opposite John Hurt as Winston Smith in the Michael Radford film Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on the eponymous George Orwell dystopian novel. She obtained the role through the casting agency of the Anna Scher Theatre School. She was one of the school's earliest alumni, and the theatre is acknowledged in the film's closing credits. This performance raised her profile as a film actress and attracted critical praise, particularly from Vincent Canby in The New York Times. However, her work was largely overshadowed by the death of fellow cast member Richard Burton, who delivered his final screen performance in the role of O'Brien, as well as by post-release controversy over the film's musical score. Later television and film appearances In 1985, Hamilton starred in British playwright David Hare's film Wetherby, opposite Vanessa Redgrave. Her next role was as Felicity in Sydney Pollack's Academy Award-winning Out of Africa, based on the memoirs of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen, and starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer. By the latter half of the decade, the majority of her screen roles were in obscure European films made in exotic locations as well as numerous British television dramas. In the 1986 German film, , which was shot in Thailand and loosely based on Joseph Conrad's 1915 novel Victory, Hamilton was cast as a saxophonist in an all-woman band touring seedy hotels and nightclubs in Southeast Asia. Her character, Julie, escapes a life of sexual slavery by fleeing with an eccentric German adventurer, played by Jürgen Prochnow, and the two of them take refuge on an island near Indonesia, which is already populated by a savage native warrior tribe. Also in 1986, Hamilton starred in the well-received television drama Johnny Bull, a film developed at the National Playwrights' Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center and filmed in Tennessee. In this film, a period piece set in the mid-1940s just after VE Day, she was cast as Iris Kovacs, a lighthearted Cockney bride who travels to rural Pennsylvania to live with her new American G.I. husband (Peter MacNicol) and his working class Hungarian-immigrant coal-mining family; Colleen Dewhurst and Kathy Bates starred in supporting roles. That same year, Hamilton appeared as Emily Barkstone in Hold the Dream, the second of the three BBC miniseries based on Barbara Taylor Bradford's popular "Emma Harte" novels about the fortunes of a retail empire and the machinations of the