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Samantha Morton biography

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Samantha Morton is an English actress and film director, perhaps best known for her roles in Sweet and Lowdown and Minority Report.

Synopsis

English actress Samantha Morton endured a difficult childhood growing up in foster homes. At age 13, she took acting classes and landed a role in the series Soldier, Soldier. For many years, she secured work in low-budget films. In the 1990s, she starred in several well-received TV dramas,

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including Under the Skin (1997). She is best known for roles in Sweet and Lowdown and Minority Report.

Profile

Actress. Born in 1977, in Nottingham, England. One of six children, Morton?s parents divorced when she was three years old; she spent much of her childhood in foster care. Morton dropped out of school at age 13; she dreamed of being an actress, and enrolled in an acting workshop in Nottingham. She got her first professional acting job when she was 14, when she began appearing on British television, most notably in the serial Soldier, Soldier. Morton?s breakthrough role came in a 1994 episode of the British TV drama Cracker, when she played a young girl who becomes pregnant by the head of a religious cult. She also appeared as a prostitute in the British miniseries Band of Gold, which was shown in the U.S. on HBO in 1995.

Morton gained a measure of recognition for her roles in three acclaimed BBC/A&E TV productions: she played Harriet Smith in Emma (1997), the title role in Jane Eyre (also 1997), and Sophia Western in an adaptation of Tom Jones (1998). Her feature film debut, in the low-budget drama Under the Skin (1997), earned her a Best Actress award from the Boston Society of Film Critics.

The pace of Morton?s career moved up several notches in 1999, when she made no fewer than five films. She first garnered praise for her starring role in Dreaming of Joseph Lees (1999), also featuring Rupert Graves. Also in 1999, she turned in an impressive performance?and scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress?as the long-suffering mute companion of Sean Penn?s dissolute jazz guitarist in Sweet and Lowdown, written and directed by Woody Allen. Other films she completed in 1999 included Jesus? Son, the comedy caper The Last Yellow, and Pandemonium, in which she played the very-pregnant wife of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (played by Linus Roache).

After appearing in several small-budget films that never saw release in the United States, Morton began production on Steven Spielberg's $80 million sci-fi thriller Minority Report. In 2004, she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in In America.

Morton gave birth on February 5, 2000

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