8. Fantine - Les Miserables (2012)
"I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I'm living!" The Oscar hype around Anne Hathaway was buzzing way before any of us had actually seen it, so we were all expecting something great from her. Her performance 15 minutes into the film gives us the first real emotional impact that really tugs at our heartstrings, and it is a performance that stays with us all the way through until we see her again at the end. The character of Fantine is remarkably empathetic and she is presented as the emotional heart of the story: she loses her only source of income, she cannot see her child, she becomes destitute, is raped and spends her last few days in extreme pain. She dies knowing that her daughter will be saved by Jean Valjean and so we know she is at peace but her death still shakes us. Anne Hathaway really does out-perform everyone else and she thoroughly deserved her Oscar despite only having 20 minutes of screen-time. If you only put a quarter of the amount of screen-time that the main characters have, and you are the one that everyone talks about, you know you've done a good job. Fantine's story out of all the characters in Les Mis is definitely the most hard-going. This is why everyone cares a lot more about her than any of the other characters.