Actors - Suzanna Hamilton

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	Actors - Suzanna Hamilton

Suzanna Hamilton is a British actress born in 1960 in London. She is most famous for her role as Julia in the modern film adaptation of George Orwell's classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four
.

She is often cast as beguiling, enigmatic characters, who tend to combine an appearance of childlike tenderness and vulnerability with a hint of provocative sexuality. Her mysterious, dark-haired looks and sensual poise are faintly reminiscent of the early performances of Swedish actress, Harriet Andersson, while her understated -- and very English -- gamine beauty is comparable to that of a young Rita Tushingham. In the 1985 film Wetherby, Hamilton's elusive character is succinctly described as "the kind of girl people become obsessed with".

Early career

Suzanna Hamilton was discovered by filmmaker, Claude Whatham, at age 12 in a children's experimental theater in north London in the early 1970s. She starred in her first feature, based on the popular Arthur Ransome children's book, Swallows and Amazons, in 1974. Billed as Zanna Hamilton, she was cast in the role of Susan Walker, one of four young siblings collectively known as "the Swallows", who go on a boating excursion in the Lake District during the summer of 1929. Whatham also directed her as Princess Alexandra in the BBC miniseries, Disraeli (1978), which was later broadcast to North American audiences as a featured program on Masterpiece Theater in 1980.

Suzanna Hamilton received her acting training at the Anna Scher Theatre School and the Centre School of Speech and Drama in London.

For her first appearance in a big-budget motion picture, she played Izz Huett, the lovesick Dorset dairymaid, in Roman Polanski's 1979 film, Tess
-- based on the classic Thomas Hardy novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles -- which starred Nastassja Kinski in the title role. She also appeared as one of the boarding school girls who organize a strike against the Ministry of Education in The Wildcats of St. Trinian's (1980) -- a queasy, heavy-handed updating of Ronald Searle's satirical St. Trinian's cartoons, which was intended to mirror the actual and widespread wildcat strikes that had plagued Britain's Labour government during the Winter of Discontent only two years earlier.

Her next significant role was in Richard Loncraine's 1982 film, Brimstone and Treacle
, based on Dennis Potter's play of the same name. In this film, Hamilton starred as Pattie Bates, the traumatized, catatonic daughter of a devoutly religious, middle-aged Home Counties couple (Denholm Elliott and Joan Plowright) whose lives are changed by a demonic drifter and con man played by Sting. The film caused much consternation in the UK press for its shifting and contradictory overtones of religious parable, suspense potboiler, and domestic satire -- all of which were expressed through several confusing dream sequences and multiple plot twists that included an explicit and disturbing portrayal of Hamilton's helpless, disabled character being molested and eventually raped by the Sting character. The following year, Hamilton was featured in BBC-TV's paranormal mystery, A Pattern of Roses, with a young Helena Bonham Carter.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Suzanna Hamilton's next major screen appearance stands as her most well-known and accomplished motion picture performance. In Nineteen Eighty-Four
, she was perfectly cast as Julia opposite John Hurt's Winston Smith in writer/director Michael Radford's film of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel. Her uncommonly bold, affecting and physically revealing appearance garnered critical praise, particularly from Vincent Canby in The New York Times. But her excellent work was largely overshadowed by the death of legendary fellow cast member, Richard Burton, who delivered his final screen performance in the role of O'Brien, as well as the post-release controversy regarding the film's soundtrack.

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