Actress Samantha Morton to Receive BAFTA Fellowship Award for 30 Years of Extraordinary Acting Career

Samantha Morton is set to be honoured with a BAFTA Fellowship award for her ‘extraordinary’ 30 year acting career.

The actress, 46, will receive the gong at the EE BAFTA Film Awards on February 18 at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.

The accolade is the highest honour handed out in recognition of outstanding achievement in TV and film. 

Samantha said: ‘As a proud BAFTA member I am honoured, profoundly humbled and grateful to BAFTA for giving me this award.’

Anna Higgs, Chair of BAFTA’s Film Committee, added: ‘Samantha Morton is a mesmerising storyteller with incredible range.

Samantha Morton, 46, is set to be honoured with a BAFTA Fellowship award for her ‘extraordinary’ 30 year acting career

The actress will receive the gong at the EE BAFTA Film Awards on February 18 at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall

‘She has made an extraordinary impact on the British film industry – consistently shining a light on complex characters and championing underrepresented stories. On-and-off screen, she always works to break down societal barriers and change the make-up of the screen industries for the better – often against great odds. 

‘Samantha is hugely respected by her peers in Britain and Hollywood alike for her versatility, talent and passion for the craft of acting, and we are delighted to be honouring her exceptional body of work at the EE BAFTA Film Awards next week.’

Previous BAFTA Fellowship winners include Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Elizabeth Taylor. 

Samantha garnered international attention in 1997 for her performance in Under The Skin and has since been nominated for Academy Awards and multiple Emmy and BAFTA nominations.

She has previously been awarded a Golden Globe and has won a BAFTA award for Best Single Drama.

The actress starred in award-winning The Walking Dead and the drama I Am… Kirsty, with the most recent show The Burning Girls. 

Speaking about receiving the upcoming award, Samantha spoke to Loose Women panelists Katie Piper, Branda Edwards, Christine Lampard, Joanna Lumley and Kelly Holmes about the honour on Wednesday.

She said: ‘It’s imposter syndrome, because of growing up in care, sometimes when I sit on the toilet in a fancy hotel I’m like “omg”.’ Christine shortly after announced the incredible news of her upcoming award. 

Samantha will receive the accolade next week – it is the highest honour handed out in recognition of outstanding achievement in TV and film

Samantha said: ‘As a proud BAFTA member I am honoured, profoundly humbled and grateful to BAFTA for giving me this award.’

Speaking about receiving the upcoming award, Samantha spoke to Loose Women panelists Katie Piper, Branda Edwards, Christine Lampard, Joanna Lumley and Kelly Holmes about the honour on Wednesday

It comes after she claimed Harvey Weinstein tried to destroy her career when she was in her early twenties.

The actress  accused the disgraced producer – who is currently in jail after being found guilty of sex crimes – of threatening to make sure she would ‘not work again’ after she turned down an approach to be in his 2000 romantic comedy About Adam, which starred Kate Hudson, Stuart Townsend and Frances O’Connor.

She recalled on The Louis Theroux Podcast: ‘I said, “I don’t like it. I think the film is really misogynistic and I don’t want to be part of it”.’

The Minority Report actress said the casting director then told her: ‘You don’t say no to Harvey.’

But Samantha stressed she wasn’t rejecting the producer, just the film – and was issued with a chilling warning when she refused to change her stance.

She said: ‘I had just worked with Stuart Townsend on Under The Skin. It was just not interesting to me. I was uber-polite.

‘I [then] had a phone call saying, “You can’t say no.” The “no” wasn’t being listened to. So they kept coming back with this role and I was told unequivocally, 

‘You’re not going to work again unless you do this role. I’m going to make your life hell. You will not work again.’

She said: ‘I [then] had a phone call saying, “You can’t say no.” The “no” wasn’t being listened to. So they kept coming back with this role and I was told unequivocally, ‘You’re not going to work again unless you do this role. I’m going to make your life hell. You will not work again’ – Weinstein pictured in October 2022 

The Whale actress refused to give in and admitted she felt her decision cost her roles on some of Weinstein’s later films, including being passed in favour of Lena Headey for a role in 2005’s The Brothers Grimm opposite Matt Damon and Heath Ledger after the producer deemed her ‘unf****able’.

Samantha said: ‘It made me question why he was anti-me?’ She then remembered the About Adam warning.

She added: ‘I forgot about it because it was years earlier. And then all these years later, I realised that [when] I get an offer, get a letter from a director, if Miramax or then the Weinstein Company had anything to do with it, it was just awful for me.

‘He had a reason, a deep-seated reason, to just try and destroy my career… He categorically couldn’t, because I kept working, doing independent cinema all over the world.’

Throughout her early childhood, Samantha grew up in various children’s homes. At 13 years old, during her stay at one of her homes, she was abused by her care workers who she trusted and the police did nothing about her case.

In her view the care system for young people is still ‘completely broken’, ‘beyond repair’ and ‘has to be completely re-thought from the ground up’.

Because of her experience, she confesses that she ‘always felt like an outsider, being and growing up in care, being a child of the state’.

She says she loved living in New York because she felt as though everyone was accepted there, a feeling that she never experienced in the UK as a child.

Weinstein was once a powerful media mogul before scores of women came forward to accuse him of rape and sexual assault in 2017

Going on to discuss her love of America, Samantha admits how she also preferred working in the US and how the sets always felt ‘more comfortable’. 

She comments that, as a young woman on film sets in the UK, she was often asked to do things that ‘wouldn’t happen now’ and got a reputation for being ‘tricky’. 

She states ‘I didn’t have the skillset to articulate when I was uncomfortable or when something didn’t feel right’. She said that she ‘never had these problems in America’.

Meanwhile, disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was given a  16-year prison sentence in February 2023.

The once powerful media mogul, 70, was found guilty of rape and two other counts of sexual assault at a trial in Los Angeles in December after previously being sentenced in 2020 for sex crimes in New York City.