4. Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway is another actress who just seems to keep building on the year previous, and though she didn't have too many roles in 2012, it's no surprise given the sheer enormity that each of them required. Her first, as Selina Kyle aka Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises was met with a lot of fan scepticism prior to release, relating more to the relatively pared-down costume rather than her as a choice, but in the final product, she proved beyond doubt that she had the sass and the sex appeal to pull the role off. Far more straight-faced and reigned in than we've come to expect from the character, she slotted perfectly into Christopher Nolan's gritty, realistic approach to the Batman mythos, and among the performances praised from the film, hers was consistently in the conversation. Hathaway's second turn was as Fantine in Tom Hooper's adaptation of the world-famous musical Les Miserables, a performance that is likely to earn her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, largely on the strength of her single-take rendition of the classic song "I Dreamed A Dream". Hathaway entirely commits herself to the role, and in the aforementioned scene, scores the film's most jaw-dropping moment. 2013's slate for Hathaway is currently empty, though she has Rio 2 and Steven Spielberg's Robopocalypse in the pipeline for 2014.