Lily Gladstone: The actress who could make Oscars history

The 37-year-old is the first Native American woman to ever be nominated for best actress at the Oscars. We will find out if she is also the first winner when the ceremony takes place in Los Angeles on 10 March. Gladstone is not a newcomer to acting - viewers may have seen her in TV series such as Billions and films including Certain Women. Gladstone isn’t the first indigenous performer to be nominated for best actress.

Whale Rider’s Keisha Castle-Hughes and Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio preceded her. She has already won a Golden Globe for her role. Gladstone was born on 2 August 1986 in Kalispell, Montana and lived on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in the western US state. She was keen on acting from the age of five - deciding she wanted to play an Ewok after watching Return of the Jedi and loving the concept of living in tree houses.

Gladstone started appearing in local productions and continued acting throughout her youth. Made her feature film debut in 2012’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which starred Benicio del Toro. In her yearbook, Gladstone was voted most likely to win an Oscar. Gladstone’s role in Certain Women won her best supporting actress prize.

Roles followed in Winter in the Blood and Buster’s Mal Heart, opposite Rami Malek. Martin Scorsese had become attached to a screen adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon. True story of the murders of Osage people in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. Gladstone was widely applauded for her portrayal of Mollie in the film.

She says she was guided by her community to carry herself like a royal. The actress began her Golden Globe acceptance speech by speaking Blackfeet, something she was applauded for. She tells BBC News the words she spoke were the traditional introduction within her community. Gladstone also used her speech to highlight the way Hollywood used to represent her community on screen.

Native actors used to speak their lines in English, and then their sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera. Attitudes towards Native American actors have come a long way since then, but Gladstone has still had to battle prejudice. After a journalist friend covered her protestations as a news story, Gladstone sensed that staff were unhappy that she had upset the apple cart. Some of my classmates thought I was a shoe-in for Tigerlily.

Tigerl Lily is a red-faced character who lives in Never Never land, whose only lines are ‘ugh-ugh-wah#39%; I wanted nothing to do with it. Killers of the Flower Moon started out with what’s been described as a “white saviour”" narrative. The narrative evolved thanks to the contributions of Osage people. Gladstone is set to star in sci-fi film Memory Police, which will see her reunite with executive producer Scorsese.

After some heavy projects, she is ready for something lighter. But, she laughs: “I also feel like I’m very due for a comedy at this point. 34: She admits that any piece that she does does tend to revolve around these big questions of imperialism, authoritarianism, indigeneity.

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