Stage Beauty (2004)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

Richard Eyre

Writers (WGA):

Jeffrey Hatcher (play)
Jeffrey Hatcher (screenplay)

Release Date:

3 wrzesieñ 2004 (UK)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

She was the first of her kind. He was the last of his.

Plot:

A female theatre dresser creates a stir and sparks a revolution in seventeenth century London theatre by playing Desedmona in Othello. But what will become of the male actor she once worked for and eventually replaced?

Plot Keywords:

Theatre | Actor | Gender | 1660s | Homosexual

Awards:

3 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Derek Hutchinson	...	Stage Manager
Mark Letheren	...	Male Emilia / Dickie
Claire Danes	...	Maria
Billy Crudup	...	Ned Kynaston
Tom Wilkinson	...	Betterton
Ben Chaplin	...	George Villiars, Duke of Buckingham
Hugh Bonneville	...	Samuel Pepys
Jack Kempton	...	Call Boy
Alice Eve	...	Miss Frayne
Fenella Woolgar	...	Lady Meresvale
David Westhead	...	Harry
Nick Barber	...	Nick
Stephen Marcus	...	Thomas Cockerell
Richard Griffiths	...	Sir Charles Sedley
Zoe Tapper	...	Nell Gwynn

Also Known As:

Compleat Female Stage Beauty (UK) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for sexual content and language.

Runtime:

106 min

Country:

UK | Germany | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital

Certification:

Brazil:16 | Australia:M | Argentina:16 | Iceland:12 | Germany:12 | South Korea:18 | Netherlands:AL | Singapore:M18 | Spain:13 | UK:15 | USA:R | Canada:14A (Ontario)

Filming Locations:

Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey, England, UK

Company:

Qwerty Films

Trivia:

While the movie does not claim strict historical accuracy, it features many characters based on actual personalities from the seventeenth-century stage. Ned Kynaston did play female roles, but also played male roles before and after women were allowed on stage. He would have been 20 in 1660, when the first woman appeared on stage. Margaret Hughes (Maria) is supposed to have been the first woman to appear in a stage production, aged 30. She did appear as Desdemona in Othello, on December 8 at the theater on Vere Street operated by the King's Company, whose manager was Thomas Killigrew, not Thomas Betterton as the film shows. Betterton was a successful theater manager later, but was only 25 in 1660. Other characters also were not historically the age that they appear to be in the film - Nell Gwynn would have been 10.

Goofs:

Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Pepys is telling Kynaston to play a man's role, Kynaston's lips are out of sync with his speech in some shots.

Quotes:

Samuel Pepys: Tell me about your parentage, Miss Gwynn.
Nell Gwynn: My mum was a whore, my father was in the navy.
Samuel Pepys: I see.
Nell Gwynn: That's why I don't never do sailors.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The Daily Show: (2004-10-21)" (2004)

Seventeenth-century Stanislavsky

"All the world's a stage," wrote the Bard, "and all the men and women merely players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage."

"Stage Beauty" is set in the world of seventeenth-century Restoration theatre, but the stage serves as a microcosm for life itself, and the roles played by the actors before the public mirror the roles they play in their private lives. The question is, do they create their roles, or do their roles create them?

Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is an actor who takes on women's roles, since real women are not permitted to do so. He has been thoroughly trained and schooled in the then highly stylized technique of portraying women -- to such an extent that any trace of masculinity seems to have been drummed out of him.

His dresser Maria (Clare Danes) yearns to be an actress herself, but is prevented from doing so by the narrow conventions of Puritan England -- until Charles II is restored to the throne and decrees that, henceforth, real women shall play women's roles on the stage. A whole new world opens up for Maria, but it looks like curtains for Ned.

What happens next is pure anachronism: Ned and Maria are able to rise above the limitations and constraints of their era. Not only do they transcend their gender or sex roles, but they overcome their classical training and, in effect, engage in Method acting, a technique still three hundred years away in the far-distant future. When he teaches Maria how to break the mold and play Othello's Desdemona in a whole new, natural way, Ned becomes a seventeenth-century Stanislavsky.

But, by George, it works. Their performance of the celebrated death scene from "Othello" sends shock waves through an audience accustomed to pantomime and exaggerated gestures -- and it electrifies us as well.

Not since Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow in "Shakespeare in Love" have an actor and actress so shimmered and shone simultaneously on stage and screen. One hopes that Billy Crudup and Clare Danes will be remembered for their luminous performances at the 2005 Academy Awards.