Georgina Hale

Georgina Hale was born in Ilford, Essex to publicans Elsie (née Fordham) and George Robert Hole. 

She later said she had:

" ...a really bad education. I couldn't write, spell, or read, so it was a real problem, because that sort of thing wasn't acknowledged then. There was a real shame in it, and you were the dunce of the class, always getting whacked around the head. We were on the move a lot as well, so going to so many schools, always being the new girl, it was so frightening and so nerve-wracking as a kid, and it really affected me."

As a teenager, she worked as an apprentice hairdresser and studied Stanislavski's method approach to acting at a fledgling studio, the Chelsea Actors' Workshop, in London, before being accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she graduated in 1965.

Her most significant film rôle is arguably that of Alma Mahler in Ken Russell's Mahler (1974), opposite Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler. Her performance was called "excellent" by both Time Out and Radio Times, and earned her the 1975 BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Rôles.

In his review for Film Comment magazine, critic Stephen Farber wrote:

"Georgina Hale gives an electric performance as Alma. She is touchingly vulnerable in all the flashback sequences, while in the scenes on the train she presents a completely different side of Alma’s character-a supremely bitter, savagely sarcastic shrew. Alma’s imperious, ice-cold façade is the mask she has chiseled to conceal her frustration and disappointment over the stifling of her creative potential. The tension is palpable: we can feel the anger and pain seething beneath her sardonic exterior."

She also made appearances in a number of Russell's other films, with rôles in The Devils (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), Lisztomania (1975), Valentino (1977), and Treasure Island (1995). Russell later referred to Hale as "an actress of such sensitivity that she can make the hair rise on your arms."