Miranda Otto Biography

Miranda Otto is the Australian dramatic actress best known for playing Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.  Miranda Otto grew up in a theater family: her father, Barry Otto, is a well-known actor in Australia. Miranda made her film debut as a teenager in Emma’s War (1986) and attended Australia’s prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). She spent most of the next decade in Australian theater and film roles. But her small role as the wandering wife of a soldier in Terrence Malick’s war movie The Thin Red Line brought her to the attention of American audiences. With her strong cheekbones and jawline, and hair that ranged from copper to blonde, she was a natural for dramatic and slighly offbeat roles. (“A fascinating combination of fragility and strength,” Australian director Robyn Nevin has called her.) She was a mysterious neighbor in the thriller What Lies Beneath (2000) and then Peter Jackson cast her as Eowyn, the undaunted warrior maiden of Rohan, in The Lord of the Rings.  (She appeared in the second and third films, The Two Towers in 2002 and The Return of the King  in 2003.) Her other films have included Danny Deckchair (2004), War of the Worlds (2005, with Tom Cruise), The Turning (2013) and I, Frankenstein (2014).