Iris

Iris moves between two periods in the life of the writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch: her fiercely intelligent, free-spirited youth, when she met the shy academic John Bayley, and her final years, as Alzheimer's steadily erodes the mind that made her. Bayley, her husband of many decades, becomes her carer, and the film holds the two timelines together so that the loss registers against all that is being lost.

It is a study of the erosion of a mind and of the marriage that must hold as one partner disappears. The film attends to the grief of the caregiver and to the endurance of love when recognition itself is failing. It won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and drew two further acting nominations in 2002, and is based on John Bayley's memoirs Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch and Elegy for Iris.