News - The Meaning Behind ‘Ophelia’ on Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl

According to the Tate collection in the UK, artist Elizabeth Siddal posed for Millais over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. Millais covered her body with flowers that signify love, pain, innocence, and faithfulness. The painting also inspired Hamlet adaptations by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996), as well as a 1995 music video for “Where The Wild Roses Grow” by Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The art news website ArtNet even pointed out that the scene in season 3 of White Lotus in which Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Woods are floating dead in the water appears to invoke the Millais painting. Arguably the most famous depiction of Ophelia in pop culture in recent years is the 2019 film Ophelia, which reimagined Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view, with Daisy Ridley starring as Ophelia. Swift acknowledged the Hamlet reference when she was previewing the album during an interview on her Kelce’s podcast, joking, “He may not have read Hamlet, but I explained it to him, so he knows what happened.”