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Daphne - BBC2 Saturday 12th May 2007; Lesbian content drama with Janet McTeer
Topic Started: May 12 2007, 10:09 AM (2,281 Views)
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The bosses slave!
Having been a fan of Janet McTeer for a long time, I was interested to find out she had done a new drama for BBC2, even more interested to find it has lesbian content.

Finally found a date for it to be shown - this Saturday 21:00 - 22:30 times.
Its called Daphne and here is the information from the BBC tv online listing.

In celebration of Daphne Du Maurier's centenary, a brand new drama starring Geraldine Somerville, Elizabeth McGovern and Janet McTeer brings the secret love life of this renowned story teller to BBC TWO.

Based on personal letters and biographies, the film charts the story of Daphne's passion for the beautiful American heiress, Ellen Doubleday, and her life changing love affair with the fun loving actress Gertrude Lawrence. Some strong language.
“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
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abzug
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Oooh, let's hope we get this in the US at some point. I LOVE Janet McTeer!
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Probably not the time to mention we saw her in the all women's version at The Globe in London of Taming Of The Shrew then...............
and its not a word I usually use, but she and it was....... awesome!


“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
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silverballnz
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Hi from the land of the Kiwi.
abzug
May 13 2007, 02:56 AM
Oooh, let's hope we get this in the US at some point. I LOVE Janet McTeer!

Same here abzug just love her.
Will never forget her performance in Portrait of a Marrige when she played Vita Sackville_West did you see it?

ILMJN well was it good?
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I love MJNet
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Portrait of a Marriage - yep saw it. And The Governor.... I suppose you could say the forerunner to BG's at the time.

As for the production, I thought it was excellent! It was pretty obvious (more than I had realised to be honest) DDM had a pretty torrid private life.
In fact you could draw some parallels with POAM but it never felt that is what you were watching (if that makes sense to you).

I thought all three main woman were excellent! DDM was played by Geraldine Somerville, JMcT played Gertrude, and Elizabeth McGovern played Ellen Doubleday.
Amy Jenkins (the creator of This Life of which I was also a fan so was really interested to see how they dealt with this), wrote Daphne after reading Margaret Forster’s celebrated biography and studying du Maurier’s private letters.

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SPOILER


Basically the plot line for this centred around DDM not long after the war. After her husband returns (she was married with 3 children) she was already a successful author.
Because of this success with "Rebecca" DDM has to go to New York to defend herself against unfounded accusations that she plagiarised the plot.

Its while she is there she falls completely for the wife of her publicist, Ellen Doubleday.
Despite the pair’s intense friendship, the heterosexual Doubleday does not reciprocate, but does allude to knowing and understanding DDM situation.

DDM is devastated and she returns to Britain, having won her court case, but lost out in love. But she channels her pain and frustration into a play, September Tide, about a young man’s forbidden love for his mother-in-law. The plot, though few people realised it at the time, is a cipher for her own predicament.

Then, having already briefly met Gertrude Lawrence (JMcT) at a party and instantly disliking her, DDM was horrified to find Gertrude had been cast as the lead role of Mother in Law in her play.
But, eventually, Gertrude breaks down the frosty DDM, being completely opposite in character. Although another twist is that Gertrude was also at one time a mistress to DMM's father!

They enjoyed what appeared to be a passionate, if not altogether troubled relationship although it was subtle in the way it was portrayed, partly because you could sense DDM was at times dismissive and didn't really "end" the relationship, but at the same time, pushed Gertrude away.
If anything, you sensed at the end of this it’s not neat. It’s not black and white. And it was certainly no fairy tale, and you ended where they had begun, with the arrival of the news to DDM that Gertrude had died - and this lead onto her next best selling novel "My Cousin Rachel."

To sum up briefly. I thought it was subtle, tragic and sometimes even funny in places.
Excellent production and one I would highly recommend to anyone!


“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
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silverballnz
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Hi from the land of the Kiwi.
Sounds just like my cup of tea hope we get it here in NZ.

Saw the Goveror and loved it.

Also I think ive seen all her moives JMT is a wonderful actress.
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solitasolano
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Daphne to play on LOGO...starting this next Sunday I believe...

(silverballnz.....love your avatar, but itreminds me of that LOGO airs shows censored and/or altered and/or omitted ....when that episode was shown on LOGO the shot was reframed to lose Nikki's butt crack...what a lose so thanks for the memories.)
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abzug
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I finally watched this film, and I was absolutely blown away! First, stylistically it was incredible. The lighting, the makeup, the cinematography, the music: they all made you feel like you were actually watching a film from the late 1940s or early 1950s. The imagery of the ocean and waves, the cigarette smoking, the eye contact--this film used all the 1950s imagery/metaphors for sex. But yet all of this was focused on lesbian relationships, not heterosexual ones. It was absolutely completely stirring to watch.

Geraldine Somerville was absolutely incredible--so wound up inside, so passionate and yet so controlled. I also found myself relating so strongly to her character. It was this wonderful portrait of a woman who loves women, but can't find any who love her back. Reminded me so much of a crush or two I had in my late teens when I was a lesbian and it seemed like no one else in the world was or would ever be. I wished desperately for her to have a happy ending, to find love and allow herself to be loved back, but I guess it was not to be for DDM.

Has anyone read My Cousin Rachel? What is it about? I've only read Rebecca, none of her other novels.
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abzug
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I forgot to mention, the soundtrack was another delicious twist, with all this double entendre. Daphne comes back from NY, having fallen in love with Ellen Doubleday, and her husband and her two kids are singing "There's Nothing Like A Dame." There were three or four other fun examples of lyrics on the soundtrack almost acting like lesbian thought bubbles above Daphne's head.
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Oooh sounds good then abzug...but I wonder, what version did you see...a broadcast or a dvd perhaps...because so far what I've seen on LOGO are always edited and the good stuff cut out or truncated...maybe I should just go rent the dvd. Thoughts?
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Oh I'm dying to see this one too. I'm a great fan of Janet McTeer as well. She was absolutely amazing in POAM (btw my nick is Vita Sackville-West's alter ego in Virginia Woolf's novel of the same name).

I've been looking desperately for a torrent (my only chance to see it), but so far in vain.
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abzug
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I watched a dvd version recorded from BBC2, so no editing, no commercials. It was only 90 minutes long, though, so perhaps Logo will give it a 2 hour slot and not cut anything? The commercial breaks would still be annoying though.

The more I've been thinking about this film, and how well-made it was, the more I think that if it hadn't been about lesbians, it would have gotten a theatrical release in the US, as many made-for-BBC films do. Or at the very least someone like HBO or Showtime would have picked it up. No offense to Logo or anything, but this film deserves to be shown without commercials and without editing.
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abzug
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OK, I'm kind of obsessed with this film now. Here's an article I found from when they were in the middle of filming:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...2010509,00.html

Du Maurier's lesbian loves on film

Screenplay examines writer's infatuation with American publishing tycoon's wife and actress

Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday February 11, 2007
The Observer

Daphne du Maurier's name has long been linked with the destructive story of one woman's obsession with another. Her novel Rebecca tells of the second Mrs de Winter's desperate struggle to break free of the shadow cast by her beautiful predecessor. To commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth this year, the BBC has turned to another story full of passionate intrigue between women: Du Maurier's own life.
Daphne, based on the controversial central chapters in Margaret Forster's 1993 authorised biography, is being filmed on location this month in London, Devon and Cornwall. It stars Geraldine Somerville in the role of Du Maurier, and Elizabeth McGovern and Janet McTeer as her two great romantic loves - the American publishing tycoon's wife Ellen Doubleday and the actress Gertrude Lawrence.

The screenplay has been adapted from Forster's book by Amy Jenkins, the creator of This Life, in her first attempt at period drama. It will chart du Maurier's deep and enduring love for her husband, Frederick 'Boy' Browning, but will also explain how her largely unrequited infatuations with Doubleday and Lawrence were reflected in her writing.
The 90-minute drama, to be shown on BBC2, focuses on what the BBC describes as the 'fraught' period of Du Maurier's life that followed the success of Rebecca and led up to the writing of My Cousin Rachel and her short story The Birds, famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Jenkins has worked with both Forster and with the Du Maurier family to shape the script. 'Daphne du Maurier was not what you would expect,' she said. 'She was irreverent, reclusive, funny, and tortured during this period of her life. I always want to write about strong, interesting women and Daphne's story is both tragic and illuminating. You'll never read Rebecca in the same way again.'

Du Maurier first met the glamorous Doubleday, who was married to her own publisher, Nelson Doubleday, on a voyage to New York on the Queen Mary. The novelist was sailing out, accompanied by two of her three children, in order to appear in a trial which revolved around accusations that she had plagiarised sections of Rebecca

The unsuccessful case had been brought against her by the writer Edwina MacDonald, who claimed that the 1940 Hitchcock film of the book relied heavily on her own work, Blind Windows

At some point during Du Maurier's stay in the Doubledays' comfortable New York home, she fell in love with her hostess.

Private letters written between the two women reveal the intensity of their relationship and show how hard the novelist tried to understand her own sexual and emotional needs. Somewhat mysteriously, she habitually referred to her heterosexual encounters as 'Cairo' and to homosexual encounters as 'Venice'. The code is thought to relate to her feelings about the nature of the two cities.

Du Maurier wrote a play, September Tide, about her forbidden love for Ellen, 'the Rebecca of Barberrys', and its staging then led her straight into a life-changing and doomed second lesbian affair with Lawrence, the vivacious actress who had inspired Noel Coward.

'What is fascinating is the way her personal life informed her writing,' said Kim Thomas, the executive producer of Daphne. 'Once you know this story, it changes the way you read everything. I would say that in My Cousin Rachel, Rachel is Ellen.' The film, Thomas adds, will be a contemporary take on the story, but with a strong sense of the films of Du Maurier's own era. The lesbian love scenes, she suggests, will be more reminiscent of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter than Sarah Waters's more graphic Fingersmith

At the time of her book's publication, Forster acknowledged the complexity of Du Maurier's emotional life. 'I accept her word that she was a hybrid, with tendencies both ways,' Forster said. 'But she said she felt the pleasure was greater with Venice than Cairo because she felt more in control that way.'

Forster's book also dwelt on Du Maurier's difficult relationship with her father, the actor/manager Gerald du Maurier, who was candid about the fact that he wished she were a boy.
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abzug
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And a re-interpretation of the novel Rebecca with a focus on the images of repressed lesbian desire:
http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/featur...icle2537289.ece

Daphne du Maurier: Venetian tendencies

Daphne du Maurier, born 100 years ago today, kept a dark secret behind the façade of the respectable English wife. Cathy Pryor revisits her finest novel, 'Rebecca', and finds it full of clues to the author's inner turmoil
Published: 13 May 2007

In November 1947, Daphne du Maurier fell in love with a woman. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last. But it was to be the most surprising to du Maurier herself. The affair she had already had, with a teacher at her finishing school in Paris, was 20 years behind her, and she considered herself more or less what she seemed to be to the outside world: a successful writer, a mother, and, an affair or two notwithstanding, a wife. Her nemesis was Ellen Doubleday, the wife of du Maurier's US publisher, Nelson Doubleday, and the way in which they met, according to Margaret Forster's excellent 1993 biography, Daphne, only added to the shock.

Du Maurier had been sued over alleged plagiarism in her 1938 novel Rebecca, and had to travel to the US to answer those charges in court. She went by sea, on the Queen Mary. Two days into the journey, Doubleday knocked on her cabin door. Du Maurier "stared at her speechless, then sank down on her bunk", Forster writes. "In a letter she wrote to Ellen six weeks later, when she was back in England, she described how overcome she had been and how she had instantly been transported back 20 years in time until she was 'a boy of 18 all over again with nervous hands and a beating heart, incurably romantic and wanting to throw a cloak before his lady's feet...'. Her feelings of excitement were mixed with ones close to terror."

We can thank Ellen Doubleday for two things. Firstly, she lived abroad. Secondly, she wasn't gay, and though she became very fond of du Maurier, she made it clear that she was not going to sleep with her. Those two things resulted in an outpouring of frustrated, intense letters from du Maurier to Doubleday that tell us a great deal about her conflicted feelings about the attraction she felt for women. Read what she has to say in the letters, and then reread her novels, and they take on a whole new meaning. In Rebecca, in particular, phrases and images du Maurier used to Doubleday leap out at you, even though the novel was written nearly a decade earlier.

The idea that she was really a boy, not a woman, is one that du Maurier returns to over and over again. She had grown up, she writes to Doubleday, "with a boy's mind and a boy's heart... so that at 18, this half-breed fell in love, as a boy would, with someone quite 12 years older than himself... and he loved her in every conceivable way. And then the boy realised he had to grow up, and not be a boy any longer, so he turned into a girl, and the boy was locked in the box forever. D du M wrote her books, and had young men, and later a husband, and children, and a lover, but... she opened up the box sometimes and let the phantom, who was neither boy nor girl but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see."

The boy's abrupt reappearance threw her into turmoil, she writes: "I pushed the boy back into his box again and avoided you on the boat like the plague... You looked lovelier every day. It just defeated me." But however much in love du Maurier was, Doubleday was not under any circumstances to think she was a lesbian. "By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that love by that unattractive word that begins with 'L', I'd tear their guts out."

Ironically, du Maurier was something of a homophobe. "Nobody could be more bored with all the L people than I am," she writes. "I like to think my Jack-in-the-box was, and is, unique." But this "uniqueness" brought with it anguished self-doubt: "Disembodied spirits like myself are all wrong," she wails to Doubleday at one point, and "my life has been one long lie for as far back as I can remember" at another. She wears many masks, she writes, but is in the end "merely the person dancing alone in the long room, thumbing my nose at the world". Not even Doubleday was exempt from mockery: after visiting her in the US, du Maurier writes, cruelly: "I am shaking with silent laughter most of the time, but you are probably not aware of it."

Du Maurier's love affairs with women are common knowledge now. But they weren't during du Maurier's lifetime. It was only after she died in 1989 that Forster's biography made her sexuality public. Forster writes, in a new, revised edition released as part of the centenary of du Maurier's birth, 100 years ago today, that du Maurier's children still find their mother's bisexuality hard to accept. Perhaps the fact that du Maurier kept it hidden for so long, however, is not surprising, since she was a secretive woman who struggled to understand it herself. She describes sexual feelings evasively, using code words and euphemisms, "the L word" being but one example. An attractive person she termed "a menace" (note the suggestion of threat); foreplay was "spinning", to have sex was "to wax", sex with men was "Cairo", sex with women "Venice". She wouldn't name things by their name. In one of her later letters to Doubleday, though, she admits that she preferred "Venice" to "Cairo", because she felt more confident with it. "Truly, truly, I should have been born a boy. Don't you think? ... Nothing is more amusing than to have fun with glamorous or menacing men, but that's a diversion, it's not home ... What is strongest in you comes out in the middle years. [I have] gone back to nature."

So to Rebecca, which remains du Maurier's most admired work along with her short stories "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now", all subsequently turned into brilliant films, all peerless examples of her talent for creating a sharp, atmospheric sense of place and a pervading suggestion of disturbance and threat. Rebecca is sometimes mistakenly seen as a romance, probably because du Maurier was at times marketed as a writer of romances, which infuriated her. She herself said it was a study of jealousy based on her feelings for her husband.

The plot, partly thanks to the 1941 Hitchcock adaptation, is well known. A shy young woman, the narrator of the book, who remains nameless throughout, meets a rich man, Max de Winter, marries him and is whisked back to his country pile in Cornwall, Manderley (based on du Maurier's own country pile in Cornwall, Menabilly). Here, feeling inadequate to the task of being the lady of the house, particularly in the face of hostility from the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, she becomes obsessed with the thought of her husband's first wife, the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca, who had drowned only a year before. She convinces herself that her husband still loves Rebecca.

But far from being a demure wife, it turns out, Rebecca was a sexually free spirit who held the bonds of marriage in contempt. We aren't told what she got up to: Max de Winter won't give it a name. But "she was not even normal", he says, savagely. "I don't want to tell you about [those years], the lie we lived, she and I." If he is repulsed, however, Danvers is admiring. Rebecca's close companion and maid for many years, "Danny" is clearly still in love with her. Rebecca "had all the courage and spirit of a boy", Danvers says. "She ought to have been a boy." Rebecca's affairs with men meant nothing, Danvers insists: "She despised all men.... Lovemaking was a game to her, only a game. She did it because it made her laugh. I've known her come back and sit upstairs in her bed and rock with laughter at the lot of you."

What has happened to Rebecca, this vital, forceful creature who we are told had the face of a beautiful boy, who went through life shaking with silent laughter, thumbing her nose at the world? Before the novel even starts, she has been killed, locked in a box forever - the tiny cabin of her boat - and buried beneath the sea. Du Maurier may have raved "to hell with psychoanalysis", but that's as clear an image of repression as you can get. It fails, as repression fails: the attempt to blot out Rebecca has only made her stronger. Though dead, she still dominates the book. She is the centre around which the thoughts of the others constantly revolve. Even the boat her body lies in is called Je Reviens ("I will return"). Her presence haunts Manderley, where it is felt in every room: the second wife sees her possessions, her taste, as "vividly alive, having something of the glow of the rhododendrons... rich and glowing in the morning sun".

The second wife's growing obsession with Rebecca, which du Maurier claimed was jealousy, begins to seem curiously like desire as the book proceeds. For one, there's a preoccupation with Rebecca's physical attributes, which she cannot seem to control. "Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca," she says. "I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the strong and clever hands... If I heard it, even among a thousand others, I should recognise her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca." In a telling episode, she goes on the sly to inspect what had been Rebecca's bedroom, "my heart beating in a queer excited way". Once there, she begins to fondle Rebecca's intimate possessions. She notes that the room smelt "queer" - that word again. At that moment the door opens and in comes Danvers, "triumphant, gloating, excited in a strange unhealthy way". Danvers comes nearer. "Now you are here let me show you everything," she says. "'I know you want to see it all, you've wanted to for a long time, and you were too shy to ask.' She took hold of my arm, and walked me towards the bed. I could not resist her." But Danvers doesn't thrust the wife on to the bed and have her evil way with her, as you might expect. Instead, she talks obsessively about Rebecca. "I did everything for her, you know..." The mood darkens as Danvers describes the night of Rebecca's death, then becomes intimate again: "When Mr De Winter is away, and you feel lonely, you might like to come to these rooms and sit here ... I feel her everywhere. You do too, don't you?"

Though this scene pulses with the narrator's "queer" excitement, there's dread, too, and distaste: far be it from du Maurier to admit to "that unattractive word that begins with L". Danvers, in other words, is a threatening character because she represents what du Maurier thought of as a threatening thing. She, like Rebecca, is "a menace". She is often described as looking dead, a "black figure" with a "skull's face" and "hollow eyes". That is partly because she is, in one sense, a dead woman: her heart is in the grave with Rebecca. Like the second wife, who feels herself to be a ghost, and Rebecca herself, Danvers is a "disembodied spirit", "all wrong".

With all this, it's perhaps surprising that heterosexuality wins in the end. Or does it? After all, Max de Winter and his bride are forced into exile in a foreign land, where they fritter away their time in dull routines, talking about cricket. They lose Manderley, which stands for many things, among them class, privilege, marriage, domesticity, all destroyed, burned to the ground by an enraged lesbian (who gets away scot-free, too, in contrast to the film). In fact, Manderley can be seen as another box: a grandiose box, but a box nonetheless, in which the second wife feels herself to be buried. It's under threat from the start, in the famous opening passage - "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again" - in which the second wife sees the trees and plants around the house encroaching on it menacingly, having gone "half-breed" and grown enormous, taking on sexual shapes: "The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace." Nature, she says, "had come into her own again ... The garden had obeyed the jungle law."

As did du Maurier ... almost. Sadly, she maintained her distaste for "the L people" to the end of her life. At the time she wrote Rebecca, she believed her "Venetian" tendencies to be under control, put aside in favour of marriage. Ironically, it was Rebecca that led to her meeting with Ellen Doubleday, abruptly reviving those buried impulses (which, happily, subsequently found some fulfilment in her affair with the actress Gertrude Lawrence). Rebecca, it seems to me, owes its emotional force to those half-stifled longings, which run counter to the book's overtly heterosexual themes, but which, like Rebecca, refuse to die. You can put the boy in his box, and the wife in her house, but the truth will out in the end.
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Well I'll start out with the broadcast on LOGO...but I"ve never seen one LOGO movie which isn't cut to hell...and not just with interruptions for adverts...I mean cuts in content....but I'll start there...depending I can chase a bbc dvd down.

And dang, doesn't my reading list just get longer and longer.



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and her short story The Birds, famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Where have I been?

abzug, see you have posted another article while I was composing here...soon off to read that too.
ETA: Boy in a box article, great read...all I know is the old b&w film Rebecca. I can see Judith Anderson, Joan Fontaine and Sir Olivier...and of course the set blazing away...And I didn't know Du Maurier wrote Dont' Look Now also...is it Sunday night yet?
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