Orlando (film)

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Orlando
Promotional poster for Orlando.
Directed by	Sally Potter
Written by	Sally Potter (script) Virginia Woolf (novel)
Starring	Tilda Swinton
Release date(s)	1992
Running time	93 minutes
Language	English
Budget	$5,000,000
IMDb profile

Orlando is a 1992 film, based on Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando, Billy Zane as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth. It was directed by Sally Potter. Actor Toby Stephens, son of Maggie Smith, appears as an Elizabethan actor playing the role of Othello. Gay icon Jimmy Somerville provides some of the music and appears in a cameo as a angel.

In writing the screenplay for the film, Sally Potter provided the character Nick Greene with a cutting poem that showed up Orlando’s poor attempt at poetry. Orlando comes up with lines such as:

‘His heart was broken: cleft in two. Abandoned, lost! What could he do?’

Greene’s memorable commentary on the lordly Orlando’s efforts went:

Try as he might, this gracious noble lord.
Who lifts his pen and thinks he then can write,
Cannot. For who can pen when he is bored?
The mind of leisure only can be trite.
This pretty knight, who feebly lifts his sword,
To make a witless thrust against his doom,
Is foiled by what his noble birth affords:
Dogs, dogs, more dogs, and far too many rooms.
So fortune smiles on those that own the land,
And frowns at trivia from the dabbler's hand.

It was particularly acclaimed for its visual treatment of the settings of Woolf's 1928 novel. Potter chose to film much of the Constantinople portion of the book in the isolated city of Khiva in Uzbekistan, and made use of the forest of carved columns in the city's 18th century Juma mosque.

The film goes beyond the novel in that it brings Orlando's life into the early 1990s.

Orlando was nominated for Academy Awards for art direction and costume design.