Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was the daughter of academic and essayist Sir Leslie Stephen, and began publishing essays herself in 1905 after moving to London's Bloomsbury with her brother Adrian. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, delayed by the outbreak of war and Woolf's mental breakdown. In 1922 Woolf met the poet Vita Sackville-West, and by 1925 they had become lovers. Woolf, meanwhile, had worked on a string of novels that had defined her pre-eminence in British modernism: Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Dedicated to Sackville-West, Orlando was published a year later. Woolf's psychiatric problems had not gone away, however; after the Woolfs were bombed out of their London home, she drowned herself in the river Ouse during her fourth nervous breakdown.
Story: A tribute to Sackville-West's "rich, dusky attic of a mind", Orlando is the fictional biography of a 16th-century aristocrat who lives for four centuries and hardly ages. Starting out a man, Orlando is a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I and a devotee of the literary arts, but is sent to Constantinople as an ambassador by Charles II. There he falls into a trance, and reawakens as a woman. Orlando returns to England and takes her place in 18th-century literary society. In the 19th century, she wins her legal battle to retain her landed estates, and falls in love with the ambiguously gendered man Shelmerdine. Orlando's literary aspirations are finally consummated in the 20th century, as poetic works dismissed hundreds of years earlier find critical acclaim. The chronicle finishes at midnight, October 11 1928 - the day of the book's publication, as Orlando returns to her ancestral home.
Film-makers: Sally Potter (b1949) emerged from the London avant-garde scene of the 1970s, making short films and training as a dancer. Her first feature, The Gold Diggers (1983), was a parody musical starring Julie Christie. After a seven-year struggle to finance Orlando, Potter cast Tilda Swinton (then known largely for her collaborations with Derek Jarman) in the lead role, playing Orlando both as man and woman. Swinton had already played a male in Manfred Karge's play Man to Man.
How book and film compare: The spirit of 1970s and 1980s gender politics hangs over Potter's adaptation. Stressing Woolf's theme of sexual mutability and citing "the confusion of the last two decades", Potter cast "stately homo" Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I, and created a role of a castrato singer and angel for Jimmy Somerville. For her screenplay, Potter picked individual scenes from the flood of incidents Woolf describes, emphasising a narrative whereby Orlando needs to give birth to a son to keep her estates. (She has a daughter.) Woolf's final "present-day" sequence is reconfigured to reflect the film's early-1990s context. But Potter's most adventurous additions are Swinton's occasional asides to camera, breaking the fourth wall - a counterpart, according to the director, of Woolf's habit of directly addressing the reader.
Inspirations and influences: In many ways, Orlando is the summation and end-point of a certain kind of politically engaged and aesthetically daring British cinema. Derek Jarman, its spiritual leader, died in 1994, only a year later. (Four Weddings and a Funeral was also released in 1994, heralding the start of a new, "commercial" phase.)