernanda Torres at the Globes mean that the road to the Oscars may have plenty more thrills to come.
This year's Golden Globes did what those awards do best: shook up a major Oscar race, when Demi Moore won best actress in a musical or comedy for the body-horror satire The Substance, and Fernanda Torres won in the drama category for the Brazilian political film I'm Still Here. Both actresses had been far down on most Oscar prediction lists, mentioned as unlikely possibilities. But their unexpected wins, plus the fact that both gave stirring, eloquent acceptance speeches, now puts them firmly in the mix for nominations.
Let's be blunt about what the Globes are. As awards, they're candy, an excuse for a glitzy, starry show, where everyone from Nicole Kidman to Harrison Ford and Zendaya turn up. The Globes were reconstituted two years ago when the scandal-ridden Hollywood Foreign Press Association was bought out by corporate owners, and its membership changed. But the 334 Globe voters, from international publications or websites, do not overlap with the more than 9,000 people who can vote for Oscars. Winning a Globe is all about momentum and being perceived as a winner, or at least a competitor to be taken seriously. That is why those wins are such good news for Moore and Torres.
Moore's performance as a television personality pushed aside for a younger replacement (Margaret Qualley) is strong, but an Oscar campaign needs more than that, and she has the kind of comeback narrative awards voters love. She smartly emphasised it in her acceptance speech, beginning with the fact that she had never been awarded for acting in her long career. She mentioned her own insecurity, how a producer told her 30 years ago that she was "a popcorn actress" who could make money but not be taken seriously, an idea she internalised – a nice touch of modesty. Then, she said, "As I was at a low point, I had this creative, out of the box, bonkers script come across my desk, called The Substance". That kind of resurgence plays right into voters' hands, as it did when Ke Huy Quan won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once after having left acting for decades. And it helps that the theme of The Substance, the necessity and the high cost of Hollywood vanity and stardom, resonates among voters.
Torres, a veteran actress but hardly a Hollywood star, was even more of a surprise, but her win is well deserved. Her fierce, understated performance is the heart of Walter Salles's I'm Still Here, in which she plays a woman whose husband, a former politician, is among the disappeared victims of Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s. Torres's speech included an affecting dedication to her own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who plays her character's mother in the film and who was nominated for a Globe and an Oscar 25 years ago for another Salles film, Central Station. And Torres was among the few winners whose speech commented, obliquely, on the state of the world, linking the resilience her character needed to today. "There's something that is happening now in the world with so much fear. And this is a film that helped us to think how to survive in tough times like this," she said. It's a hopeful message delivered with tact that Hollywood is likely to welcome.
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Of course, these upsets merely put Moore and Torres in the minds of Oscar voters (and for Moore, Bafta voters, as she made the longlist). The Globes can be terrible predictors because dividing the major categories into comedy and drama doubles the number of nominees. But Moore and Torres beat the toughest competition. Moore won over three presumed Oscar frontrunners, Mikey Madison (Anora), Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez) and Cynthia Erivo (Wicked). Torres's category included Nicole Kidman (Babygirl), Angelina Jolie (Maria) and Tilda Swinton (The Room Next Door). All eight of those actresses are now in a game of Oscars musical chairs, a game in which Moore and Torres weren't necessarily players a few days ago.
Another acting upset, Sebastian Stan's win as best actor in a musical or comedy for A Different Man, isn't likely to have the same impact. The real competition there was in the drama category, with the Oscar frontrunners Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) and Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown) going head-to-head and Brody winning. Stan's surprise win is likely to stand as career validation and an awards blip because he faced some weak competition. Glen Powell for Hit Man and Gabriel Labelle for Saturday Night seem like moves to fill that category. It is, after all, rare for The Golden Globes to rattle a race the way it has best actress. More often they solidify Oscar prospects, as it did for Kieran Culkin, who won best supporting actor for A Real Pain and is seeming like a lock to win the Oscar.
The most important thing about the Golden Globes this year may be its timing. Voting for Oscar nominations ends next Sunday, 12 January, which means the Globes arrived just in time to let voters mull the new awards landscape.
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