Robin Wright The Princess Bride (1987)
Robin Virginia Gayle Wright was born in Dallas in 1966, raised in San Diego, and started modeling at fourteen. By eighteen she was on the daytime soap Santa Barbara as Kelly Capwell, a role that brought her three Daytime Emmy nominations and a recognizable face but had not, before The Princess Bride, given her a film career. She was twenty-one when Rob Reiner cast her as Buttercup.
"She was so beautiful, but it was more than that. She had a quality, a kind of inner radiance." — Rob Reiner, Vanity Fair (2012)
Buttercup as still center
Wright's performance has often been read as flat or passive — a function of the role's writing more than the actor's choice. Goldman wrote Buttercup deliberately as the loved object whose fidelity is structural rather than psychological: she does not develop, because the film's argument is that she does not need to. The grandson's exasperation when the grandfather skips ahead past the kissing scene at beat 15 is the audience permission for Buttercup's stillness — she is in love, and that is the fact the rescue depends on.
What Wright does well is what the role requires: she does not pretend with Humperdinck, she does not negotiate, she does not equivocate. When she catches him in the four-ships lie she names him a coward to his face.b29 The bedroom suicide scene before Westley reveals himself is played with more weight than the writing strictly requires.b38
Career after Princess Bride
Wright's screen career took until The Playboys (1992) and Forrest Gump (1994) to take its mature shape. The Jenny Curran of Forrest Gump established the kind of role she would take repeatedly — women carrying generational damage, played without sentimentality. Moll Flanders (1996), She's So Lovely (1997), Message in a Bottle (1999), Unbreakable (2000), The Pledge (2001), and White Oleander (2002) followed. She was credited as Robin Wright Penn during her marriage to Sean Penn (1996–2010); she has been credited as Robin Wright since.
Her later career has been defined by House of Cards (2013–2018), where her Claire Underwood became the show's central character after Kevin Spacey's removal in 2018. She directed several episodes of the series and won a Golden Globe in 2014. Wonder Woman (2017) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) gave her the Antiope role; she made her feature directorial debut with Land (2021).
"I think the only reason I'm getting these incredible parts at this stage of my career is because I've been doing it for so long without getting too tired of it." — Robin Wright, The Guardian (2021)
On Princess Bride at distance
Wright has spoken less often about The Princess Bride than her co-stars, but her standard line in interviews is that it gave her the career she has had.
"Without that film I wouldn't have a career. Period. Rob took a chance on me — I had only done a soap opera. And he gave me the role that people still know me from." — Robin Wright, Today (2018)