Kristen Stewart hit the height of her fame as the star of the Twilight movies about a decade ago, and to many audiences she will always be a teenage girl falling in love with a vampire.
Here was the headliner of a franchise that would make her the highest-paid actress when she was 22 years old, and she refused to appreciate her luck.
Instead, Stewart is the rare actor who has channeled her love-hate relationship with public scrutiny into her roles—and is now thriving because of it.
Stewart doesn’t deliver an impression of the late royal but rather interprets her spirit, embodying a woman haunted by the weight of her desire and disdain for the attention she attracts.
For another, Stewart has done impressive indie work, such as her supporting turn in Still Alice and her collaboration with the French auteur Olivier Assayas in Clouds of Sils Maria, for which she won a César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar.
She imbued Bella Swan—a “vessel,” she often put it to reporters, who was little more than a fantasy onto which fans could project themselves—with a relatable and awkward teenage malaise.
Actors and filmmakers tend to ignore their derided work—or join in on the mockery, as Stewart’s co-star Robert Pattinson has done with Twilight—but Stewart has approached her past differently.
In Spencer, she appears to fully understand the fact that her performances are inextricably linked to dated audience perceptions—and she embraces that.