19 Great Performances by Women Playing Love Interests

Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway in Brokeback Mountain (2005), screenshots courtesy of Focus Features

9 and 8. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway (Brokeback Mountain)

The role: Alma Beers is the wife of Heath Ledger’s closeted cowboy, Ennis Del Mar. Lurleen Newsome is the wife of Jake Gyllenhaal’s closeted cowboy, Jack Twist. Both women struggle to keep their marriages together, even as their husbands grow increasingly distant.

Why they’re great: It seems unfair to choose between Williams and Hathaway, so let’s not bother. Saddled with the unenviable task of playing (to put it crudely) the obstacles in Ennis and Jack’s epic, tragic romance, the actresses manage to craft characters that feel fully realized, with thoughts, histories, and desires of their own. It helps that, in adapting Annie Proulx’s short story, screenwriters Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana give Alma and Lurleen distinct personalities, and director Ang Lee encourages us to understand their perspectives. As women in Cold War-era America, they, too, are constrained by societal norms. Williams and Hathaway capture the agony of emotional repression with poignant delicacy.

Standout moments: After four years apart, Ennis and Jack reunite for a fishing trip and share a passionate kiss outside the former’s house. Unbeknownst to them, Alma is watching from the front door. Shock, anguish, and indignation all flit through Williams’s eyes as Alma struggles to process what she witnessed, her isolation starkly juxtaposed with their intimacy. Lurleen, on the other hand, never confronts Jack about his secret, but it’s clear from her phone conversation with Ennis that she figured it out. Over the course of the scene, Hathaway’s icy expression gradually softens, her sharp, honeyed voice masking years of bottled-up tension.