30-year old British actress Saffron Burrows is a rarity in entertainment--an openly bisexual feminist with a successful film career who doesn't shy away from lesbian relationships in her work or her life.

Burrows started off with a modeling career at 15, and appeared in her first film at 17. But Burrows first gained international visibility as Nan, the boyfriend-stealing best friend of Minnie Driver's character in 1995's Circle of Friends. She was in several smaller films in the next few years, until 1999's shark-thriller Deep Blue Sea propelled her to some fame in America. She continued to appear in mostly indie films after that, however, including Timecode (2000), Enigma (2001), and Frida (2002).

Burrows first publicly acknowledged her bisexuality in an October 1999 interview with Film Unlimited when she confirmed she had had female lovers in the past. She expanded on the subject in an interview with Tatler Magazine in July 2000:

"If I was going to make a broad generalization," she confirms, "I'd say that I prefer the company of women. People know now that I live with Mike Figgis, but I prefer not to talk about it. On one level, privacy is important but, on another level, I have no desire to deny certain things. For a woman to say she has had a dalliance with another woman is quite trendy these days, but I do not like that trendiness. Life isn't about dalliances - it's about individuals. You come across people in your life that you find very interesting. It's not about something flighty."

Then a month later, in an interview with The Scotsman, Burrows, anticipating the interviewer's question about her past references to female lovers, responds "Was I confused? Not at all. I love men and I love women. I just happen to be in a calm relationship right now."

But that "calm relationship" with Figgis ended in 2002 after five years, reportedly in part because of her close relationship with acclaimed British stage actress Fiona Shaw (who is also known as Mrs. Dursley in the Harry Potter movies). Fueling the gossip was the fact that the two women share a sapphic kiss in a play they starred in together (Jeannette Winterson's PowerBook) .

When asked about her relationship with Shaw in a June, 2002 interview with The Observer, Burrows herself gave a rather cryptic response:

There is a long silence before she replies: 'She and I are working together and are great friends.' Then an even longer silence - so long that I can hear her breathing down the telephone. 'It is very difficult to talk about anything at all because it becomes so personal,' she adds eventually. 'It is right to talk about Mike [Figgis] but any other area of life is not really the domain of newsprint. As Mike has said, it is "crude and speculative".'

The same article notes that Burrows once said, long before she ever met Bill Clinton (whom she is also rumored to have dated at one time), that she fancied his wife Hillary, which Bill found very amusing, according to Burrows. In a 2003 interview with the The Observer, actor Alan Cumming (X2, Anniversary Party, Circle of Friends) credits his two-year relationship with Burrows several years ago with helping him accept his own bisexuality:

"I was really lucky that the first relationship I had after [my divorce] was with Saffron, who's really...understanding and a broadminded person. And who's now...As I'm sure you know...Well. She bats for both teams, too."

Most actresses who are gay or bisexual (or rumored to be) tend to shy away from gay roles on screen for fear of either being typecast or blowing their cover, but this clearly isn't of concern to Burrows given her roles in Timecode and Frida. Although she has played some archetypal female roles (like Nan in Circle of Friends) she most often plays women who are multi-dimensional, assertive, and hard to pin down. Her character in Deep Blue Sea, for example, is the "villain" of the film as a scientist whose driving ambition puts the others lives at stake, but you can't help synthesizing with her when you learn the intentions behind that drive.

This may be partly because Burrows herself is hard to categorize. She may be a model and an actress, but she grew up marching in demonstrations with her activist parents, joined an anti-racist group at 11, and is now an active vice-president of the National Civil Rights Movement in England. She earned spending money as a young girl by selling copies of the Socialist Worker newsletter. She admires Maya Angelou and Adrienne Rich, Marx and Galileo.

The characters she plays are rarely "women who hate other women," as she noted in an interview, and she complained to Warner Bros when her wet suit was digitally unzipped and her breasts were digitally enlarged on the posters for Deep Blue Sea.

As a woman who speaks her mind on both social issues and personal ones, and an actress who consistently plays strong, interesting female characters on-screen, Burrows proves that it is possible to go against the grain and still have a film career. The scarcity of openly bisexual actresses in Hollywood makes Burrows' apparent success a challenge to conventional wisdom that says you can't be out and successful.

But the fact that she doesn't openly discuss her relationship with Shaw may be what's allowing her to still have a career. Like Portia de Rossi, Burrows has chosen to walk the fine line between neither denying nor confirming speculation about her relationship, while quietly living her life with Shaw.

It's unfortunate that this kind of careful compromise is required, but it's still progress from a few years ago, when nothing short of denial would save an actress' career from these kinds of rumors. Perhaps with more women like Burrows coming out publicly, even this kind of compromise will be no longer be required in a few years.