Premier - May 1995
STUDY FOR PORTRAIT I, BY FRANCIS BACON, painter of the dark and disturbed, brings an "Ahhh" of recognition from Julia Ormond, who has been slowly making her way through an exhibit of postwar paintings at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum. Having just left a side gallery full of sunny Picassos, the British actress stops in front of Bacon's black-and-purple canvas and gives it a knowing, "now that's a painting" look.
Dressed in black (leggings, Agnes b. jacket, short, blunt-toed boots), make-up free and with her hair snaking down her back in a thick, ropy braid, Ormond is the picture of a serious art student - which is exactly what she was before a prescient tutor suggested that she try acting instead of painting. That advice is about to pay off. First spotted on the big screen in The Baby Of Macon and Nostradamus, Ormond is about to hit the big time in director Edward Zwick's Legends Of The Fall alongside Aidan Quinn, Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. As Susannah, a well-bred Englishwoman who heads out to Montana in the late 1890s, Ormond's fate is to tangle, literally and figuratively, with three brothers (Pitt, Quinn and E.T.'s Henry Thomas). Not an easy life, but one that beats staying back East and pouring tea. "What I liked about Susannah was her capacity to embrace life and re-embrace it," says Ormond, "regardless of how hurt she got or what happened."
For the past six years, Ormond has been patiently building up her c.v. on the London stage and in television and the occasional film. It's a c.v. with impressive range: she played the junkie daughter in the Channel Four miniseries Traffik, Russian empress Catherine the Great in American cable network TNT's Young Catherine, a baby-crazy woman who gets to seduce Ralph Fiennes in Peter Greenaway's dismal The Baby Of Macon, a prison dentist opposite Tim Roth in Captives (also out this month) and a science-obsessed medieval love interest in Nostradamus. Legends, however, is Ormond's Big Break, both in terms of its size and the marquee value of its leading hunks.
But it's not like Zwick woke up one morning and said, "I'll cast a British unknown as the female lead in my expensive studio western full of A-list stars." Oh no. "I was engaged in a very diligent, very comprehensive search of actresses in this country," the director insists.
After seeing dozens of actresses (whose names are not forthcoming), however, Zwick still hadn't found his Susannah. Then Legends casting director Mary Colquhoun suggested that he take a look at Ormond's performance in the made-for-cable movie Stalin. Interest piqued, he asked her to take a screen test in London. "There I am, trying to convince the studio that I want to cast someone they've never heard of opposite Tony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn and Brad Pitt," says Zwick. "To their credit, they said, `Well, OK, bring her out and we'll see her,' and I said, `Well, no, she's going to Romania."' Indeed the actress was due to leave a few days later to shoot director Roger Christian's Nostradamus. So Ormond hopped on the Concorde to New York to meet Zwick and Pitt in a SoHo loft, where Zwick tested the two actors in several scenes. Ormond left the audition convinced she had messed up and would never hear from them again, flying back to London, packing up and leaving for Romania.
Two weeks later word arrived: she was the one. Once Nostradamus wrapped, she was straight on a plane again, this time bound for Calgary, Canada, and the set of Legends. Two weeks of riding lessons, archery practice and learning how to rope a calf, and she was shooting a movie - the first in a trio of mega-budget, high profile potential blockbusters that have put her firmly on the Hollywood map. She recently completed shooting First Knight, playing Guinevere to Richard Gere's Lancelot and Sean Connery's King Arthur, and is currently reprising Audrey Hepburn's immortal role in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina, also starring Harrison Ford.
This time next year, Julia Ormond will either be an A-list star or a tantalising case of So Near Yet So Far. "You have so many doubts," says the actress. "Like, `Oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do it,' or, `It's not going to be good."' But her cool core, as well as the sheer amount of work she had to do on Legends, kept any major anxieties at bay. It wasn't until she saw footage of herself onscreen with Quinn during postproduction that it all hit her. "Then," she says, "I realised the risk that Ed had taken."
PREMIERE (UK) MAY 1995