Suddenly Last Summer British tour & West End 2004 Catherine Holly (Evening Standard Award; TMA Theatre Award nomination)

Sweet Panic West End 2003 Clare

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg West End 2001–02, Broadway 2003 Sheila (Tony Award nomination; Theatre World Award; Olivier Award nomination; Outer Critics' Circle Award nomination; Whatsonstage.com’s Audience Award)

Home and Beauty West End 2002 Victoria Lowndes

The Country Wife Sheffield and Lyric Theater Hammersmith 2000 Margery Pinchwife

As You Like It Sheffield & Lyric Theater Hammersmith 2000 Rosalind (with Lucy Briers) (TMA Award; Critics Choice Theatre Award, London Critics Circle Award)

Money National 1999 Clara Douglas

Summerfolk National 1999 Yulia Suslova (with Jennifer Ehle)

The Doctor’s Dilemma Almeida Theatre 1998 Jennifer Dubedat

King Lear Peter Hall Company Old Vic 1997 Cordelia

The Seagull Peter Hall Company Old Vic 1997 Nina

The Provok’d Wife Peter Hall Company Old Vic 1997 Lady Brute (with Alison Steadman)

As You Like It RSC 1996 Phoebe

Troilus and Cressida Royal Shakespeare Company 1996 Cressida

The Master Builder Peter Hall Company tour & West End 1995, Toronto 1996 Hilde Wangel (Critics Circle Award—Best Newcomer; Ian Charleson Award nominee)

Retreat Richmond Orange Tree 1995 Hannah

Memorandum 1995 Maria

To the Ends of the Earth 2005 Miss Granham

Babyfather 2 2003 Lucy Fry

In Search of the Brontes 2003 Charlotte Bronte

Goodbye Mr. Chips 2002 Kathie Bridges Chipping

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg 2002 Sheila

Victoria and Albert 2001 Queen Victoria (with Crispin Bonham-Carter)

Babyfather 2001 Lucy Fry

The Savages 2001 Jessica Savage

Midsomer Murders, ep. “Garden of Death” Hilary Inkpen (with Neville Phillips)

King Lear 1997 Cordelia

The Merchant of Venice 1996 Nerissa (with Benjamin Whitrow)

Cone Zone 1995 Zandra Doyle

Before You Go 2002 Catherine

Mansfield Park 1999 Maria Bertram

Persuasion 1995 Henrietta Mus-grove

BBC Woman’s Hour 2004

The Eye of the Day: The Story of Mata Hari 2003 Mata Hari

Love and Freindship 2002

Autumn Sonata 2001 Eva

Easy Virtue

Man and Superman 1996

The Doctor’s Dilemma

Crossing the Equator

Classic FM Favourite Shakespeare narrator

The Doctor’s Dilemma

Easy Virtue

Man and Superman

Pride and Prejudice offered a host of roles for young actors just starting out in the business, and several have since gone on to bigger careers. Of all these, Victoria Hamilton has probably gone the farthest and won the greatest acclaim. Emilia Fox and Lucy Davis may be better known for their work on popular television series, but Hamilton has earned the kind of critical accolades that most actors only dream about. “There is a remarkable consensus among theatre people—from directors to critics to audiences—that the 32-year-old actress Victoria Hamilton is the Judi Dench of her generation,” wrote Jasper Rees in the Sunday Telegraph in 2003. “One of the new ‘great names’ of acting” (Newsquest Media Group). “One of our finest actresses” (Independent). “One of our best young actresses” (Mail on Sunday). “The Judi Dench of her generation who never puts a foot wrong” (Independent). “One of the most remarkable actresses to emerge in years” (Evening Standard). “Perhaps the finest, and most touching, actress of her generation” (Telegraph). When she appeared in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer with Dame Diana Rigg in 2004, one newspaper called them “two of the country’s most distinguished actresses,” and another said that Hamilton acted Rigg off the stage.

	Troilus and Cressida, with Joseph Fiennes

Superlatives like these have followed Hamilton from the beginning; she has never had to struggle for recognition. She won the tiny role of Mrs. Forster (“blink and you’ll miss me”) in Pride and Prejudice shortly after graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. The following year she made her professional stage debut in two plays at the Orange Tree Theater in Richmond (“outstanding debut,” “has stardom written all over her”). In the audience at one performance were Peter Hall and Alan Bates ( “I knew they were in because it's such a tiny little theatre. It was hysterical because nobody watched the play. Every time Alan moved, so did 17 women in the front row.”), who hired her to star opposite Bates in Hall’s production of The Master Builder in the West End. “There are moments when a new young artist arrives on a stage and instantly the performance ignites the entire production,” wrote Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail. “Then you reach for the old superlative cliches. A star is born; an overnight success. Yet these are to trivialise the subtle achievements of Victoria Hamilton in Sir Peter Hall's otherwise curiously stilted production of Ibsen's great monument to male megalomania.”

The Provok'd Wife, with Clare Swinburne

Hamilton was lucky not only to have gotten such big breaks so early in her career, but also to have had fate dovetail so nicely with her own plans. “I made a decision that I wanted to do five years of classical theatre before I did anything else, which was a very unfashionable thing to do,” she told an interviewer in 2001. “People would look at me with bewildered expressions and ask, ‘Why do you do so much theatre?’ But achieving longevity in this business is enormously difficult; I’ve seen so many people leave drama school, get a big telly part, then find themselves out of work. Looking at the actors I most admire—Judi Dench, Ian Holm, that whole generation—they all started in rep and slowly built themselves into the position where they could juggle theatre and film. I know I’ll always want to come back to theatre and I also thought if I can crack classical acting everything else will probably seem easier.”

	Midsomer Murders, with Sarah Alexander

Adhering to her plan meant that she spent the first six years of her professional life in corsets, playing period roles. Of all the Pride and Prejudice actors, she has done the most Austen, with roles in Persuasion and Mansfield Park and a radio version of the early work Love and Freindship. Mansfield Park required her to do a brief nude scene, something she now regrets (“It was one of those, ‘I was very young and needed the money’ things”) and today she still remains leery of the demands imposed on actresses by the film industry. “Clearly I'm not glamorous, Hollywood kind of material. I've got tits and a bum and I'm happy about that. I don't like being thin, I don't feel well or sexy when I'm thin,” she told the Independent in 2001. “The industry wants you to be thin and glamorous and there's an incredible pressure to adhere to a certain set of rules. It's very rare that a very big, buxom girl will get cast as a female lead. I have huge respect for actresses of my generation who've basically told that side of the business to sod off, but when you know that if you were a stone lighter you'd be offered parts, it's very tempting and very dangerous. I reached a point where I thought about the kind of career I wanted, and realised I didn't want to be a sex object, I just wanted to look like me, which is OK one minute and then like hell the next.”

	The Savages, with Marcus Brigstocke

Hamilton (a stage name; her real surname was already taken when she joined Equity) was born in Wimbledon, south London, on April 5, 1971, and grew up in prosperity in Surrey. She wanted to be a journalist until a couple of actors from the National Theater visited her private school, and she was bitten by the stage bug. Despite coming from a thoroughly untheatrical family (her father is in advertising, her mother ran a nursery school), she shelved her plans to study English at Bristol University and auditioned for drama schools. They all rejected her, so she spent a year acting before reapplying, and won a place at LAMDA. She thinks the year off was “the best thing that could have happened. Drama school is very intense: you need to get a bit of life under your belt before you go.” At LAMDA she won a prize for imagination, and her career took off almost as soon as she graduated.

	Suddenly Last Summer

Just what is it about Hamilton that inspires the extraordinary reviews she consistently receives? Critics have struggled to explain it. Many have cited her emotional openness and ability to speak even the most difficult verse with spontaneity, while maintaining scansion and timing “with the precision of a drill sergeant.” “She can be heart-catching,” wrote Alistair Macauley in the Financial Times. “I hope I never forget how, standing still in the Epilogue of As You Like It, after a pause, she lifted her eyes and in a low soft voice, simply said to the audience ‘My way is to conjure you,’ and so drew the whole house into the spell of her inner being. From the start of her career, Hamilton has had that ability: to catch the sympathies of her audience in the fine net of her own nervous system.” The Guardian said something similar: “Victoria Hamilton has always had a dewiness and openness that makes audiences catch their breath. She is lovable, often childlike: convincing as a tearful young person of principle when she first appeared on the London stage, in a Havel play at the Orange Tree; pert in Restoration drama; a radiant Rosalind in As You Like It.” And Charles Spencer of the Telegraph added, “She combines keen intelligence with an extraordinary emotional openness, and when the role requires it, this dark, petite actress with the ‘period bust’ (her words) brings an exciting, unbuttoned sensuality to the stage.”

Hamilton has achieved a great deal by her early thirties. She has acted with Peter Hall’s company, the Royal Shakespeare Company (not a happy experience), and the National Theater; has appeared in the West End, on Broadway (where she was nominated for a Tony Award); and has played leading roles in film and television. The producer of Victoria and Albert has called her “the most dedicated professional for her age that I have ever worked with.” But she hasn’t let it all go to her head. “You have to constantly discipline yourself to avoid self-indulgence and complacency,” she says. “If I ever thought I couldn’t get any better, I’d have to stop and do something else.”