Rose's GOLDEN YEAR

Rose Byrne's monumental performance as a mother on the brink has earned the star her first Oscar nomination and a string of coveted awards. Her family and friends tell The Weekly that no one could deserve them more.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

Moments after the Academy announced its Oscar nominees for the Best Actress category, Rose Byrne's husband, Bobby Cannavale, was on the phone, screaming.

It was the middle of the night in Sydney, where Rose was staying with her parents, and suddenly the whole house was awake. Rose has shared the moment online. Her mouth is open in a joyous scream. Bobby's grin is huge and proud.

“Oh, my heart,” she wrote.

The announcement that the Sydney-born star had been nominated came just over a week after a visibly shocked Rose accepted a Golden Globe with a touchingly unguarded speech. Rattled, but thrilled, she expressed her deep gratitude to writer/director Mary Bronstein for creating the role in the black comedy If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” Rose said, clutching her statuette. “We shot this movie in 25 days for, like, $8.50.”

“You could see how genuinely shocked Rose was too, and that made it all the more moving,” says artist George Byrne, Rose’s brother, and date for the Globes. “I was having an out-of-body experience. It was all too much.”

“I’m so proud of her,” says Krew Boylan, Rose’s longtime friend and co-founder of Dollhouse Pictures. “Her winning just made me go, ‘Oh my gosh! Something is right in the world’.”

Rose may have been surprised she won the Golden Globe, and received the Oscar nomination, but the family, friends and fans who have witnessed her decades of commitment and hard graft were not.

Rose fell in love with performing when she was just eight, after a neighbour suggested she join the Australian Theatre for Young People.

“She was always performing in some way,” George says. “Not in an overly theatrical sense, but she had a natural instinct for inhabiting characters and mimicking people. She was – and still is – a very funny human. It never felt like a phase; it felt like something she intuitively understood from early on.”