ALL FOR ONE AND 50 FILMS
Sharpen up on Three Musketeers
★ SWASHBUCKLING new movie The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan is hitting cinemas this weekend and has been getting rave reviews from the critics.
The action-packed flick tells the story of dashing Frenchman D’Artagnan, played by Francois Civil, in a thrills and spills 17th-Century adventure.
★ He pals up with fellow fighters Athos, Porthos and Aramis to defeat foes and outwit the beautiful and mysterious Milady de Winter, played by ex-Bond girl Eva Green, 42.
Here JAMES MOORE reveals some stirring secrets behind the fiction…
The movie is adapted from
1 the 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. Its hero was based on the real-life French soldier Charles de Batz de Castelmore, born in Gascony and known as D’Artagnan, above right. He became captain of the
2 Musketeers of the Guards, an elite cavalry regiment armed with guns and swords formed in the 1600s to protect the French kings. The briefly wed
3 father-of-two also worked as a spy and died in 1673, aged 61, ironically from a musket ball, while laying siege to the Dutch city of Maastricht. The characters of
4 Athos, Porthos and Aramis were based on Armand de Sillegue, Isaac de Portau and Henry d’Aramitz. And although
5 the plot of the book is largely fictionalised along with the motto, “All for one and one for all”, there are elements of truth.
6 There really was a ruthless Cardinal Richelieu, right, in 17th-Century France who was involved in intrigue with the French King Louis XIII.
The book and film’s
7 English Duke of Buckingham was also a real 17thCentury figure, who may indeed have wooed Louis’ wife Queen Anne. He was murdered in 1628. Scheming Milady de Winter
8 is thought to have been based on Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle. She’s said to have been involved in a genuine revenge-based, jewel-stealing plot after being spurned by Buckingham.
9 The book’s author was Alexandre Dumas, born in France in 1802, from a mixed race and aristocratic background. His grandmother was a slave in the Caribbean and his grandfather was a nobleman.
10 He grew up in poverty when his dad Thomas, a top French Revolutionary general, died of stomach cancer when Dumas was three years old.
11 But Dumas would find fame as an author, also penning novels like The Man in the Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Cristo, plus the story on which composer Tchaikovsky based his ballet The Nutcracker.
12 Although he married Ida Ferrier in 1840, the writer is reckoned to have had 40 mistresses and four illegitimate children.
13 He was a member of a Parisian club, which included other famous authors like Victor Hugo, who would get together to smoke hash.
14 Dumas splashed the cash building a lavish chateau, but later had to flee into exile before his death aged 68 in 1870. There have been
15 over 50 screen adaptations of The Three Musketeers, including a 1973 movie starring Oliver Reed and Raquel Welch, as well as hit cartoon versions, such as the wacky Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds. A sequel to the new movie is currently in the works.