By David Raether
Before we get too deep into the brilliant career of the young Irish/American actress Saoirse Ronan, let’s first talk about her name. It’s an Irish name. It’s sometimes called a Gaelic name, but the language spoken in Ireland (other than a beguiling version of English) is Irish, sometimes Irish Gaelic. It’s different from Scottish Gaelic.
Saoirse means “freedom” in English. It’s a name that’s been around for a long time but only became popular in the 1920s.
And how to pronounce it? The easiest way to remember is that Saoirse rhymes with inertia. So, her name is pronounced sur-sha.
My ex-wife—who is fluent in five languages—once told me that English is an easy and flexible language to learn except for one thing: the phonetics. She said it’s baffling. Words are not pronounced the way they are spelled. Here’s a perfect example: fought rhymes with taught. What? And we’re just going to ignore the “gh” in both words? Huh?
A lot of English’s phonetics issues are due to its heritage in the languages of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where it seems as if the goal of spelling is to misdirect you away from the correct pronunciation completely. Sort of an “oh, you can’t pronounce that word properly? You must not be from around here. Out with you before we start chucking tabers at you!”
But enough with her name. The topic here today is her talent, which is prodigious. By the time she turned 26, Ronan had already received four Academy Award nominations for Best Actress.
So, where did this brilliant Irish actress come from? Well, from the Bronx, as a matter of fact. She was born in the Bronx to Monica and Paul Ronan, a couple of undocumented immigrants from Ireland. They had moved to the U.S., hoping to better their lives during a protracted recession in Ireland. Her father was a construction worker who later trained to be an actor, and her mother worked as a nanny.
When Saoirse was three, the family moved back to Dublin, and she grew up there. She holds dual American and Irish citizenship. “I identify as a New Yorker,” she said once when asked about her heritage. If you’re wondering, yes, she’s Catholic, but she has questioned that faith since she was a child.
Ronan’s feature film debut came in 2006 in Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman. She played the daughter of Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd. One year later, when she was 13, she played one of the leads in the searing melodrama Atonement. Ronan picked up the first of what would become many Academy Award nominations for her supporting role in the film. In 2009, she played the teenage murder victim in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the novel The Lovely Bones alongside names like Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, and Susan Sarandon. The film received mixed reviews, but Ronan’s performance was widely praised. Time Magazine’s film critic Richard Corliss rated her performance in the film as one of the top three of the year.
Ronan’s first lead role came two years later in the action/thriller Hanna (2011). It’s an outstanding action film, and she more than carries it, despite the fact that she was only 17 when the movie was made.
In 2015, she was the lead in John Crowley’s quietly powerful and moving immigrant saga, Brooklyn. Her performance was widely acclaimed, and it led to her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She moved back to her hometown of New York City after this film, and in 2017, nabbed her second Oscar nomination for her leading role in Greta Gerwig’s touching and very funny coming-of-age film, Lady Bird. In 2019, Ronan reunited with Gerwig in her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic 19th-century novel, Little Women, and received another Oscar nomination for her work.
Ronan is now established as one of the most accomplished actresses of her generation. She also is actively involved in charitable work for homelessness and preventing abuse of children. At just 28, she’s repeatedly proven herself as an actress who makes every movie she is in better—in some cases, better than they really have any right to be.
And with that said, here are six Saoirse Ronan movies I recommend you put in your queue right away.
Ronan was just 13 years old when she turned in this absolutely astonishing performance. Based on Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel of the same name, it tells the story of a misunderstanding by Ronan’s character that leads to drastic consequences. Ronan’s character witnesses her older sister (Keira Knightley) and her boyfriend (James McAvoy) in a compromising situation (which is, in fact, totally consesual) and subsequently makes a devastating accusation against McAvoy’s character. As punishment, he is forced to join the British Army during the height of the slaughter in World War II.
This is a profoundly moral movie, the type you rarely see nowadays. Movies now are all pretty much black and white—good guys versus bad guys, avenging angels, and evil manipulators. The story here is anything but that. Ronan’s performance here as the gangly and busybody little sister is nothing short of brilliant.
Joe Wright directed the film from a screenplay penned by Christopher Hampton. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. If you have an early teen child in your home, this could be an excellent one to share with them on a movie night. Or just yourself.
Despite reuniting Ronan with director Joe Wright, this movie could not be more different from Atonement. Hanna is an action movie, pure and simple. Not only that, it is a bit of a pathbreaker. This was one of the first action movies that had a woman in the action hero lead.
Ronan plays Hanna Heller, the only daughter of Erik Heller, a legendary CIA operative from Germany. Hanna has lived in a cabin in the remote Arctic part of Finland since she was two years old. Her father has trained her every day since childhood in the ways of being an assassin. Now pursued by the CIA, Erik leaves her one morning and instructs her to meet him in Berlin. Action, chases, and killings ensue. It’s all pretty standard action movie fare, but watching a 15-year-old girl handle these situations is exciting and highly entertaining. And, of course, Ronan is just fantastic.
You probably have never heard of this movie, but Ronan has stated it’s her favorite thus far. It’s a rather odd melange of movie genres, combining teenage romance with a coming-of-age story and global terrorism. Wait, what?
Ronan plays Daisy, a troubled teenager who is sent to stay with her English cousins in the English countryside for the summer. Of course, she falls in love with her oldest cousin, and things are going along swimmingly on that front until there’s a terrorist bombing in Paris. That was the plot twist you didn’t see coming, did you? Then war breaks out, and who knows what’s gonna happen next? I’ll just say plenty of things do.
Kevin MacDonald handled the directing, and the screenplay by Jeremy Brock, Tony Grisoni, and Penelope Skinner is based on the novel of the same name by Meg Rosoff. And it is just full of surprises. Tom Holland, George MacKay, Harley Bird, and Danny McEvoy round out a cast brilliantly anchored by Ronan.
Do you know what we just don’t have enough of? Movies that are pure love stories. And that is exactly what this movie is. It’s a good, old-fashioned love story where you just don’t know how things will work out until you reach the end.
Ronan plays Eilis, a young woman stuck in small-town Ireland in 1951, unable to find anything other than part-time work. So, she decides to take on a big adventure and go to America. She finds a place to live in a boarding house filled with similar Irish immigrants. It's a tight-knit community, and adjusting to America is not easy or smooth. She meets a young Italian American man, a plumber named Tony, and they begin dating. However, a family emergency occurs back home, and Ellis has to return to Ireland to help her widowed mother deal with it. Now back in Ireland, she is set up with a bachelor from a well-to-do family. He’s nice, he’s handsome, and he has good prospects.
Who will she choose? The ambitious Italian plumber in Brooklyn or the nice rich boy from the village in Ireland? Well, you’ll just have to watch it now, won’t you? Jon Crowley directed the film from a script by the fabulous British novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby of About a Boy (2002) and High Fidelity (2000) fame. The screenplay was adapted from a novel of the same name by Colm Tóibín.
This movie is an absolute gem. Also, full disclosure here: I worked with Laurie Metcalf when I was a writer on Roseanne for nearly five seasons in the 1990s. I think she is one of the most gifted and versatile actresses of our time.
I have always argued that the mother/daughter relationship is the most complicated ecosystem on the planet. Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird offers a full, brutally real, and funny portrayal of mother/daughter relationships as I have ever seen in the movies.
Ronan pays a 17-year-old girl, a senior in high school. She and her family live in Sacramento, CA, which she considers just about the doofiest place in the world. “I want to live in New York or Connecticut or New Hampshire where writers live in the woods.” Uh, I lived in rural New Hampshire for eight years. Trust me, Sacramento is better. Ronan’s portrayal of a rebellious and self-absorbed teenage girl desperate for a more exciting life is just flat-out excellent.
Ronan was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar and Metcalf for a Best Supporting Actress. Additionally, it won the Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) Golden Globe, and Ronan also took home a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. This is definitely a movie to watch with your daughter.
This is the sixth screen adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic 19th-century young adult novel about a family of outstanding daughters and their journeys through heartache in search of love and happiness. Yes, the sixth. However, what’s remarkable about Alcott's 1868 novel is that while each of the earlier screen adaptations was also a period drama, each adaptation finds something new in the book.
Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, Ronan stars as Jo, the most prominent of the talented March sisters. Gerwig’s version has a strong feminist undercurrent to it. Of the prior versions of this story, its only equal might be George Cukor’s 1933 version, which starred Katharine Hepburn in the role of Jo. Gerwig’s version was critically acclaimed and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress—Ronan’s fourth Oscar nomination. The spectacular cast also includes Emma Watson, Timothee Chalamet, Laura Dern, and Meryl Streep. Don’t miss out on this feast of a movie.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.