In the last few years, there has been a notable increase in the number of female-fronted biopics, from Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016), to Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016), The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011), Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014) or Queen of Katwe (Mira Nair, 2016), to name just a few. However, celebratory reports of this remarkable phenomenon are frequently punctuated with a sense of urgency. As veteran producer Alison Owen emphatically puts it: ‘we’re currently on the crest of a new wave. I’ve seen this wave before, and then it subsides’ (Newland, 2017). Paying heed to the advice of experts, it seems that we must take advantage of this perhaps brief surge in production to take the pulse on the current situation of the female biopic. Moreover, it is not just numbers that should justify our interest, but more importantly the significant shift from narratives of victimisation and failure to ones of empowerment and triumph.

In his comprehensive study of the biopic genre, Dennis Bingham argues that whilst biopics about men have evolved from the early celebratory melodramatic formula to the postmodern and parodic, biopics of women ‘are weighted down by myths of suffering, victimization and failure’ (Bingham 2010: 10). Films about real women seem to revert with predictable regularity to the biome of melodrama and realism that defined the ‘warts-and-all’ biopic after the 1950s. A further legacy of that era was a taste for exploring ‘the private lives and travails’ of famous protagonists (Bingham 2010: 19), which in the case of the female biopic frequently implies – then and now – an insistence on the protagonist's inability to balance or to establish a clear distinction between the public and private spheres.

In the case of female artists this melodramatic formula ‘reproduces the double standard of our culture concerning creativity – men create as a result of personal genius, but women come to do so through passionate love and loss’ (Moine 2014: 63). For Moine, Coco before Chanel (Anne Fontaine, 2009) and La Môme/La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007) are contemporary examples of this tendency, where the creative forces of the two female protagonists are closely linked with personal tragedy and suffering.