Gay Hamilton

Gay Hamilton is a Scottish-born actress whose relatively spare film career has at least equaled her much longer television biography through its caliber and renown. After co-starring in the U.K. television dramas "Kidnapped" and the BBC production of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," in 1963 and 1966 respectively, Hamilton had her first credited film role in the Hammer Film Productions' "A Challenge for Robin Hood" in 1967. Hamilton continued earning recurring roles in several BBC series well into the 1970s, among them the crime dramas "Softly Softly " and its spinoff, "Softly Softly: Task Force," all part of the momentum that led her toward her a prominent role in Stanley Kubrick's highly lauded war romance "Barry Lyndon," as Nora Brady, the source of the film's key duel. Her subsequent film role in another movie involving duels, Ridley Scott's 1977 action adventure "The Duellists," as the less crucial character Maid, was a trivial if amusing coincidence. On top of appearing in recurring BBC TV roles separated by decades--as Mo Khan in the 1980 drama "Wainwright's Law," and then as Maisie McLintock in the soap "Doctors," from 2005 to 2008--Hamilton had an even longer late-career gap between film projects, spanning from 1978's "The Day Santa Claus Cried" to the 2012 drama "The Glass House."