Alicia Vikander

Alicia Vikander (born October 3, 1988, Gothenburg, Västra Götaland, Sweden) is a Swedish actress who is known for her versatility. She earned an Academy Award for her performance in The Danish Girl (2015).

Vikander was the daughter of stage actress Maria Fahl Vikander and Svante Vikander, a psychiatrist. Initially she studied dance at the Royal Swedish Ballet School, but injuries that required foot and back surgeries prompted her to turn to acting. She launched her career in Swedish short films and on television, most memorably in the TV drama Second Avenue (original title Andra Avenyn), in which she appeared (2007–08) as Jossan Tegebrandt Björn. Her feature film debut in Till det som är vackert (2009; Pure) resulted in a Guldbagge Award for best actress.

Vikander’s international appeal grew after her appearance as Kitty in Anna Karenina (2012), which was her first English-language movie; the Oscar-nominated Danish film En kongelig affære (2012; A Royal Affair); and The Fifth Estate (2013), a biopic about Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In 2014 she gave convincing performances in Testament of Youth, Son of a Gun, and Seventh Son, in which she portrayed a witch.

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In 2015 Vikander appeared in several films, though she earned particular acclaim for her sensitive portrayal of the loving wife of an artist who undergoes male-to-female gender-reassignment surgery in The Danish Girl. The drama was loosely based on the true-life story of Danish artists Einar and Gerda Wegener and Einar’s ultimate transformation into Lili Elbe. For her work, Vikander received an Oscar for best supporting actress. In addition, she also earned praise in 2015 for her powerhouse turn as the android Ava in Ex Machina, expertly imbuing her AI character with a sense of humanity.

In 2016 Vikander had starring roles in the modern action thriller Jason Bourne and The Light Between Oceans, in which she portrayed an anguished wife forced to face the fact that the infant whom she and her husband (played by Michael Fassbender, whom Vikander married in 2017) had rescued from an adrift rowboat years earlier has a living mother who believes that her daughter perished. Vikander’s films from 2017 included Tulip Fever, in which she portrayed a young wife in 17th-century Amsterdam who becomes romantically entangled with an artist who is painting a portrait of her and her husband; Euphoria, a drama about two estranged sisters who go on a holiday together; and Submergence, Wim Wenders’s romance about a bio-mathematician and an undercover MI6 agent (played by James McAvoy). She later starred as Lara Croft in the 2018 film adaptation of the rebooted video game franchise Tomb Raider.

In 2019 Vikander lent her voice to the TV series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, a 10-episode prequel to the 1982 puppet fantasy The Dark Crystal, and she starred in the thriller Earthquake Bird, playing a translator whose friend goes missing in Japan. Vikander was among the actors portraying the title character in The Glorias (2020), Julie Taymor’s film about feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Her credits from 2021 included The Green Knight, an adventure-drama based on the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Blue Bayou, in which she was cast as the American wife of a Korean American immigrant who is facing deportation. In 2022 Vikander starred in the TV miniseries Irma Vep, an adaptation of the 1996 movie; in the dramedy, she played an American actress who agrees to appear in a TV remake of a classic French film.