This strikingly beautiful player of the English stage gave several attention-getting performances in British and American TV-movies and international co-productions before making a big splash in Hollywood features: three starring roles in one year (1994-95) alone. Ormond studied acting at London's Webber-Douglas Academy and went on to amass such stage credits as "The Rehearsal", "Wuthering Heights", and "The Crucible". PBS viewers first encountered Ormond as the junkie Cambridge student daughter of a British official involved in the war on drugs in "Traffik", a British miniseries broadcast in the USA in 1990 on "Masterpiece Theatre". Ormond starred as Russia's Catherine the Great in the miniseries "Young Catherine" (TNT, 1991). She also appeared in two little-seen international films: Peter Greenaway's "The Baby of Macon" (1993), a tale of the 17th century Medicis which co-starred Ralph Fiennes, and "Nostradamus" (1994), a biopic of the famed visionary played by Tcheky Karyo. Filmmaker Edward Zwick was so impressed by her performance opposite Robert Duvall in the HBO biopic "Stalin" (1992, as the dictator's wife) that he cast her as the pivotal female lead in "Legends of the Fall" (1994).
This large-scale World War I-era family drama featured Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas as the sons of Western patriarch Anthony Hopkins; Ormond's character impacts upon the lives of each of these men. Next came the Richard Gere and Sean Connery starrer "First Knight" (1995), with Ormond playing Guinevere to their Lancelot and King Arthur, respectively. The film did not win the hearts of critics or audiences.
By the time "First Knight" opened, Ormond had bobbed her waist-length brown hair to play "Sabrina" in the 1995 remake of the 1954 Audrey Hepburn vehicle. It was a no-win situation for the actress: no matter how good her performance (and her reviews were not generally unkind), she would be unfavorably compared to the recently-deceased actress who had created the role. The prison thriller "Captives", which Ormond shot in the Great Britain after "Legends of the Fall", received a more modest and brief US art-house run shortly thereafter, while Ormond kept busy on a series of both large and smaller-scale international projects (e.g., "Smilla's Sense of Snow" 1997; "The Barber of Siberia" 1999).