‘It is an absolute miracle that I am not dead’: the harrowing story of Samantha Morton, who is astonishing audiences with her performance in ‘The Odyssey’

A recent episode neatly sums up where Samantha Morton’s career stands. After attending a promotional event for The Odyssey, her latest project as an actress, dozens of professional autograph hunters — the sort who appear with perfectly organized folders to collect signatures from stars — set out to get signatures from Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron and the rest of Christopher Nolan’s star-studded cast. When the 49-year-old British actress walked by and saw the pens pointed at her as well, she warned them with a laugh: “Just so you know, you won’t make much money from my autograph, okay?” Maybe because of her low-key recent public profile — in the media, not professionally — Morton was right. But judging by the enthusiasm her performance has sparked in this summer’s big cinematic premiere, her signature is about to appreciate in value.

“Masterful,” “astonishing,” “deserves an Oscar,” “the best thing in the film” and “we’ll be talking about her for years.” Those are some of the plaudits from the industry experts for her performance in The Odyssey. Nolan cast her as Circe, the powerful sorceress of Greek mythology who detains Odysseus and his men during their voyage back to Ithaca in one of the most famous episodes of Homer’s epic. But the highest praise came from the director himself and from Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producing partner on of all his feature films, who said Morton’s work produced an exceptional reaction during filming. “After one of her takes, the crew gave her a great round of applause,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I was talking with Emma afterwards and she remembered that the last time that had happened was with Heath Ledger onThe Dark Knight,” they recalled. “In some weird way, the film lived or died over that character. She was the fulcrum.”

Morton herself has said that working with the British director was one of those experiences that are “life-changing,” and she expressed deep gratitude for the chance to appear in a production of this scale at age 49. While many viewers will discover her through this role, for the industry it marks the return to the fore of a talent who has spent more than three decades proving her vast acting ability. After making a name for herself in British independent cinema, Woody Allen cast her as the mute laundress who falls for the jazz guitarist played by Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown, a role that earned Morton her first Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. That was followed by Minority Report, where Steven Spielberg again trusted an actress capable of conveying emotion with almost no dialogue, and In America, which brought her a second Academy Award nomination. In recent years she has shone mainly on television, in series such as Tales of the Walking Dead, The Serpent Queen and Harlots.

Morton never wanted to become a star, and the fact that she has become an international celebrity is, in her words, miraculous. Born in Nottingham in 1977 into a family of nine siblings, she spent part of her childhood in foster care. Her father was violent, her teenage mother suffered from mental health problems, and her stepfather was an alcoholic. For years she alternated stays with her father, who had custody, and various institutions until the child welfare system placed her in care permanently. But the situation there did not improve. In an interview with The Guardian she revealed that she was sexually abused by two workers at one of those residences when she was thirteen. She reported the incidents to the police and social services, but a formal investigation was never opened. The alleged abusers continued working and the only consequence was that she was abruptly moved to another center. When she reexamined her case after establishing herself as an actress, she found her complaints had been reduced to “children’s games.”

It was theater that ultimately changed her life. Between the ages of 14 and 16 she began acting while, offstage, she kept stealing food to survive, used drugs and accumulated several arrests for violent incidents. Those acting classes offered her, for the first time, a place to feel safe and a future that had until then seemed impossible. “The older I get and the more I reflect on it, the more I feel it is an absolute miracle that I am not dead,” she told The Times. Today she uses the visibility her career has given her to call for an end to the privatization of child welfare services, demand stricter standards for social workers and ask for more resources to prevent other vulnerable children from falling into exclusion, drugs or suicide.

Morton was also one of the first actresses to publicly stand up to Harvey Weinstein. In 2003, when the producer was still one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures, Terry Gilliam had chosen her to star in The Brothers Grimm alongside Heath Ledger and Matt Damon. However, Weinstein intervened in the casting process and blocked her hiring with a comment the actress never forgot, saying she was “unfuckable.” After she left the project, up to six actresses turned down the role before it eventually went to Lena Headey (Game of Thrones). When the accusations against Weinstein sparked a global campaign against sexual harassment and abuse, Morton admits she relived the trauma of her childhood: “I have been very quiet about Harvey Weinstein and very quiet about the Me Too movement. And it’s not because I don’t care. It’s because this has mattered to me since before I could speak. It hits very close to home (…) Sexual abuse is never something that can be ignored. If someone says another person did something to them, we listen. It’s a duty.”

After a childhood without a stable home, Samantha Morton has built exactly what she missed most. She is the mother of three children and, although she has always tried to keep them out of the media spotlight, that is about to change. Her eldest daughter, Esmé Creed-Miles, born in 2000 from her relationship with actor Charlie Creed-Miles, has followed in her footsteps as an actress and promises to be one of this year’s major revelations thanks to her role in the new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, which she co-stars in with Daisy Edgar-Jones and which is expected to rival with The Odyssey in the upcoming awards season. She later had Theodore and Edie with filmmaker Harry Holm, her partner for more than two decades, who are now very close to seeing their mother vying for a statuette again this summer.

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