Photo: Focus Features
Laura Linney ("Hyde Park on Hudson") -- As
Margaret Suckley, a fifth cousin turned secret lover to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt (Bill Murray), Linney plays a faded daisy. She
shows every wrinkle in a face that would have been plainly pretty but
has passed its marital sell-by date. Linney knows what she's doing, and
she doesn't give this poor relation any more power than Suckley would
have had when she entered FDR's inner sanctum. She is outmaneuvered at
every point, and yet her love, her sense of a spinster's rebirth at an
unexpected opportunity that takes her out of the musty cedar closet of
her life and puts her in the center of the president's household -- all
are real. Linney's performance is as precise and painstaking as
needlepoint as she artfully stitches the private life of a virtually
unknown woman in the shadow of a great man.