[6] Hamilton starred as Patricia Bates, the traumatised, catatonic daughter of a devoutly religious, middle aged Home Counties couple (Denholm Elliott and Joan Plowright) whose lives are changed by a demonic drifter and con man who calls himself Martin Taylor, played by Sting.
[8] Hamilton was cast as Julia opposite John Hurt as Winston Smith in the Michael Radford film Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on the eponymous George Orwell dystopian novel.
[10] 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.
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.
In the 1986 German film, Devil's Paradise [de],[14] 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.
That same year, Hamilton appeared as Emily Barkstone in Hold the Dream,[13] 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 business élite across three generations.
In 1989, she starred as the inscrutable femme fatale Anna Raven in the BBC miniseries of Never Come Back,[13] a noirish conspiracy thriller based on the celebrated 1941 novel by John Mair, which takes place on the eve of the London Blitz during the so-called "Phoney War" of 1939–40.
[15] In 1997, she appeared in The Island on Bird Street,[14] a Danish period drama made in the Dogme 95 style, about an 11-year-old Jewish boy who hides from the Nazis in occupied Poland during World War II before he is reunited with his father.
More recently, she appeared as Vivienne in the 2005 short film, Benjamin's Struggle,[14] described as "a compelling story set in 1930s Nazi Germany, about a nine-year-old Jewish boy who attempts to steal the original manuscript of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, believing that it will topple the Third Reich and end the suffering of his family".