More recently, Ormond founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking (ASSET), which works with governments to clean up the supply chains that allow for human trafficking. A documentary she produced about women in Bosnian concentration camps, Calling the Ghosts, won two Emmys. She also threw herself into nonprofit work: In 1999, she helped found FilmAid International, which brings film into refugee camps around the world. She took a break and had a daughter with activist and entrepreneur Jon Rubin. Which is when Ormond’s natural detachment kicked in. “And it all went horribly pear-shaped right in the press conference. “I got to Cannes thinking finally we could talk about the work,” she recalls. When the film opened in 1999, however, it, too, was panned, amid speculation that its director, Nikita Mikhalkov, might run for president of Russia.

Ironically, she had taken the lead in Barber to get out of a creative rut and back to her Stanislavsky roots. Then she got stuck in Moscow working on the runaway Russian epic The Barber of Siberia it shot for nearly a year, then got shelved for two. Smilla’s Sense of Snow, an anticipated adaptation of the best seller, opened and promptly closed in early 1997. “I’m British, so I can’t help but see anybody who is getting that kind of hype as being set up to be torn down.” First Knight and Sabrina got creamed by critics. In fact, she had a rather precipitous fall. It was also notable for what it provoked in viewers: Wait! Was that Julia Ormond? What ever happened to her? But the range required was astonishing (she plays, in turn, a tormented white-trash stabbing victim, the stabber herself, and a mysterious upper-crust woman). To wit, her trifecta of shape-shifting weirdness in David Lynch’s 2006 Inland Empire. If the parts aren’t big, at least the Surrey-born, stage-trained actress gets to take risks in ways those stand-around-and-look-pretty parts didn’t allow. “It was pretty spectacular, and that’s all it took.” “Julia put on a blonde wig and sent us a tape of herself as Howard,” says director Steven Soderbergh of casting her. In the second, she is American journalist Lisa Howard, whose interview with Benicio Del Toro’s Che provides the film’s structure. In the first, it’s her reading of Benjamin Button’s journal that propels the film’s flashback structure (though she is never reunited onscreen with Pitt, who plays Button). “Then you step back and realize it’s the same thing.”Īnd now, here she is again, at 43, appearing in small yet key parts in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Che. “You think they’re different-one’s a Western, one’s a fairy tale, one’s a romantic comedy,” she says of those roles. For a moment there, she was Hollywood’s Next Big Thing, primo alpha-male bait, fought over by Brad Pitt and Aidan Quinn in 1994’s Legends of the Fall, Richard Gere and Sean Connery in 1995’s First Knight, and Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear in Sydney Pollack’s remake of Sabrina. Not being the love interest frees you up to do a lot of other things,” says Julia Ormond, who has been inconspicuous for some years after one of the most conspicuous careers of the nineties. ‘It’s wonderful to not get stuck with the ingénue roles.

Julia ormond wrinkles