Samantha Morton, who plays the sorceress Circe in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, has spoken candidly about experiencing homelessness as a teenager, describing a childhood shaped by her mother’s mental health struggles and her father’s battle with alcoholism.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, the 49-year-old BAFTA winner recalled moving between foster families and hostels after being placed under legal guardianship as a ward of court.
“I went pillar to post with foster families, homeless hostels, sleeping by the bins at the back of the Co-op, because it was too dangerous to go back to the children’s home because of the abuse,” she said.
Morton left school at 13 and spent nearly a year homeless between the ages of 13 and 14, sleeping at friends’ houses or in bus shelters.
Reflecting on how those years shaped her, she said: “I have made choices that have always been about survival, because I watched my mum trying to survive and I watched my dad trying to survive.”
Despite the hardship, Morton was firm that she has never blamed her parents for her upbringing.
“Never, never my parents. Always authority. Always the establishment. That’s because I grew up in Nottinghamshire in the 80s with Margaret Thatcher destroying everything,” she said.
“Just because somebody doesn’t bring up their children or can’t look after their children doesn’t make them a bad person. There are all sorts of reasons… illness. There are so many reasons you can end up in care.”
She added of her early resilience: “Someone told me I was resilient when I was younger. But sometimes you’ve got no choice other than to be resilient because if you are not, you’re dead.”
Morton is the daughter of factory worker Pamela Morton, who died of lung cancer in 2017, and coal miner Peter Morton, who died last year.
She has previously spoken about experiencing abuse during her time in care as a child, describing herself in a 2009 interview as someone who understood, even then, that violence in that context was “irrational.”
Morton went on to build an acclaimed career across film and television, including an Oscar-nominated performance in 2003’s In America and a longtime role on AMC’s The Walking Dead.
