Julia Ormond

Born: 4 January 1965
Where: Epsom, Surrey, England

Ormond gave several attention-getting performances in British and American TV-movies and international co-productions before making a big splash in Hollywood features.

She studied acting at London's Webber-Douglas Academy before amassing a number of stage credits.

Ormond made her feature debut in Peter Greenaway's little-seen film The Baby of Macon, co-starring Ralph Fiennes; followed by Nostradamus, a biopic of the famed visionary played by Tcheky Karyo.

Filmmaker Edward Zwick was so impressed by her performance opposite Robert Duvall in the TV biopic Stalin, that he cast her as the pivotal female lead in Legends of the Fall, alongside Hollywood star Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn and Anthony Hopkins.

This marked a big year for Ormond as this was followed by two more starring roles; she starred with Richard Gere and Sean Connery in First Knight, then played Sabrina in a remake of the 1954 Audrey Hepburn movie.

The prison thriller Captives, which Ormond shot in Great Britain after Legends of the Fall, received a more modest and brief US art-house run, while Ormond kept busy on a series of both large and smaller-scale projects.

In 1997 she signed a two year contract with Fox Searchlight Pictures to produce, direct and write. Ormand had a lead role in Smilla's Sense of Snow, after which she starred in Nikita Mikhalkov's epic The Barber of Siberia.