Lady Jane 1986
- Director: Trevor Nunn
- Based on book: no
- Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Cary Elwes, John Wood, Michael Horden, Jane Lapotaire, Patrick Stewart
- Personal “oh yeah him/her” reaction, i.e. have seen this actor in:
- Helena Bonham Carter – The Lone Ranger, Les Misérables, Great Expectations, Dark Shadows, Life’s Too Short, Harry Potter, Toast, The King’s Speech, Alice in Wonderland, Enid, Terminator Salvation, Sweeney Todd, Corpse Bride, Conversations with Other Women, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish, Planet of the Apes, Fight Club, Keep the Aspidistras Flying, Twelfth Night, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Howards End, Hamlet, A Room with a View
- Cary Elwes – Ella Enchanted, The X Files, Cradle Will Rock, Kiss the Girls, Twister
- John Wood – Chocolat, Longitude, Jane Eyre, The Madness of King George, Orlando
- Michael Horden – Middlemarch, Cymbeline, Gandhi, King Lear, Ivanhoe, All’s Well that Ends Well, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, How I Won the War, The Yellow Rolls Royce, Cleopatra
- Jane Lapotaire – Shooting Fish, Surviving Picasso, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra
- Patrick Stewart – The Hollow Crown Richard II, The X Men Days of Future Past, Hamlet, Extras, X Men, Star Trek (one of them, I don’t remember which), Excalibur, Hamlet, I Claudius
- Why? HBC and the subject
- Seen: 29 January 2017
Having just read The Children of England by Alison Weir about the three children of Henry
VIII it’s fitting to finally watch this film that has been waiting on the shelf
for some time.
When Henry died his heir Edward was nine
years old. He was quite a strong king for all that but he inconveniently died
at the age of fifteen. He was a fervent protestant and his supporters were
determined to keep his fanatically Catholic half-sister Mary from the throne. They
chose fifteen-year-old Jane Grey, a shy, scholarly, well-educated girl with
cruel, ambitious and manipulative parents.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film starts with Jane and Edward
being friends, with Jane being warned by Catholic Princess Mary to take care. Some
of the intrigues are revealed. Jane is married off to the Duke of
Northumberland, the drunken, brawling, stupid Guilford, against her vehement protests,
but only after being whipped into submission by her mother. Even her friend the
king tells her she must marry Guilford.
So they marry. Neither is happy about it
but then they get to know each other. Maybe he’s not so bad after all. This romantic
bit is highly unhistorical. And Guilford was, in reality, hardly the class-conscious
revolutionary portrayed here.
Edward dies and to her horror Jane finds
that she has been manipulated into becoming queen.
She decides to take advantage of it to
promote her protestant beliefs but neither the people nor Mary are pleased.
Mary raises an army. Jane is queen for nine days. Then Mary is proclaimed queen
and Jane is confined to the Tower.
The movie is too long and far too
romantic. Nevertheless, it is quite an interesting portrayal of this short
dramatic parenthesis in Tudor history. A very young Bonham Carter is already
showing her vast acting skills.
3
* of 5