My Brilliant Career (film)

My Brilliant Career
Theatrical release poster
Directed byGillian Armstrong
Screenplay byEleanor Witcombe
Based onMy Brilliant Career
1901 novel
by Miles Franklin
Produced byMargaret Fink
Starring
CinematographyDonald McAlpine
Edited byNicholas Beauman
Music byNathan Waks
Production
companies
The New South Wales Film Corporation
Margaret Fink Productions
Distributed byGUO Film Distributors
Release date
  • 17 August 1979 (1979-08-17)
Running time
100 minutes
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
BudgetAU$890,000[1]
Box officeAU$3,052,000 (Australia)
$2.5 million (US/Canada)[2]

My Brilliant Career is a 1979 Australian period drama film directed by Gillian Armstrong, and starring Judy Davis, Sam Neill, and Wendy Hughes. Based on the 1901 novel of the same name by Miles Franklin, it follows a young woman in rural, late-19th-century Australia whose aspirations to become a writer are impeded first by her social circumstance, and later by a budding romance.

Filmed in the Monaro region, New South Wales in 1978, My Brilliant Career was released in Australia in August 1979, and later premiered in the United States at the New York Film Festival. It received significant critical acclaim, and was nominated for numerous AACTA Awards, winning three, while Davis won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In the United States, it received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film.

Contemporarily, the film is regarded as being part of the Australian New Wave of cinema. In 2018, it underwent restoration by the Australian National Sound and Film Archive, and was issued on Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection the following year.

  1. ^ Stratton 1980, pp. 217–220.
  2. ^ Donahue, Suzanne Mary (1987). American film distribution : the changing marketplace. UMI Research Press. p. 302. ISBN 978-0-8357-1776-2. Please note figures are for rentals in US and Canada