Julia (1977)

Julia is a 1977 drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann, from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. It is based on Lillian Hellman's book Pentimento, a chapter of which purports to tell the story of her relationship with an alleged lifelong friend, "Julia," who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II. The film in DeLuxe Color was produced by Richard Roth, with Julien Derode as executive producer and Tom Pevsner as associate producer.

Julia was received positively from the critics and was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Fred Zinnemann and Best Actress for Jane Fonda. It ended up winning three awards, Best Supporting Actor for Jason Robards, Best Supporting Actress for Vanessa Redgrave, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Alvin Sargent's script. Julia was the first film to win both supporting actor categories since The Last Picture Show six years earlier in 1971, and would be followed by Hannah and Her Sisters nine years later in 1986.

Synopsis

The young Lillian and her friend Julia, daughter of a wealthy family being brought up by her grandparents in the U.S., enjoy a childhood together and an extremely close relationship in late adolescence. Later, while medical student/physician Julia (Vanessa Redgrave) attends Oxford and the University of Vienna and studies with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Lillian (Jane Fonda), a struggling writer, suffers through revisions of her play with her mentor and sometime lover, famed author Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards) at a beachhouse.

Actors