Look who’s NOT afraid to play Virginia Woolf . . .
THE love affair between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, which occurred as much on paper as it did between sheets of Egyptian cotton, is soon to go before cameras now that Elizabeth Debicki has joined Gemma Arterton in the long-gestating project. Debicki (left) has arrived in London from Chicago, where she was filming Steve McQueen’s cinematic take on Lynda La Plante’s breakthrough Eighties ITV drama series Widows, to prepare to portray literary lioness Woolf in Vita And Virginia. The film is based on Eileen Atkins’s adaptation of her epistolary play, which she created from the almost 20 years of correspondence between Woolf and Sackville-West. Arterton told me a year ago she would be in director Chanya Button’s picture, as Vita. Since then, though, everyone from Eva Green to Andrea Riseborough and Claire Foy has been linked with the role of Virginia. When I saw Debicki a few weeks ago, she mentioned in passing she was about to sign on to do ‘a film in London’ about some ‘famous women’, but she was reluctant to reveal more. I have since been able to confirm her involvement in the movie. Debicki has become much sought after following successes in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, the BBC TV drama The Night Manager and Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 2.
Atkins wrote Vita And Virginia as a theatrical piece that was originally staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1992. Atkins played Woolf, and Penelope Wilton was Sackville-West, and they transferred with the show to the West End. Two years later, the play moved to Broadway, now with Atkins starring opposite Vanessa Redgrave.
Atkins wrote a screenplay, but it was a 25-year struggle for funding. Changing attitudes to same-sex relationships helped, as has acclaim for films featuring lesbian love such as Carol and Blue Is The Warmest Colour.
In the play, the two women stood by, or sat at, desks at opposite sides. I trust the movie will open out to locations such as the Sackville-West family seat at Knole in Kent (where there’s an inscribed copy of Woolf’s novel Orlando, whose androgynous titular character was based on Sackville-West... Vita’s son Nigel described it as the ‘longest love letter in literature’).
They could also visit Sissinghurst Castle, where Vita and husband Harold Nicolson made their home. Plus, there’s Monk’s House, Woolf’s cottage in Sussex, where she and husband Leonard entertained Vita and literary luminaries such as T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster.
While Vita had an aristocratic background, Virginia’s lineage was storied, in a literary way (she was a granddaughter of William Thackeray). And her books still fly off the shelves. Filming on the picture begins on September 4.