Many are the actresses who reach a point in their careers where they are compelled to face life after stardom.
For the last eight years, in the prime of her career, Julia Ormond has been enjoying life as an actress instead of stardom.
A ravishing beauty from a country not exactly noted for them, the British-born Ormond first came to note for a 1991 television epic about Catherine the Great called “The Young Catherine.” The next year she won rave reviews playing the tyrant’s wife in Robert Duvall’s “Stalin.”
The big-time
From there she was propelled into three big Hollywood productions: “Legends of the Fall,” with Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn; “First Knight,” with Sean Connery and Richard Gere; and an unfortunate remake of “Sabrina,” with Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear.
During this time, Hollywood went on a sort of bender, lavishing much effort and money on a high-pressure promotional campaign aimed at making her a superstar, the next Julia Roberts, etc.
“All the stuff that happens to you when you get a terrific break like `Legends of the Fall’ happens without your control,” she said in an interview last week. “You can’t stop people from saying things or projecting stardom onto you or making comparisons, however hard they are for both people being compared.”
A dud of a remake
“Sabrina” was unfortunately a dud (how could you possibly make a remake of a film so vividly identified with Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden?). The superstar promotion sputtered. Julia became a mere mortal again, which is to say, instead of becoming Julia Roberts, she reverted to being an actual actress.
Happily for us, she reverted also to the more interesting kind of roles she had done pre-stardom: i.e.: the Nordic heroine in the eerie, icy “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” and the female lead in the 1998 Russian film “The Barber of Siberia,” which still holds the box office record in that country.
“My life definitely changed,” she said. “I did Smilla and I did the Russian project, which took a very long time and was hugely successful in Russia. Following that, I determined that I was going to take a bit of a break and just reassess and really make sure that I was developing some of my own things and only doing projects that I really loved.’
She has found a new one, playing the winged symbol of the American women’s suffrage movement in the new HBO movie “Iron Jawed Angels,” to be telecast on the cable network at 8:30 p.m. Sunday.
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Hilary Swank stars as Alice Paul, the leader of the radical women’s movement that actually got the Constitution changed to give American women the vote in 1920. Frances O’Connor plays her irreverent sidekick, Lucy Barnes, and Molly Parker is the long-suffering wife of a male chauvinist U.S. senator who comes late to the cause.
The suffragettes, especially the cronish early ones like Susan B. Anthony, are too often portrayed or viewed as saintly sisters who won the vote with lofty speeches, petition drives and pretty parades.
Paul and her crew were real women — and modern women. They smoked. They drank in saloons. They swore. They, gads, flirted with men, and shamelessly manipulated the media.
“There’s the cliche out there that women who fight for their rights are no fun,” said German-born director Katja von Garnier (remembered for “Bandits”). “They take themselves incredibly seriously. They can’t laugh about a joke. I really wanted to change that. I was interested in their life beyond that — as people in the bathroom brushing their teeth.”
Mobbed by men
They won their Constitutional amendment the hard way. That legendary pretty parade down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue culminated in their being verbally and physically attacked by a mob of men. When they continued to protest outside the White House after the U.S. entered World War I, they were called traitors.
Woodrow Wilson, a racist and one of our country’s worst presidents, had them arrested on trumped-up obstruction of traffic charges. They were thrown into a hell-hole of a local prison and brutally force-fed when they went on a hunger strike in protest. After seeing this movie, a woman would be hard put not to vote in this year’s election.
Ormond’s character, Inez Mulholland Boissevain, even gave her life for the cause.
“She was an extraordinary woman,” Ormond said. “She was a labor lawyer and also a journalist and war correspondent who took quite a strong stance against the war. There were two people from the NAACP who spoke at her funeral.”
In demand
Dressed as a winged angel, Inez rode a white horse in that famous 1913 parade, instantly becoming the icon of the suffrage movement and in popular demand as a speaker across the country.
“Julia has this heroic thing going for her and she’s very brave too,” said von Garnier. “On that horse with all those people around [in the parade riot scene]. She’s good on the horse.”
But Inez suffered from pernicious anemia, a then largely untreatable genetic disorder with symptoms that include bleeding, extreme exhaustion and, in Inez’s case, death. Yet when Alice Paul asked Inez to go on tour making speeches again at a critical point in the campaign, she agreed.
“In the scene where she expresses reluctance about going, it’s a moment of fear for her,” Ormond said. “She knows what’s going to happen to her. I think also it’s a mixed moment — a certain amount of frustration because, why should something so obvious [women’s voting rights] require so much energy?”
Both Ormond and von Garnier see this film as very timely, though the events took place more than 80 years ago.
“When we were editing the scene where they debate picketing a wartime president,” von Garnier said, “a woman was arrested outside the [Bush] White House while protesting [the Iraq war].”