Samantha Morton

Samantha Morton is a British actor and director whose screen work is marked by emotional directness, watchful silences and a willingness to inhabit difficult characters without smoothing their edges. Born in Nottingham on 13 May 1977, she joined the Central Junior Television Workshop at 13 and soon appeared in Soldier Soldier and Boon. Further television work included Band of Gold, Emma and Jane Eyre, but Carine Adler’s independent drama Under the Skin gave Morton an especially forceful early showcase as Iris, a young woman coping with her mother’s death. That performance led Woody Allen to cast her as Hattie, a mute laundress, in Sweet and Lowdown. Without spoken dialogue, Morton earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress. Her ability to make silence dramatically active would remain central to later performances, including the precog Agatha in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and a grieving Scottish woman in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar. In Jim Sheridan’s In America, Morton played the mother of an Irish family attempting to build a new life in New York, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Her film work has continued across strikingly different registers: Deborah Curtis in Control, Mary, Queen of Scots in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Hazel in Synecdoche, New York and an Iraq War widow in The Messenger. She has also appeared in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Whale, Save the Cinema and She Said. Morton’s television roles have been equally varied. She played Myra Hindley in Longford, winning a Golden Globe, and later took prominent parts in Harlots, The Walking Dead and The Serpent Queen, where she stars as Catherine de’ Medici. Her work behind the camera is just as personal. Morton made her directorial debut with the semi-autobiographical Channel 4 drama The Unloved, told from the perspective of a girl growing up within the care system. The film earned Morton a BAFTA for her direction, adding another dimension to a career built on confronting complicated lives with unusual clarity.