Suzanna Hamilton

British actress Suzanna Hamilton's first major screen role was as Izz Huett in Roman Polanski's "Tess" . Hamilton also starred in the well-received 1986 television drama "Johnny Bull", with Peter MacNichol, Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, and Kathy Bates. She next played the winsome Anglo-French spy, Matty Firman, in "Wish Me Luck", a British World War II miniseries, and starred in the miniseries based on Barbara Taylor Bradford's "Hold the Dream." In the 1989 BBC miniseries "Never Come Back", she made a striking appearance as the inscrutable femme fatale, Anna Raven, a murky, noirish conspiracy thriller set on the eve of the London blitz. Suzanna also turned in an admirable performance in the excellent 1990 British television film, "Small Zones", as a strong-willed Russian poetess whose subversive writings have led to her indefinite imprisonment in a bleak Soviet holding cell. This was followed by a supporting role in a 1992 TV film of Barbara Cartland's Regency-period bodice-ripper, "Duel of Hearts". 1992's low-budget Gothic horror romance, "Tale of a Vampire", written and directed by Shimako Sato, a 27-year-old Japanese-British film student, features Suzanna in a dual appearance, as both Ann, a librarian mourning the death of her boyfriend, and as Virgina Clemm, the wife of Edgar Allan Poe and long-lost love of a lonely melancholic vampire played by Julian Sands. Suzanna had a recurring role In the 1990s as Dr. Karen Goodliffe on the British TV hospital dramatic series, "Casualty". Her character had to be written out of the show after Hamilton became pregnant in early 1993. In 1997's "Island on Bird Street", a Danish period drama made in the Dogme 95-style, concerning an orphaned Jewish boy who dodges the Nazis in occupied Europe during World War II, Suzanna has a brief cameo as the mother of a girl whom the boy befriends. Suzanna Hamilton is also an accomplished theater and radio actress. She made her first West End appearance in 1982, starring in Tom Stoppard's play, "The Real Thing". In 1993, she played the lead as a Welsh maid who gets in over her head in the Bush Theater production of Lucinda Coxon's "Waiting at the Water's Edge". She was cast as Creusa in a Gate Theater 2002 production of Euripides' "Ion", and in early 2005, Hamilton appeared as Dora, a tough, bereaved, guilt-ridden lesbian incarcerated in a 1920's asylum in the production of Charlotte Jones' chamber drama, "Airswimming", at the Salisbury Playhouse. She also lent her voice to a 1991 audio-book recording of Julian Barnes' novel about a love triangle called "Talking It Over".