Charlotte Sally Potter

British born Sally Potter is director, dancer, singer and writer. Sally Potter is known for making innovative, personal films that center around the lives of unusual women. Born in 1949, Potter began making films as a teenager and maintained dueling duties as both a director and profession dancer/choreographer. Potter went on to become an award winning performance artist and theatre director, with shows including Mounting, Death and the Maiden and Berlin. In addition, she was a member of several music bands (including the Feminist Improvising Group and The Film Music Orchestra) working as a lyricist and singer, some of her other talents.

Potter's theatrical debut was1979’s Thriller; the film short helped kick her directorial career in high gear as she re worked Puccini's La Boheme. The film was a cult hit on the international festival circuit, and it was followed four years later by Potter's feature directorial debut, Gold Diggers; as a woman who journeys to the Yukon to explore her heritage and was acclaimed as a pro feminist piece. The director followed up with a short film and the television documentary series Tears, Laughter, Fears and Rage, as well as a 1988 film on women in the Soviet cinema entitled I Am an Ox, I Am a Horse, I Am a Man, I Am a Woman; all critical successes for Potter.



Potter had her highest-profile film to date with 1992's Orlando. Adapted from Virginia Woolf's novel about a British nobleman who lives for four centuries and changes sex along the way, it starred Tilda Swinton as its eponymous adventurer. Potter's account of Woolf's novel remains faithful to the spirit of the original work while encompassing modern touches, its broken up narrative effectively brings the viewer along the vast journey (including a sex change) of Orlando's 400-year livelihood. The film earned great international praise, gaining two Oscar nominations, won over 25 international honors including the Felix awarded by the European Film Academy for the best Young European Film of 1993, and first prizes at St Petersburg, Thessaloniki.

In 2000, she again returned to the theme of a woman's personal journey with The Man Who Cried, a love story set to an operatic theme; centering on a Russian Jewish woman (Christina Ricci) who flees WWII Germany for Paris, where she becomes involved in a romantic rectangle with Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, and Johnny Depp.
Sally Potter has blazed quite a trail since emerging from Britain in the last three decades. Her work represents a uniquely British artistic view that is both disarming and enchanting. Potter’s ambitious film-making displays an intention intertwining of image, performance and music and in its avante garde blending of genders.