Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#13473
of 909177 performers
Top 5%
Karen Young represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 26 years in, and Karen is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Karen Young appears in 5 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Karen. Conviction is the clearest case: a film rated 7.1 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, quiet performance, transformation. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for drama, action, adventure. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Tony Goldwyn, Rob Cohen, Danny DeVito and others, Karen Young helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Conviction (2010) as Elizabeth Waters · Birdy (1984) as Hannah Rourke · Hoffa (1992) as Young Woman at RTA
Career snapshot
Ranked #13473 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
5
1984–2010
Career length
26 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
7.1
Conviction
Average Nutevio score
6.1
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
7.1
Birdy
Most frequent director
Tony Goldwyn
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Tony Goldwyn
Most common genre
Drama
3 titles
Average runtime
1h 54m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
6.8
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
6.4
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
2010s
7.1 average MV
The 2010s are where the work and the material meet. Conviction — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2010s
7.1
Across 1 catalogue film in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2010s
7.1
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1980s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Jaws: The Revenge, Birdy.
Most productive era
1980s
2 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 1980s | 1990s | 2010s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | 6.91 film | 6.31 film | 7.11 film |
| Action | — | 6.11 film | — |
| Thriller | 4.11 film | 6.11 film | — |
| Crime | — | 6.31 film | — |
| Horror | 4.11 film | — | — |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio · Career peak
1984Birdy
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Hannah Rourke. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Highest rated performance · Most recent film
2010Conviction
7.1 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. The current state of the argument, as Elizabeth Waters.
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
5 of 5 films
as Hannah Rourke
Directed by Alan Parker
as Elizabeth Waters
Directed by Tony Goldwyn
as Young Woman at RTA
Directed by Danny DeVito
as Carla Brody
Directed by Joseph Sargent
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Hannah Rourke
Birdy (1984)
Performance score7.1
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Hannah Rourke gives Karen Young a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Elizabeth Waters
Conviction (2010)
Performance score7.0
Conviction asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Elizabeth Waters is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Sarah Crighton
Daylight (1996)
Performance score6.5
Daylight asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Sarah Crighton is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Young Woman at RTA
Hoffa (1992)
Performance score6.5
Hoffa asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Young Woman at RTA is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Hannah Rourke
Start here. Birdy is the clearest statement of what Karen Young does — accessible, 120 minutes, and rated 6.9 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Karen at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
A deliberate change of key after Birdy — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Hoffa (1992)
A deliberate change of key after Jaws: The Revenge — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Daylight (1996)
A deliberate change of key after Hoffa — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Conviction (2010)
A deliberate change of key after Daylight — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Alan Parker
Director
1 film together
Notably Birdy
Joseph Sargent
Director
1 film together
Notably Jaws: The Revenge
Danny DeVito
Director
1 film together
Notably Hoffa
Rob Cohen
Director
1 film together
Notably Daylight
Tony Goldwyn
Director
1 film together
Notably Conviction
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Tony Goldwyn
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
ConvictionAlan Parker
Director
1 film together · 6.9 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
BirdyDanny DeVito
Director
1 film together · 6.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
HoffaRob Cohen
Director
1 film together · 6.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
DaylightJoseph Sargent
Director
1 film together · 4.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Jaws: The RevengeSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
Conviction
as Elizabeth Waters
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
Conviction
as Elizabeth Waters
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Birdy
as Hannah Rourke
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Conviction
as Elizabeth Waters
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Birdy
as Hannah Rourke
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Karen Young has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
26 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Drama Legend
Awarded
3 catalogue titles in drama, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Conviction
as Elizabeth Waters
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Daylight
as Sarah Crighton
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
Conviction
as Elizabeth Waters
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Hoffa
as Young Woman at RTA
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Daylight
as Sarah Crighton
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Daylight
as Sarah Crighton
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Birdy
as Hannah Rourke
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Conviction
as Elizabeth Waters
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
If you like this performer
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Built a career in the same territory: adventure and drama
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David Krumholtz
Built a career in the same territory: action and adventure
Cillian Murphy
Built a career in the same territory: drama and history
Morgan Freeman
Built a career in the same territory: action and crime
Robert Downey Jr.
Built a career in the same territory: drama and history
Have your say
Community
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Reference
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