Marleen Gorris was born on 9 December 1948 in Roermond in the Netherlands. She was born to Protestant, working-class parents in the Catholic southern part of the Netherlands. Gorris studied drama at home and abroad. She studied drama at the University of Amsterdam and has an MA in Drama from the University of Birmingham, England. She began working as a filmmaker with almost no previous experience in the cinema and made an auspicious writing and directorial debut in 1982 with A Question of Silence. The Dutch government provided the funding to finance the project.
Career
It was not until the age of 30 that Gorris began writing scripts. She took her first effort to the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, hoping to interest her in directing it. Akerman, however, told Gorris that she must make the film herself. The result, A Question of Silence, caused considerable international controversy with its story about three unacquainted women who murder a randomly chosen man. The film was hailed by some as a logical case study of what happens when women are driven to the brink by a male-dominated society, and others decried it as a juvenile revenge fantasy. Gorris was honored in her homeland with the Netherlands' Golden Calf Award and earned a reputation as a subversive new filmmaker. She followed up A Question of Silence with Broken Mirrors. Set among a group of prostitutes in an Amsterdam brothel, the film re-examined some of the themes at play in Gorris' previous feature, particularly in its analysis of the patriarchy. It was greeted with mixed reactions; many critics recognized it as an insightful, disturbing look at the sexual threats directed at women in everyday life. She did not make another film until The Last Island. The film, which told the story of a group of people and a dog stranded on an island, was dubbed by one critic as "a feminist Lord of the Flies for the '90s." In 1995, Gorris had her greatest international success to-date with Antonia's Line. Starring Willeke van Ammelrooy, the story of an independent woman and her female descendants was not as radical as the director's previous work, although a number of critics complained that the men in the film were portrayed as either ineffectual idiots or potential rapists. However, critical support for the film was overwhelming, and it was honored with a number of international awards, including a Golden Calf and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Her next film was Mrs Dalloway, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, with a cast that included Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone, and Rupert Graves. It earned a number of international honors, including an Evening Standard British Film Award. She followed this movie with The Luzhin Defence, based on a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Starring John Turturro and Emily Watson, it tells the story of the love affair between an eccentric chess champion and a strong-willed society woman. Carolina, starring Julia Stiles, Shirley MacLaine, and Alessandro Nivola, was released direct-to-video in 2005. Gorris's 2009 film Within the Whirlwind, starring Emily Watson, was not picked up for distribution. According to Watson, "It was delivered pretty much the day the market crashed so nobody was buying anything."
Personal life
Marleen Gorris came out as a lesbian after the success of Antonia's Line. Her partner, Maria Uitdehaag, served in its production as first assistant director, and was mentioned by Gorris in her Academy Award acceptance speech.
