2012–2017: Resurgence
After her professional slump, Miller experienced what journalists called a "career revival". She played more complex, dramatic parts in a series of critically acclaimed films. "All the directors speak to each other," she said in an interview. "And once you crack that upper echelon of incredible directors, you've got people rooting for you. People who people listen to. I've never had that before".
In The Girl (2012), an HBO and BBC film, Miller portrayed actress Tippi Hedren, the muse of director Alfred Hitchcock. As part of her research, Miller (who was in the early stages of pregnancy) spoke to Hedren several times during filming, and they became friends. Live birds were used for the recreation of the attic scene in Hitchcock's The Birds. Miller told the Radio Times, "I did go through a bird attack for two hours. It pales in comparison to what [Hedren] was subjected to, but it was pretty horrible. There were men off-camera with boxes of birds, throwing seagulls and pigeons in my face". The film received mixed reviews, but the Daily Mirror's Jane Simon wrote: "[G]liding gracefully through it all (and with an impeccable American accent) Sienna Miller brings untouchable beauty and icy glamour, but also captures the extraordinary resilience Hedren must have had to withstand everything Hitchcock threw at her." Writing for The Telegraph, Clive James said "[a] better choice [to play Hedren] could not have been made than Sienna Miller, who is even lovelier than Hedren was". She garnered nominations for the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film. In 2012, she also played a socialite in the dramedy Two Jacks, the hysterical sister of an elementary teacher in the drama Yellow, and a housewife who aspires to complete in a belly-dance competition in the made-for-television film Just like a Woman.
In 2014, Miller portrayed Nancy Schultz, the wife of murdered Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Dave Schultz, in Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, and Taya Renae Kyle, the wife of United States Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, in Clint Eastwood's American Sniper. Both films were highly acclaimed, and American Sniper emerged as the highest-grossing war film of all time. In 2015, she took on the roles of a prostitute in the road drama Mississippi Grind, the former boss of a hard-working small business owner in the comedy Unfinished Business, a single mother in the dystopian film High-Rise, and that of a sous-chef in the drama Burnt, which reunited her with Bradley Cooper. For High-Rise, she received a BIFA nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Miller also took the role of Sally Bowles in the Broadway revival of Cabaret after Emma Stone's scheduled departure from the production and performed for the last six weeks of the show's engagement, in February and March 2015. The New York Daily News praised her "cocky and steely" performance and wrote that her approach to the role "works well in the Kander and Ebb songs 'Don't Tell Momma' and 'Perfectly Marvelous'." She was selected to be on the jury for the main competition section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
Miller appeared in Paramount Pictures and Plan B Entertainment's adaptation of The Lost City of Z (2016), directed by James Gray, portraying Nina Fawcett, the wife of British geographer Percy Fawcett. The New York Times called her "wonderful" in her role, while Time described her as "luminous and astute". In Ben Affleck's period crime drama Live by Night (2016), Miller played the mistress of a notorious gangster and the love interest of a World War I veteran. In 2017, Miller starred in the drama The Private Life of a Modern Woman, which screened out of competition at the 74th Venice International Film Festival, and in a West End production of the Tennessee Williams classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at the Apollo Theatre.
