Biography
A technical theatre student at Swinburne College, Gillian Armstrong studied filmmaking at the Melbourne and Australian Film and Television School, paying her tuition by working as a waitress. She functioned in several secondary technical capacities in the Australian film industry, then she made her mainstream directorial bow with the 1977 short
The Singer and the Dancer, a soft-pedaled feminist tract which won an award at the Sydney Festival. Her first feature was
My Brilliant Career (1979), which combined a modern sensibility concerning male/female relationships with the glossy romanticism of a 19th-century novel. Featuring a star-making turn by
Judy Davis,
My Brilliant Career garnered seven Australian Film Institute awards, firmly securing Armstrong's reputation and future in her native country.
Armstrong's next major feature, the American-financed Mrs. Soffel (1984), starred
Diane Keaton and
Mel Gibson. The real-life tale of a scandalous love affair between a prison warden's wife and a prisoner, it was moderately well-received. After directing two concert documentaries, Armstrong returned to Australia to make
High Tide (1987), a drama about a woman (
Judy Davis) struggling to reconcile herself with both her past and the daughter she abandoned at birth. Both that film and Armstrong's next major feature, the critically-acclaimed
The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), went largely unknown outside of her native country.
It was with her 1994 adaptation of
Little Women that Armstrong earned a substantial degree of international recognition; featuring strong performances by the likes of
Susan Sarandon,
Winona Ryder, and
Claire Danes, the film became one of the most popular of the year. Armstrong followed this success three years later with
Oscar and Lucinda, an adaptation of the Peter Carey novel of the same name. Starring
Ralph Fiennes and a then-relatively unknown
Cate Blanchett as two misfits who fall in love in 19th-century Australia, the film was a model of strong production values and stellar performances, but received a mixed reception on both sides of the Pacific. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide