Suzanna Hamilton
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| Suzanna Hamilton | |
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| Born | 1960 London, England |
| Other name(s) | Zanna Hamilton |
| Years active | 1973-present |
Suzanna Hamilton (born 1960 in London) is an English actress. She is most famous for her performance 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. In the 1985 film Wetherby, her character Karen Creasy is described as "the kind of girl people become obsessed with."
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[edit] Early career
Suzanna Hamilton was a protégée of filmmaker, Claude Whatham, who discovered her in a children's experimental theater in North London in 1972. She starred in her first feature, Swallows and Amazons, which was directed by Whatham and based on the popular children's book of the same name by Arthur Ransome. Swallows and Amazons was filmed in 1973 and released to the public the following year. Billed as Zanna Hamilton, the young actress was cast in the role of Susan Walker, one of four young siblings collectively known as "the Swallows", who go on a camping and sailing holiday in the Lake District during the summer of 1929. Whatham later directed the teenage Suzanna Hamilton as Princess Alexandra in the BBC miniseries, Disraeli (1978), which was later broadcast to North American audiences as a featured program on Masterpiece Theatre in 1980.
It was during this time in the mid-1970s that Suzanna Hamilton received her acting training at the Anna Scher Theatre School in Islington and at the famous Central School of Speech and Drama in Swiss Cottage, Camden.
For her first appearance in a big-budget motion picture, Hamilton 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) — an 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 & Treacle, based on Dennis Potter's play of the same name. In this film, Hamilton starred as Patricia 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 who calls himself Martin Taylor, 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. The following year, Suzanna Hamilton was featured in BBC-TV's paranormal mystery, A Pattern of Roses, with a young Helena Bonham Carter.
[edit] Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Suzanna Hamilton's next major screen role stands as her most accomplished and well-known motion picture performance. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was cast as Julia opposite John Hurt as Winston Smith in Michael Radford's film of George Orwell's classic dystopian novel. She had been chosen for the role in 1983 after being referred by the casting agency of the Anna Scher Theatre School. She was one of the school's earliest alumni, and the theatre is acknowledged in the film's closing credits.
Her bold and affecting performance 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 much-publicized post-release controversy over the film's musical score.
Her casual and unself-conscious manner while playing scenes in the nude for nearly two thirds of her screen time in Nineteen Eighty-Four earned the 24-year-old actress a measure of notoriety as the film's reputation has grown.
[edit] Film appearances in the late 1980s
Nineteen eighty-five proved to be a very active year for Suzanna Hamilton. She starred in British playwright David Hare's film, Wetherby, opposite Vanessa Redgrave. In this film, Hamilton's character, Karen Creasy, is the sullen former friend of a young man who committed suicide. Karen is meant to personify the emotional disconnect at the heart of contemporary British life — "a central disfiguring blankness" as one character calls it.
Her next role was as the equestrienne, Felicity, in Sydney Pollack's Academy Award-winning Out of Africa, based on the memoirs of the famed Danish writer, Isak Dinesen, and starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
In the 1986 German film, Devil's Paradise, which was shot in Thailand and loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1915 novel, Victory, Hamilton was cast as a saxophonist in an all-woman band touring seedy hotels and nightclubs in southeast Asia. Her character, Julie, escapes a life of sexual slavery by fleeing with an eccentric German adventurer, played by Jürgen Prochnow, and the two of them take refuge on an island near Indonesia, which is already populated by a savage native warrior tribe. In this role, as in several others, Hamilton combines apparent gamine innocence and naïveté with conspicuous sexuality. As Julie tells the Prochnow character, "I'm not what you call a good girl".
In 1988 she starred opposite the British classical and horror actor Jon Finch in another low-budget German film, a short called The Voice, about six individuals who are held captive overnight in a boat-cum-discothèque.
At this point, Suzanna Hamilton's major film career was effectively over. In the October 1988 issue of Elle magazine, in a piece devoted to the fashion secrets of the current crop of British beauties, it was stated that she felt all of her ambitions had been realized at the age of 28. By the end of the decade, the majority of her screen roles were in obscure European films made in exotic locations as well as numerous British television dramas.
[edit] Television appearances and the 1990s
In 1986, Suzanna Hamilton starred in the well-received television drama, Johnny Bull, a movie developed at the National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center and filmed in Tennessee. In this film, a period piece set in the mid-1940s just after VE day, she was cast as Iris Kovacs, a lighthearted Cockney bride who travels to rural Pennsylvania to live with her new American G.I. husband (Peter MacNicol) and his working-class Hungarian-immigrant coal-mining family. There she discovers that the hardscrabble life in America is not at all like the Doris Day movies she had seen, and encounters hostility from her gruff, overbearing father-in-law (Jason Robards). The production also featured distinguished supporting performances from Colleen Dewhurst as well as Kathy Bates in an early role.
That same year, Hamilton appeared as Emily Barkstone in Hold the Dream, the second of the three BBC miniseries based on Barbara Taylor Bradford's popular "Emma Harte" novels about the fortunes of a retail empire and the machinations of the business élite across three generations. In 1987, she played the winsome Anglo-French Special Operations Executive spy, Matty Firman, in Wish Me Luck — another BBC miniseries, this one set in occupied France during World War II.
She made a striking appearance as the inscrutable femme fatale, Anna Raven, in the 1989 BBC miniseries of Never Come Back, a murky, noirish conspiracy thriller based on the celebrated 1941 novel by John Mair, which takes place on the eve of the London Blitz during the so-called "Phony War" of 1939-40. Hamilton also turned in an admirable performance in the excellent 1990 British television film, Small Zones, as a strong-willed Russian poetess whose subversive writings have led to her indefinite imprisonment in a bleak Soviet holding cell.
In 1991, she appeared as Amelia, one of the five daughters placed under house arrest by their domineering mother, in the BBC adaptation of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's play, The House of Bernarda Alba; Glenda Jackson starred in the title role. She also had a supporting role in a 1992 TV film of Barbara Cartland's Regency-period bodice-ripper, Duel of Hearts.
Her next commercial film role came with 1992's low-budget Gothic horror romance, Tale of a Vampire. Written and directed by a 27-year-old Japanese-British film student, Shimako Sato, Hamilton made a dual appearance: first as Anne, a mousy librarian in present-day London grieving the untimely death of her boyfriend; then as Anne's nineteenth-century Doppelgänger, Virginia Clemm, the real-life wife of Edgar Allan Poe — who coincidentally also happens to be (at least according to the film's fanciful literary premise) the long-lost mistress of a lonely, melancholic, centuries-old vampire played by Julian Sands.
In the early 1990s, she had a recurring role as Dr. Karen Goodliffe on the British TV hospital drama series, Casualty. When the actress became pregnant in early 1993, her character had to be written out of the show. In 1995, she appeared as John Hannah's love interest, Joanna Sparks, on the BBC-TV crime series, McCallum.
Her last feature film of note was 1997's The Island on Bird Street, a Danish period drama made in the Dogme 95 style, about an 11-year-old Jewish boy who hides from the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II before he is reunited with his father. In this film, Hamilton had a brief cameo as the mother of a girl whom the boy befriends. Most recently, she appeared as Vivienne in the 2005 short film, Benjamin's Struggle, described as "a compelling story set in 1930s Nazi Germany, about a nine-year-old Jewish boy who attempts to steal the original manuscript of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, believing that it will topple the Third Reich and end the suffering of his family".
In 2006, she appeared as Helen Gillespie in the ITV series, Jane Hall. As of late, she has been cast as Dr. Hillary Slayton in the children's television series, Dinosapien, which is presently filming on location in southern Alberta, Canada, and is scheduled for broadcast in 2007.
[edit] Theatre career
Suzanna Hamilton is also an accomplished theater and radio actress. She made her first West End appearance on the London stage in 1982 as part of the original cast production of Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Thing. In 1993, she played the lead as a Welsh maid who gets in over her head in the Bush Theatre production of Lucinda Coxon's Waiting at the Water's Edge; in 2002, she was cast as Creusa in a Gate Theatre production of Euripides' Ion; and in early 2005, she appeared as Dora, a tough, bereaved, guilt-ridden lesbian incarcerated in a 1920s asylum in the Salisbury Playhouse production of Charlotte Jones' chamber drama, Airswimming. She also lent her voice to a 1991 audiobook recording of Julian Barnes' novel about a love triangle called Talking It Over, playing the role of Gillian.
[edit] Current activities
Suzanna Hamilton has since retired from acting in major motion pictures to raise her son, Lowell, who was born 5 October 1993. However, she is still featured in television roles and continues to do theater and voice work.
[edit] Trivia
- She stands 5 feet, 5 inches (1.65 m) tall.
- She practices the Alexander Technique for relaxation and posture.
[edit] Personal quotes
About playing a doctor on Casualty:
"I would like to have trained as a doctor, it's a completely different way of life from mine. I found I wasn't squeamish and I watched operations. It was fascinating."
About events on the set of the BBC hospital series, Casualty:
"There's a strange moment that everyone experiences, it comes when you sit in the canteen and see an atrocious head wound opposite you eating curry and chips."
On wearing no make-up for her role in Casualty:
"I thought at first that would be a relief, but starting work at 8:30am, some days looking like death, I could do with make-up—the works."
[edit] Film and television credits
- "Dinosapien" (2007) TV Series - Dr. Hillary Slayton
- "Jane Hall" (2006) TV Series - Helen Gillsepie
- Benjamin's Struggle (2005) - Vivienne
- "New Tricks": Episode #1.3 (2004) TV Episode - Imogen Hoult
- "The Bill": 'Follow Through' (1999) TV Episode - Jo Merton
- "Jonathan Creek": 'Black Canary' (1998) TV Episode - Hannah
- The Island on Bird Street (1997) - Stasya's Mother
- A Virtual Stranger (1996) (TV) - Jenny Bell
- "McCallum" (1995) TV Series - Joanna Sparks
- A Relative Stranger (1995) (TV) - Jenny Bell
- "Casualty" (1986) TV Series - Karen Goodliffe (1993-1994)
- "Inspector Morse": 'Absolute Conviction' (1992) TV Episode - Emma Cryer
- Duel of Hearts (1992) (TV) - Harriet Wantage
- Tale of a Vampire (1992) - Anne/Virginia
- A Masculine Ending (1992) (TV) - Veronica Puddephat
- The House of Bernarda Alba (1991) (TV) - Amelia
- "Boon": 'Cab Rank Cowboys' (1991) TV Episode - Judy Simpson
- A New Lease of Death (1991) (TV) - Elizabeth Crilling
- "TECX": 'The Sea Takes It All' (TV Episode) - Ingrid Hauptmann
- Small Zones (1990) (TV) - Irina Ratushinskaya
- Murder East - Murder West (1990) (TV) - Regine Kleinschmidt
- Never Come Back (1989) (TV) - Anna Raven
- "Saracen": 'Starcross' (1989) TV Episode
- "Streetwise" (1989) TV Series
- The Voice (Die Stimme) (1988) - Julia
- Wish Me Luck (1987) TV - Matty Firman
- Devil's Paradise (Des Teufels Paradies) (1987) - Julie
- Hold the Dream (1986) (TV) - Emily Barkstone
- Johnny Bull (1986) (TV) - Iris
- Out of Africa (1985) - Felicity
- Wetherby (1985) - Karen Creasy
- Nineteen Eighty-four (1984) - Julia
- Goodie-Two-Shoes (1984) - Veronica
- A Pattern of Roses (1983) (TV) - Rebecca
- Brimstone & Treacle (1982) - Patricia Bates
- The Wildcats of St. Trinian's (1980) - Matilda
- Tess (1979) - Izz
- One Fine Day (1979) (TV) - Linda
- Disraeli (1978) (TV) - Princess Alexandra
- Swallows and Amazons (1974) (as Zanna Hamilton) - Susan Walker, Swallow
