And yet Vanessa Redgrave didn’t play the lead role or main protagonist — Jane Fonda (as playwright Lillian Hellman) fulfilled that task, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress. Fonda wound up winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, but not an Oscar.

For her titular performance as Julia, an anti-Nazi activist (and later martyr) who was Hellman’s close friend and who experiences traumatic surgery at the hands of the Nazis, Vanessa Redgrave was campaigned by 20th Century Fox for Best Supporting Actress, and she won.

By the same token, Zoe Saldana plays the lead role in Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez — a frustrated Mexico City attorney, Rita Moro Castro, who’s persuaded to assist a Mexican cartel leader, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, as he undergoes sex reassignment surgery, partly to evade the authorities and partly to become “Emilia Perez”.

Real-life trans person Karla Sofia Gascon plays the cartel leader and Perez, but it’s not a lead role — it’s a strong supporting thing as she’s clearly not the main protagonist plus Gascon doesn’t have a huge amount of face time in Audiard’s film, certainly not compared to Saldana.

The identity fanatics (i.e., the same folks who insisted that Killers or the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone was a deserving recipient of a Best Actress Oscar) will be playing the same tune on behalf of Gascon.

She won’t win, of course, but Netflix will get to run a big identity campaign on behalf of Gascon ane the trans community, and that’s what they mostly care about.