故事发生在1552年的英国，即将到来的权利交替让王公贵族们各个如临大敌，在摄政王约翰达利公爵（约翰·伍德 John Wood 饰）的暗中操纵下，原本的继承人，信奉天主教的玛丽公主（Jane Lapotaire 饰）遭到了排挤，简（海伦娜·伯翰·卡特 Helena Bonham Carter 饰）成为了继位者。之后，约翰公爵让儿子吉尔福德（加利·艾尔维斯 Cary Elwes 饰）迎娶了简，如此一来，实权便落入了他的手中。
简和吉尔福德被送往乡下等待着加冕仪式，原本素不相识的两人在朝夕相处之间慢慢产生了真挚的感情。爱德华六世（Warren Saire 饰）去世后，16岁的简大权在握，她的一些做法惹恼了大臣，在位仅仅九天就遭到废黜，与此同时，逃出国外的玛丽公主带兵杀回了英国，夺回了本属于她的东西。

建筑师John Baxter（唐纳德·萨瑟兰 Donald Sutherland 饰）与其妻子Laura（朱莉·克里斯蒂 Julie Christie 饰）育有一男一女。有一天，女儿莫名其妙地溺水身亡。Laura沉浸在悲痛中。John因为工作原因，带着Laura来到威尼斯，进行一个教堂的修缮工作。在那里，Laura认识了两个老妇人，里面有一个盲人，据说能通灵，能看见Baxter夫妇的女儿。Laura晕了过去，醒来之后却摆脱了女儿死亡的阴影。通灵的老妇人告诉Laura，如果John继续留在威尼斯的话，会有危险。Laura劝John赶紧离开，John却不相信所谓通灵，继续留在威尼斯进行工作。果不其然，John在工作中发生了意外，而他们在英国读书的儿子病倒了。Laura急忙搭飞机回国，而John却在威尼斯发现Laura跟那两个老妇人在一起。发生在威尼斯的这个故事变得越来越扑朔迷离......本片在Time Out 2011“史上最佳100部英国电影”中排名第一。

皮埃尔（德雷克·德·林特 Derek de Lint 饰）是一名主教，自幼便发誓将自己的全部奉献给上帝。然而，命运之神仿佛捉弄他似的让皮埃尔邂逅了名为赫萝斯（金·索姆森 Kim Thomson 饰）的女子。赫萝斯是皮埃尔的同事福尔波特（丹霍姆·艾略特 Denholm Elliott 饰）的侄女，天真烂漫的她很快就和皮埃尔一起双双坠入了情网。
折磨着皮埃尔的除了对信仰的背弃外还有残酷的现实，更糟糕的是，赫萝斯怀孕了。皮埃尔和赫萝斯的恋情最终还是曝了光，愤怒的福尔波特对皮埃尔做出了极为可怕的举动。在生下了孩子之后，赫萝斯进入修道院成为了一名修女，她和皮埃尔从此再也没有见过面。

Julia Ormond was swept off to Hollywood to become a star - but somehow it didn't happen. Now she's in London to appear in David Hare's new play. She tells Harriet Lane why she came back

Five years ago, the smart Hollywood money was on Julia Ormond becoming the new Julia Roberts or the new Meg Ryan. Instead, she went off at a different angle and became the new Geena Davis. Like Davis, Ormond enjoyed a spectacular launch in Hollywood, buoyed by gallons of publicity rocket fuel: a dazzling ascent swiftly followed by a tumble back to earth at the end of a blackened stick.
There is something rather Hilaire Belloc about Julia Ormond's story, something a little cautionary. Or rather, there would be if she would only play along with it, cast herself as The Fallen Star, or The Girl From Surrey Who Thought She Was Audrey Hepburn. But one role she's simply not interested in is that of victim. 'For sure, you don't believe the good stuff,' says Ormond, referring to the hullaballoo that surrounded her in 1995 when Legends of the Fall , First Knight and Sabrina all opened more or less simultaneously. 'I mean, the good stuff is just insane - wacky. If you don't take it too much to heart, it does help when the negative stuff hits. And you know the negative stuff is coming. It's got to! What comes up must come down.'


Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And it's true: she did know it was coming. At 29, Ormond hadn't submitted rapturously to the star machine. There were sacrifices she didn't want to make. On-set admirers called her 'formidable' and 'flinty' and 'honest'; unnamed sources grumbled about 'attitude'. Looking back at her earliest interviews, conducted amid a swarm of excitable movie execs and publicists, with superagent Michael Ovitz himself on hand to fetch her glasses of water, you note a rich seam of ho-hum scepticism. 'They seem to be very sure things are going to be a success,' Ormond told Vogue in 1995. 'I'm not being negative about it, but I'm hedging my bets.'
Certainly, the timing was unfortunate. Legends of the Fall, where she played the love interest, was quickly followed by First Knight, a hilarious turkey in which a trumpet-sleeved Ormond was Guinevere, torn between Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Then came a remake of Sabrina, in which director Sydney Pollack misguidedly steered her into Audrey Hepburn's ballet pumps. Though she knows Sabrina was a mistake, Ormond has no regrets. 'It was a fantastic learning experience and OK, I got slammed because I wasn't Audrey Hepburn... but you could have predicted that, really, if you'd opened your eyes wide enough. But I was hungry for the learning experience and didn't feel secure enough to say no. You need to be bloody secure to say no.'

She knew she was lucky, but she also knew she was out of her depth - not with the acting, but with the stuff that surrounded it. 'The odd thing for me is the focus on looks which happened in the States. I'd always felt that was not going to be a strong point. That made me feel very disturbed, because it never seemed to be about how much hard work was involved. Ever. It was about... "hazel eyes". It does help if you can brush that stuff off.'

Billed by the publicists as an ingénue, Surrey-born Ormond was no such thing, and this may have saved her bacon. After drama school and an advert for cottage cheese, she had spent a decade as a jobbing actor in the UK, carving out a strong reputation on stage (in 1989, she'd won the London Critics' Award for Best Newcomer, in Christopher Hampton's Faith Hope and Charity at the Lyric Hammersmith) and television (in particular, as a drug addict in Traffik) before landing Legends.

'I found it all very scary. This fairytale gets built around you - as if you've been walking through the streets and then Sydney Pollack sees you and goes, "I'll put you in something!" When really you've gone to drama school and rep and then you've come to London and gone to auditions... and you've worked, solidly, for years. But that all gets forgotten. At first I was a bit indignant about it, and then I realised, "No, that's what people want, so that's what is given." But it's not in your control. It's just what happens to you, and that's what's frightening.'

The roles, on the other hand, were a gas. In the UK, 'I'd seemed to play a lot of people who'd slit their wrists or cut off their hair or shot themselves or died of the plague. And if you do anything for too long, it starts to lack edge, to become too easy. Easy is the kiss of death. And so for me what I needed was to get my head out of my bottom, and so to go off and do First Knight - gallivanting around on a horse, with a cape, and knights in blue corduroy - was quite fun.'

So Ormond gallivanted for a bit, airing her famous, transfixing smile as required ('You watch her just to wait for it to happen,' wrote one journalist), and then... vanished, at least from the mainstream. Stepping off the red carpet, she took bigger risks. A doomed film version of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow , directed by Bille August. A three-hour Russian epic, The Barber of Siberia, directed by Nikita Mikhalkov. When she was white-hot she'd been offered the Holy Grail of movie-star accessories, her own production company, and Ormond actually did something with hers, making a documentary about Bosnian women in Serbian detention camps, and working with Harold Pinter on a Karen Blixen short story that she hopes to direct. Last year she married an American who works in e-commerce.

For her next trick, she's coming back to the London stage for the first time in nine years. At the Royal Court, in a break from rehearsing David Hare's new play My Zinc Bed , Ormond looks very London, very theatre. She's wearing a black jersey, chinos and navy flipflops, and her hair is rather tangled, as if it hasn't been brushed for days. No make-up. Her face has more character, more shade, than I was expecting. You do find yourself staring at her, just so you won't miss the wild energy that surges across it when she laughs.

Ormond hasn't turned her back on film (the marital home is in LA, and The Prime Gig, a comedy co-starring Vince Vaughn and Ed Harris, is in post-production) but the Hare project was too good to miss. What swung it for her? 'The fact that David had written it and David was directing it at the Royal Court and it was a new three-hander. Plus, it's a brilliant play. I'm not making any comment on how we execute it or what we achieve through doing it, but reading it, it's a phenomenal play.'

Since there's some sort of unofficial embargo about My Zinc Bed, neither Ormond nor her co-stars Tom Wilkinson and Steven Mackintosh will spell out what actually happens in the play, other than saying that it's about an entrepreneur who recruits a young poet to jazz up his internet empire. Ormond, who plays Elsa, the entrepreneur's wife, says the Hare script outshone every film script that was coming her way. In any case, she'd been keen to get back to theatre.

'I ride,' says Ormond, who has a way with analogies, 'and doing theatre after doing film is a bit like doing dressage or showjumping after you've been out for endless hacks, having just a wild old time. You're put through your paces in a different way. And it's not that going out for a hack is wrong or bad, I certainly don't view it as that; it's just that there's something about the dressage, being put through your paces, that makes you better.'

Yes, she feels the stakes are high this time around. 'I feel that David took a risk with me. I have a sense that by starting off in the theatre and going off to do films you are seen to sell out in some way. I don't hold truck with that, but you can't stop people from feeling it. So I think people are a little guarded about me. Oh, God! It's never just about the piece. Something else always washes over it.'

She's anxious that her own trajectory, her own reputation, should not obscure Hare's work. When she adds, 'But then, my sense is that that' s all something in the past - I've escaped it', she sounds like she really means it.

•

Returning to the 18th-century world of his immensely successful TOM JONES, Tony Richardson adapts another of Henry Fielding's picaresque novels, this time with Peter Firth as the title character. Employed as a servant in the household of Sir Thomas Booby (Peter Bull), the pure-hearted Joseph is in love with Fanny Goodwill (Natalie Ogle), one of the housemaids. But Joseph is plagued by the unwanted attentions of the copiously endowed former actress Lady Booby (Ann-Margret), who becomes even more aggressive after the death of her husband. When he refuses the advances of his employer, Joseph is beaten by her minions and left for dead before being rescued by a passing coach. He finally reunites with his friend Parson Adams (Michael Hordern), who has just saved Fanny from rape. As the farcical plot accelerates, the virtuous trio get into a surprising number of scrapes, narrowly avoid being jailed for crimes they didn't commit, and are unwittingly lured to a Black Mass organized by an evil nobleman. Meanwhile, Lady Booby, scheming to ensure that the marriage of the young couple never occurs, has Fanny framed and arrested for robbery. The film is well acted by its outstanding British cast, but Ann-Margret steals the show as the lascivious Lady Booby.

In the wake of the 1972 Munich massacre, Israel decides to create a covert hit team dedicated to killing individual terrorists throughout Europe. Avner, Israeli commando and son of a renowned Israeli agent, is recruited to head a team of five specialists on a continent-wide manhunt to bring justice to those who support and architect such terrorist attacks. The team will operate with absolutely no official sanction, outside the bounds of all national laws, literally operating exactly as the terrorists do. His father warns him against trusting the agency because he was left to rot in a French prison after they disavowed all knowledge of his actions, but he believes it will not happen to him. His wife Shoshanna supports him, but worries about what will become of him after they are finished. Working from safehouses established all across Europe and utilizing an underground criminal information network, they stalked and killed high-level terrorists one by one. After the deaths of several of his team, Avner and the survivors are recalled to Israel, where he decides to quit and has to fight against the Israeli government to be allowed to live in peace with his wife and newborn son.

查尔顿·赫斯顿继《沙漠枭雄》后再远征非洲，饰演考古学家，到埃及找寻传说中神秘皇后的木乃伊，并跟随行女下属发生感情。终于找到木乃伊，希士顿不知不觉间启动了轮回，就在神秘皇后转世一刻，希士顿的妻子却在老家早产，诞下一位面如死灰的女婴。回国后，希士顿与妻子离婚，和女下属另展新生。多少年后，到重遇素未谋面的女儿时，希士顿才发现其长相竟跟神秘皇后一模一样，几经查证下，方知皇后再生的大限已经来临，准备作恶人间。

Mary Linden works for the French Red Cross in Occupied France during World War II and helps allied soldiers who have been shot down to escape to the unoccupied side. Her activities are complicated by her high profile and her daughter's love affair with a German officer. Based on the true story. Written by Ed Sutton <[email protected]>