![]() ![]() It would take an unorthodox director to film Kramer’s screenplay with the care that it deserved, and initially he was unable to find a suitable filmmaker after Narizzano abandoned the project for personal reasons – in a touch that Lawrence himself might have sympathised with, the director left his wife for a man, who then died shortly afterwards – Kramer approached the disparate likes of Stanley Kubrick, Brook and The Innocents director Jack Clayton, all of whom turned it down. ![]() ![]() He roamed freely through Lawrence’s writings, saying that while “slightly more than half” of the finished film was taken from the novel, he had also used the author’s poems, essays and letters in order to create an unorthodox but effective screenplay, that would simultaneously do justice to Women in Love and to Lawrence’s wider sensibilities, too. The end result was a combination of both.” My first draft was all dialogue, the second was mostly visual. As he said, “I became a writer not by choice but out of necessity… I wanted to show you can convey emotion along with action and that ideas and talk and beautiful scenery are not incompatible in films. However, after Kramer initially commissioned the then-modish dramatist David Mercer to adapt the novel, and it resulted in what he later called “a horrible Marxist tract”, Kramer wrote the screenplay himself. He came into contact with the Canadian director Silvio Narizzano, who suggested that Kramer produce an adaptation of Lawrence’s Women in Love: the novel’s strong sexual themes would have been unthinkable to adapt in earlier times, but given the rise of permissiveness and the opportunity to depict human behaviour frankly and explicitly on screen, the opportunity now seemed a viable one. The genesis of the film came in the mid Sixties, when the American filmmaker – and subsequent Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright – Larry Kramer had had some success with co-writing the 1968 sex comedy Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. Yet, as ever with this particular director, chaos and artistic genius walked hand in hand, and the final results spoke for themselves. She had achieved success on stage with the RSC since the early Sixties (most notably as Ophelia, opposite David Warner’s Hamlet, in Peter Hall’s legendary 1965 production) and had reprised her stage role as Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, in Peter Brook’s film of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, but she had never starred in a major picture.Īnd it did not help that Russell – who would become a frequent collaborator of hers, albeit not always harmoniously – had actively resisted casting her. When she was cast, she was by no means a known international quantity. But in truth her performance throughout the film, as the artist Gudrun Brangwen who finds herself involved in a four-sided relationship with her sister Ursula and their two friends, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, was a masterpiece of understated passion. Many would have argued that Jackson deserved an Oscar for her straight-faced delivery of that moment alone. But there’s also the moment in which the erstwhile Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn delivers the immortal line, to an understandably bewildered young man, “How are your thighs? Are they strong? Because I want to drown in flesh. It was much acclaimed on release, but it has subsequently – and undeservedly – passed into camp classic territory thanks to the notorious nude wrestling match scene between its male stars Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. However, the picture that she first received an Academy Award for, Ken Russell’s inimitable 1969 DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love, was considerably less restrained. The second Oscar that she won, for the 1973 romantic comedy-drama A Touch of Class, was an appropriate acknowledgement of a decorous and classy performance in a decorous and classy film, and one still fondly remembered now. Glenda Jackson, who has died at the age of 87, enjoyed the rare dual feat of being both a highly successful politician and one of the leading actresses of the 20th century, deservedly winning two Oscars during her illustrious career on both stage and screen. ![]()
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