On her deathbed, the queen promises an androgynous young nobleman named Orlando a large tract of land and a castle built on it, along with a generous monetary gift; both Orlando and his heirs would keep the land and inheritance forever, but Elizabeth will bequeath it to him only if he assents to an unusual command: "Do not fade.

Orlando acquiesces and reposes in splendid isolation in the castle for a couple of centuries during which time he dabbles in poetry and art.

The succeeding two centuries tire Orlando; the court case, bad luck in love, and the wars of British history eventually bring the story to the present day (the early 1990s).

The literary editor who judges the work as "quite good" is portrayed by Heathcote Williams—the same actor who played the poet who had, earlier in the film, denigrated Orlando's poetry.

For example, upon Orlando's arrival in Constantinople in about the year 1700, England is referred to as a "green and pleasant land", a line from William Blake's Jerusalem, which in reality was not written until 1804.

Before Orlando's release in the United States in June 1993, Vincent Canby wrote in an effusively positive review:This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetised.

Orlando could well become a classic of a very special kind—not mainstream perhaps—but a model for independent film makers who follow their own irrational muses, sometimes to unmourned obscurity, occasionally to glory.

"[17] By 2010, Orlando was received as part of Potter's successful oeuvre with Matthew Connelly and had one critic affirming in the first line of his review that "Rarely have source material, director, and leading actress been more in alignment than in Orlando, the 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel, directed by Sally Potter and starring Tilda Swinton...Watching Orlando some 17 years after its U.S. theatrical run, however, proves a welcome reminder of just how skillfully they [Potter and Swinton] marshalled their respective gifts here, how openly they entered into a dialogue with Woolf's playful, slippery text.

"[19] In 2017, the film was screened multiple times as part of a multi-media arts project Orlando: The Queer Element.

Together they created a site-specific piece that was performed at the National Trust venues Hanbury Hall[27][28] and Knole house (the home of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover, and the inspiration for Orlando).

The event also served part of the National Trust's "Prejudice and Pride" programme, which marked 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom with the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

[29] Orlando, both the film and the novel, was the primary inspiration for both the 2020 spring exhibition of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 2020 Met Gala.