Which more well known actress could have played Alma in PT?

I don't love the film as much as everyone else here seems to, but one thing I will concede is that it was perfectly cast across the board.

Krieps was born for Alma.

No way, she's heavenly beautiful and talented but way too petite to play someone who's supposed to look like a model.

Whoever else could've played her, it would not have been as great as the performance we got. Krieps is my Actress win for the decade. I went into Phantom Thread extremely excited to see the DDL/PTA reunion, so it was an extreme surprise and delight to witness a heretofore unknown actress do the unthinkable: steal a film from the great Daniel Day. I know this board heaps praise upon her, but in the real world this is legitimately the most underrated performance of the 2010s. She was SO amazing in it. Alma on paper would already be a very fascinating character, but Vicky Krieps embodied her with such perfection that she immediately became one of my favorite characters I've seen in years. I can't praise her enough. It's the role of a lifetime. She's BRILLIANT in the film. Sexy but mousy, unknowable but relatable, weak but powerful, slight but titanic, and countless other contradictions, all achieved through effortless calculation (another contradiction). She's the reason acting awards were invented, and yet of course she wasn't nominated because she wasn't a huge star or zeitgeisty. She is simply the BEST.

He was legitimately bad in The Crucible, while Joan Allen was giving one of the greatest performances of the decade opposite him.

Reported.

Great post. Agree with just about every word of this 

I honestly can't even fathom someone other than Krieps in her role. She's just too perfect. 

I mean like I said earlier, I love her too but she is 2nd or 3rd even of the cast. She supports DDL - it's his story, his arc, it's his film, and no one was stealing it from him.

It's (almost, not quite) like saying Maria Schneider stole Last Tango from Brando.

Nah.

Romola Garai has had such an odd career. For a period in the 2000's, she seemed destined to be a prestige actress darling on par with Kate Winslet (or the younger, equally hard to pronounce Saiorse Ronan). But it just kind of fizzled out for her, and the British film industry moved onto to new great hopes like Florence Pugh.

Maybe it was the decision to do Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights that really cooled her career.

That's not the right way to see the piece. I may like your movie actually but that is not what this great film (#2 in my 2017 list) was at all.

Rather he starts as an aloof and haunted prick and ends quite defined and rather self destructively mad and complicit in his own (likely) destruction. His arc shouldn't be confused with her mere character traits.

She's hardly Lady Macbeth on steroids and that play is also his play btw. Her closing monologue comes dangerously close to ruining that film (a PTA issue almost always) - prior to that ending, it's masterpiece level stuff. That monologue rather muffs the landing and plays as a heavy handed literary device rather than cinematic. It should have ended with DDL taking a bite and smiling actually.

He gives the 2nd best performance of his film career in this film and his second best career performance is a long way away from anything Vicky Krieps is capable of (and I love the performance but she supports him to me clearly) - we don't have to go to your Gable/Leigh comparison either - its the Brando/Schneider one that's closest here (for a film thematically also The Woman Next Door is close but that is a shared lead acting piece, this, is not in design).