British actor, writer, and director Samantha Morton will be awarded the BAFTA Fellowship at next week’s EE BAFTA Film Awards.
Born in Nottingham in 1977, Morton garnered international attention in 1997 with her performance in Carine Adler’s Under the Skin, earning her a BIFA nomination and the Boston Film Critics Award for Best Actress. She has been nominated for an Academy Award first for Best Supporting Actress for Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), and later for Best Actress for Jim Sheridan’s In America (2003).
Other notable film credits include work with directors such as Lynne Ramsay on Morvern Callar (2002), for which she won Best Performance, Toronto Film Critics Award and a BIFA for Best Actress; Steven Spielberg on Minority Report (2002); Michael Winterbottom on Code 46 (2003); Shekhar Kapur on The Golden Age (2007); Harmony Korine on Mister Lonely (2007); Anton Corbijn on Control, (2007), earning her a Best Supporting Actress BAFTA Film Award nomination; Charlie Kaufman Synecdoche, New York (2008), David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis (2012), Andrew Stanton on John Carter (2012), Spike Jonze on Her (2013), David Yates on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), Darren Aronofsky on The Whale (2022) and Maria Schrader on She Said (2022).
For her portrayal of notorious child-murderer Myra Hindley in Longford (2006), Morton received Best Actress nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, and BAFTA Television Award, and won a Golden Globe. In 2009, she made her directorial debut with the television film The Unloved, a semi-autobiographical film based on the British children’s care system, which won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Single Drama, and a BAFTA Scotland Best Actor award for Robert Carlyle. In 2023, she released her first music with producer Richard Russell.
BAFTA Fellows previously honored for their work in film include Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor, Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Lee, Martin Scorsese, Alan Parker, Helen Mirren, Mike Leigh, Sidney Poitier, Mel Brooks, Sir Ridley Scott, Thelma Schoonmaker, Kathleen Kennedy and Ang Lee. Sandy Powell received the BAFTA Fellowship at the Film Awards in 2023, and most recently, Meera Syal CBE was honored with the BAFTA Fellowship at the BAFTA Television Awards.
