The Curious Case of Julia Ormond

The actress returns, ten years after her brief fling as film’s Next Big Thing.



‘It’s wonderful to not get stuck with the ingénue roles. 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. 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. “You think they’re different—one’s a Western, one’s a fairy tale, one’s a romantic comedy,” she says of those roles. “Then you step back and realize it’s the same thing.”

And now, here she is again, at 43, appearing in small yet key parts in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button andChe. 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). In the second, she is American journalist Lisa Howard, whose interview with Benicio Del Toro’s Che provides the film’s structure. “Julia put on a blonde wig and sent us a tape of herself as Howard,” says director Steven Soderbergh of casting her. “It was pretty spectacular, and that’s all it took.”

By Bilge Ebiri