 Distinctively beautiful, Jenny Agutter (born in Taunton on 20 December 1952) trained as a dancer and began her film career as a child in the adventure East of Sudan (d. Nathan Juran, 1964), and in 1971 she made startling impressions in two diverse films. In Lionel Jeffries' beguiling The Railway Children, she played the resourceful eldest child of the wrongly arrested father (she played the mother in a 2000 TV version), and in Nicolas Roeg's poetic Australian
culture-clash drama Walkabout, she was again a teenager whose resources are called into play, this time in appalling circumstances. Since then, what looks like a busy career seems, rather, to suggest how difficult it has been for a young and gifted actress to maintain momentum in British cinema. As a result, she has worked frequently in America (e.g., Logan's Run, d. Michael Anderson, 1976) and on TV, but only intermittently in British films, where, apart from the horse-loving girl in Equus (d. Sidney Lumet, 1977), she has scarcely had a decent role in a decent film since the early '70s.
Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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