Suzanna Hamilton is the warm face at the edge of other people's stories, most memorably a dairymaid in Tess and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. She is good in that spot; the films that might have moved her nearer the centre did not come.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Tess (1979), Roman Polanski's Hardy goes out to the dairy, and for a stretch the sun comes out. Suzanna Hamilton is Izz Huett, one of three dairymaids, with Carolyn Pickles and Caroline Embling, and between them they give the film's long middle its only warmth. It is a 172-minute picture that moves at the speed of farm work, and we were glad every time it went back to the milking. That is the Hamilton part in miniature: not the story, but the reason the story is bearable while it takes its time.
She had been on screen since childhood, as Susan Walker in Swallows and Amazons (1974), billed as Zanna Hamilton and directed by Claude Whatham, who had found her in a north London theatre and would work with her again. Tess and then Brimstone and Treacle (1982) made her a name in supporting parts, and for a couple of years she was in most of the literary adaptations going: Julia opposite John Hurt in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Karen Creasy in David Hare's Wetherby (1985), Felicity Spurway in Out of Africa (1985). After that the work was mostly television, Wish Me Luck (1988), Casualty (1993–94), McCallum (1995–97), with European films, theatre and radio around it, and she is still taking supporting parts on screen and stage in the 2020s.
Julia is the performance people mean when they talk about her, and what critics consistently find in it is a naturalness and a quiet intensity that make the part feel lived rather than played. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length here. We can say what we saw in the two films we have. In Tess she is exactly what Polanski needs, a warm, likeable presence in a film otherwise short of them. In Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack's handsome, remote 161 minutes, she did not register with us at all; we noted Meryl Streep's urgency and Robert Redford's reserve and could not, afterwards, have told you what Felicity Spurway did. That is not entirely her fault. The film has room for two people and she is not one of them.
The pattern is the criticism. The film career narrowed to supporting parts after 1985 and mostly stayed there, and the parts she is good at, young women pressed by trauma, romance or social constraint in adaptations of Hardy, Orwell and Dinesen, are parts that rarely become leads. If you want to see what she does, start with the dairy in Tess and then go to Julia, and do not expect either film to be about her. They are better for having her in the corner of the frame.
Biography
Suzanna Hamilton is an English actress. She trained at the Anna Scher Theatre School in Islington and the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her early screen work includes a role in Swallows and Amazons (1974).
She is known for film roles such as Izz Huett in Tess (1979), Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Karen Creasy in Wetherby (1985) and Felicity in Out of Africa (1985). On television she has appeared in Wish Me Luck (1988), Casualty (1993–94) and McCallum (1995–97).
