Samantha Morton
Samantha Jane Morton (born 1977)[1] is an English actress and director. She is known for her work in independent film with dark and tragic themes, in particular period dramas and is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the BAFTA Fellowship, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award and nominations for two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Samantha Morton
Morton was a member of the Central Junior Television Workshop in her native Nottingham and began her career in British television in 1991. She appeared in the ITV series Band of Gold (1995–1996) and the BBC miniseries The History of Tom Jones: a Foundling (1997). Morton's early film roles include Emma (1996), Jane Eyre (1997), and Under the Skin (1997). She received two Academy Award nominations, one for Best Supporting Actress for Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999), and the other for Best Actress for Jim Sheridan's In America (2003). Other notable film credits include This Is the Sea (1997), Jesus' Son (1999), Pandaemonium (2000), Morvern Callar (2002), Minority Report (2002), Code 46 (2003), The Libertine (2004), River Queen (2005), Control (2007), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Synecdoche, New York (2008), The Messenger (2009), John Carter (2012), Decoding Annie Parker (2013), Miss Julie (2014), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), Two for Joy (2018) and The Whale (2022).[2][3][4]
For her portrayal of Myra Hindley in the HBO film Longford (2006) she received Primetime Emmy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations. Morton made her directorial debut with the television film The Unloved (2009), which won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Single Drama. She has starred in various programmes, such as The Last Panthers (2015), Rillington Place (2016), Harlots (2017–2019), The Walking Dead (2019–2020), and The Serpent Queen (2022–present).
Early life and education[edit]
Morton was born in Nottingham,[1] the third child of Pamela (née Mallek), a factory worker, and Peter Morton.[5] She is of Polish/Irish descent.[6] She has six half-siblings from her parents' relationships subsequent to their 1979 divorce. She lived with her father until she was eight, when she was made a ward of court because neither of her parents could care for her and her siblings.[7] Her father was an abusive alcoholic, and her mother was involved in a violent relationship with her second husband; as a result, she never lived with her parents again.[8]
The next nine years were spent in and out of foster care and children's homes. During that time, she attended West Bridgford Comprehensive School and joined the Central Junior Television Workshop when she was 13, soon being offered small-screen roles in Soldier Soldier and Boon.[1]
Under the effects of drugs, she threatened an older girl who had been bullying her. She was convicted of making threats to kill and served 18 weeks in an attendance centre.[9]
Career[edit]
Beginnings (1991–1998)[edit]
After joining Central Junior Television Workshop at the age of 13, she was soon being offered small-screen roles such as Clare Anderson in the first series of Lucy Gannon's Soldier Soldier and also Mandy, in an episode of Boon —both were ITV Central productions.[10] Moving to London at sixteen, Morton applied to numerous drama schools, including RADA, without success.[1] In 1991, she attended Clarendon College of Performing Arts to gain a BTEC award but subsequently left for personal reasons.[11] She made her stage début at the Royal Court Theatre,[1] and continued her television career with appearances in Peak Practice and in an episode of Cracker. At the time, she had a regular role in the first two series of Kay Mellor's successful Band of Gold (1995–96).
Further television roles followed, including parts in period dramas such as Emma and Jane Eyre. Emma was a film adaptation of the novel of the same name published in 1815 about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The movie received largely positive reviews from critics and was broadcast in late 1996 on ITV, garnering an estimated 12 million viewers.[12] In Jane Eyre, Morton starred as a Yorkshire orphan who becomes a governess to a young French girl and finds love with the brooding lord of the manor. Like her previous small-screen projects, the 1997 film originally aired on ITV.[13]
She took on the leading role in the independent drama Under the Skin (1997), directed by Carine Adler, where she played Iris, a woman coping with the death of her mother. The movie garnered favorable reviews from writers, with The Guardian placing it at number 15 on its list of the Best British Films 1984–2009.[14][15] Janet Maslin for The New York Times remarked that Morton "embodies the role with furious intensity and with a raw yet waifish presence" and James Berardinelli wrote that the actress "forces us to accept Iris as a living, breathing individual".[16][17] She won the Best Actress accolade at the 1998 Boston Society of Film Critics Awards and was nominated for the BIFA Award for Best Female Performance in a British Independent Film.
Critical recognition (1999–2005)[edit]
Impressed by her performance in Under the Skin, Woody Allen cast her in Sweet and Lowdown, a romantic comedy about a fictional jazz guitarist in the 1930s (played by Sean Penn) who regards himself as the second greatest guitarist in the world. Morton played Hattie, a mute laundress and the love interest of Penn's character. The film was released in September 1999, to wide critical acclaim and moderate success at the box office in the arthouse circuit.[18][19] George Perry for BBC.com found her to be "extraordinary" as an "adoring mute who suffers [...] She uses her eyes to convey meaning, reviving techniques of silent cinema".[20][21] Morton earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress for her role, which was especially notable, considering the fact that she does not utter a single word of dialogue in the film. During a 2007 interview with UK's The Guardian, she remarked that her Oscar nomination meant "incredible things for me in the [United States]. I'm grateful for that. It means that [...] I'm able to support the industry".[22]
Morton would next star in the small scale drama Jesus' Son, which found a limited release,[23] and praise from critics.[24] She received a Satellite Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture for her performance. Her other film in 1999 was the romantic drama Dreaming of Joseph Lees, an adaptation of a story written by Catherine Linstrum set in rural England in the late 1950s; for her part, she won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress. She appeared in the biographical drama Pandaemonium (2000), directed by Julien Temple,[25] playing Sara Coleridge, the wife of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[26] She was nominated for a British Independent Film Award in the category of Best Actress.[27] Morton also played a mermaid opposite Larry Mullen in the Anton Corbijn-directed promotional video for U2's "Electrical Storm",[28] and provided the voice of Ruby for the Canadian animated series Max & Ruby from 2002 to 2003.
Morton found wider recognition and mainstream success when she took on the part of a senior precog in Steven Spielberg science fiction thriller Minority Report, opposite Tom Cruise. Although critics felt she was "slightly typecast" in her role of "feral, near-mute victim",[29][30] Minority Report grossed US$358 million.[31][32] She won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Empire Award for Best British Actress.[33][34] In her next film, the drama Morvern Callar, she played a grieving young woman from Scotland who decides to escape to Spain after the suicide of her boyfriend.[35][36] Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers stated that Morton "fills this character study with poetic force and buoyant feeling",[37] as part of a positive critical response, and she earned the Best Actress Award at the 5th British Independent Film Awards and the 7th Toronto Film Critics Association Awards.[38]
In the independent drama In America (2003), directed by Jim Sheridan, Morton played the matriarch of an immigrant Irish family struggling to start a new life in New York. In America met widespread critical acclaim, with Terry Lawson of Detroit Free Press calling the film "an achingly intimate and beautifully observed account of the immigrant experience".[39] Roger Ebert felt that Morton "reveals the power of her silences, her quiet [and] her presence",[40] while A.O. Scott, of The New York Times, found the "blunt, inarticulate force of her feeling [...] at the center of the drama".[41] Her performance earned her nominations for the Academy Award, the Independent Spirit Award, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award in the category of Best Actress.[42][43][44]
In 2004, Morton starred as a love interest in the dystopian film Code 46, directed by Michael Winterbottom and alongside Tim Robbins,[45][46] and played the wife of a man who witnessed a deadly accident in the drama Enduring Love, opposite Rhys Ifans and Daniel Craig.[47] Critics were polarized for the latter film and suggested that Morton did not have enough time on screen.[48][49] Nevertheless, she earned a nomination for the Best Supporting Award at the 2004 British Independent Film Awards. In River Queen (2005), she took on the role of a young Irish woman finding herself on both sides of the wars between British and Maori during the British colonisation of New Zealand.[50] The film was a box office success at the New Zealand box office, grossing around NZ$1 million in the country.[51][52][53] For her role, she received a nomination for the New Zealand Screen Award for Best Leading Actress.[54] She starred alongside Johnny Depp in the little-seen period drama The Libertine,[55][56] and appeared in the drama Lassie, both of which were also released in 2005.
Personal life[edit]
Morton dated actor Charlie Creed-Miles, whom she met on the set of the film The Last Yellow, in 1999. They broke up when Morton was 15 weeks pregnant[136] with their daughter, actress Esmé Creed-Miles, born in February 2000.[137]
Morton met filmmaker Harry Holm (son of actor Ian Holm) while filming a music video for the band The Vitamins.[1] They had a daughter[1] and a son, and as of 2012 lived in Monyash, Derbyshire.[117][138]
In early 2008, Morton revealed that she had been "close to death" after suffering a debilitating stroke after being hit on the head by a piece of 17th-century plaster, damaging her vertebral artery, in 2006. She was in hospital for three weeks after the incident.[7] She took an 18-month break from public life and acting to learn to walk again.[139]
In 2011, Morton wrote an open letter to her stepfather, hoping they would get back in touch after being estranged for several years. However, it was soon revealed that her stepfather had died of prostate cancer four years previously.[8]
On 20 July 2011, Morton received an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from Nottingham Trent University, "in recognition of her internationally successful acting career".[140][141][142]
Morton is a Catholic and describes herself as 'quite religious.'[143][144]
Charity work[edit]
Having been raised in the foster care system, Morton has often been active in related causes. In March 2009, Morton returned to her hometown to show her support for its children's homes and protest against the threatened closure, by Nottingham City Council, of one of the four establishments with 24 social-care staff facing redundancy.[145] In 2012, Morton showed her support for the Fostering Network's annual campaign Foster Care Fortnight,[146] and in September 2014, triggered by the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal,[147] she discussed in a video interview the sexual abuse she experienced while in the foster care system as a child in Nottingham and that the police took no action when she reported the abuse. Morton had discussed the abuse previously while promoting the semi-autobiographical drama The Unloved, in an article for The Guardian.[148]
In 2008, she was part of the Vodafone Foundation's World of Difference campaign, which gives people the opportunity to work for a charity of their choice.[149] Whilst attending a fundraiser for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) in January 2009, she vowed never to work for the BBC again after their refusal to broadcast an emergency charity appeal for the victims of Israel's attack on Gaza on 27 December 2008. She was later joined by Tam Dean Burn, Pauline Goldsmith, Peter Mullan, and Alison Peebles, who also threatened to boycott the corporation.[150] In 2009, she also fronted a television advertising recruitment campaign for social workers in the UK.[151]