Trailer
Plot summary
On her deathbed in 1603, Queen Elizabeth I makes Orlando an offer. The androgynous young nobleman will receive a large tract of land, a castle and a generous sum of money, and his heirs after him, if he accepts her unusual command that he never fade, wither or grow old. He agrees. For roughly two centuries he lives in near isolation at the castle, writing poetry and dabbling in art, and a celebrated poet he tries to befriend mocks his verse. He then serves as England's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
Cast
- John Bottas Orlando's Father
- Elaine Banhamas Orlando's Mother
- Anna Farnworthas Clorinda
- Sara Mair-Thomasas Favilla
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Orlando (1992)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The 2020 spring exhibition of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the 2020 Met Gala, took Orlando as their primary inspiration, drawn specifically from the film's labyrinth scene, in which Tilda Swinton runs through in an 18th-century gown and reappears in mid-19th-century dress.
- When Sally Potter first pitched her treatment for Orlando in 1984, industry professionals told her the story was "unmakable, impossible, far too expensive and anyway not interesting"; she began writing the script and raising money four years later, in 1988.
- Sally Potter called Quentin Crisp the "Queen of Queens ... particularly in the context of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending politics", which is why she cast him as the aged Queen Elizabeth I.
- Sally Potter cast Tilda Swinton as Orlando after seeing her in Manfred Karge's play Man to Man, citing the "profound subtlety about the way she took on male body language and handled maleness and femaleness."
- The Constantinople portion of the book was shot in the isolated city of Khiva in Uzbekistan, where Sally Potter used the forest of carved columns in the city's 18th-century Djuma Mosque.
- Performances staged by the theater company Clay & Diamonds with over 30 actors from Fourth Monkey took place at Hanbury Hall and at Knole house, the home of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's lover and the inspiration for Orlando.
