The Help

…of Life and the blockbuster The Help. In the latter, Chastain portrayed an ostracized housewife who hires an African American cook (Octavia Spencer) to fool Chastain’s husband into thinking that she knows how to cook and do housework. For her performance, Chastain earned an Academy Award nomination for best actress…

…rights era in the film The Help (2011) earned her Oscar and Golden Globe nods for best actress. She then appeared as a kindly stranger who tries to assist a young boy who has lost his father in the 9/11 attacks in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), a screen…

Her subsequent films include The Help (2011), about African American housemaids working for white families in the South, and the comedy Tammy (2014), starring Melissa McCarthy.

…part in the blockbuster movie The Help (2011), and she portrayed the family matriarch in the TV series Bloodline (2015–17). Spacek’s next TV role was a mother with dementia in the first season (2018) of Castle Rock, a series based on the work of Stephen King. She then returned to…

However, the director of The Help, Tate Taylor, was a close friend of both Spencer and Kathryn Stockett (who wrote the 2009 novel on which the movie was based), and both felt that Spencer was right for the part of the forthright housemaid Minny Jackson. Spencer shone in the…

…Steenburgen appeared in the movies The Help (2011) and Book Club (2018). She played recurring characters in numerous TV shows, including 30 Rock, Justified, Orange Is the New Black, On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and Grace and Frankie. Steenburgen also was a cast

…white families in Tate Taylor’s The Help—her first experience outside comedy. Stone then played Peter Parker’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, in the superhero movies The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and she took another turn as Gosling’s love interest in the widely panned crime flick Gangster Squad…

Green Tomatoes (1991), Hoodlum (1997), The Help (2011), and several popular movies directed by Tyler Perry. In 2013 she returned to Broadway, after nearly 30 years, to play the lead in a revival of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful; her performance earned her a Tony Award. She also starred…