The Odyssey star Samantha Morton, 49, reveals she hasn't 'worked for a year' since filming epic due to her AGE

The actress who is now an Oscar frontrunner after portraying a mythical witch in The Odyssey has revealed she hasn't worked in a year since filming the movie - a gap she believes is due to her age. 

Samantha Morton, 49, has been receiving awards buzz since playing Circe, the being who transforms Odysseus' starving soldiers into pigs in a memorable, 10-minute long scene. 

Yet despite the 'really good agents' and manager supporting her career, Morton has now revealed she failed to land any roles in the year since filming The Odyssey. 

'I haven’t worked for a year since making The Odyssey, you know, and I’ve got really good agents and a manager, but at the end of the day, I’m 49,' she said on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast. 

'I do believe I’m a good actor, there are other good actors out there. Do you know what I mean? So, the politics of the industry has changed massively.'

Lull aside, Morton does have faith she will continue working until her 80s.  

'So what this means to me - first of all, regardless of carrying on working, which I feel confident that you know with the ups and the downs, I will keep working, till I'm in my 80s or whatever touch wood.'

For now, Morton is merely content knowing she was finally able to work with Nolan, whose 2006 film The Prestige she was once desperate to audition for. 

'But it's more that for me, I got to work with Christopher Nolan in my lifetime. That's it. I'm happy now.'

'I was happy before I've worked with some brilliant people but you're always at the mercy as an actor of who your employer is and what they expect of you and what they believe in you to do for them. 

'And without sounding corny, I genuinely cried when I got the call from my team saying, "Christopher Nolan would like to meet you."'

Indeed, it has been a meeting Morton had long been waiting for.

Decades earlier, Morton was itching to audition for Nolan's film about rival magicians. 

'I remember years ago when he was making The Prestige,' she told Entertainment Weekly, 'and wanting an audition so badly for that movie.'

'I’m saying to my agent, "But I was a magician’s assistant for real!"'

Now she is dazzling viewers in Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Greek epic in a brief scene in which she magically transforms Odysseus' men into pigs.

Describing taking on the role of Circe, she told The Hollywood Reporter: ‘I left school at 12 and started acting at that age. I’m not highly educated. I didn’t know the source material.

'I was just going by the script which blew my mind. I was sobbing, I was angry. I can’t really remember it in its entirety other than there was a day when I was with the pigs. I got into the zone and I was lost.’

Morton's acting career dates back to her early teens and is a passion she has long stated has saved her.  

At 13 she joined the Central Junior Television Workshop and soon her talent was noticed, earning her several TV roles including in Soldier Soldier and Cracker.

Despite the early roles, Samantha found herself homeless when she came to London from Nottingham at the age of 16, sleeping rough at St Pancras station.

At the age of 18 she won the part that made her name – as teenage prostitute Tracy Richards in Kay Mellor's gritty TV drama Band Of Gold.

In 1997 she took on the leading role in the independent drama Under the Skin where she played Iris, a woman coping with the death of her mother.

Impressed by her performance in the drama, Woody Allen cast her in his 1999 movie Sweet And Lowdown. She went on to receive an Oscar nomination for the performance and became a Hollywood name in 2002 after starring in Minority Report alongside Tom Cruise.