Royal intrigue in the bedchamber for acting aristos
KATE WINSLET, Olivia Colman and Emma Stone will be caught up in incendiary court intrigue when they go before the cameras to shoot The Favourite, a film about ruthless royal scheming during the reign of Queen Anne.
Oscar-winner Winslet is in negotiations to portray the politically savvy Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who used her position as lady of the bedchamber to influence the monarch.
But the Queen, to be played by Colman, outsmarted her by promoting lowly courtier Abigail Hill (Stone), who went on to make herself indispensable to Anne and usurped the dangerous Duchess.
Ironically, the Duchess had recommended Abigail, her distant cousin, for a job in the Royal Household when she was in her teens — something Sarah came to regret bitterly.
It sounds like All About Eve for the 18th century.
The Favourite is being put together by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek-born director everyone wants to work with, along with screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.
Yorgos’s film The Lobster, which stars Colin Farrell, Ben Whishaw, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux and Colman again, won the Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
This much-debated picture divided the critics, though everyone agreed on one thing: Colman’s portrait of a hotel manager overseeing weird goings-on at a strange hotel stole the picture.
The deals for the three actresses in the Queen Anne project have not been completed, but they are making themselves available to shoot the film in the spring.
Well before then, though, they will meet with big-time, multi-Oscarwinning costume designer Sandy Powell to be measured up for their gowns. However, as Lanthimos is not a conventional film-maker, this will not be the usual costume-drama fare.
The director wasn’t available for comment yesterday because he was travelling, and a spokesman for him and the producers, Ceci Dempsey, Film4 and Element Pictures, told me that it was too early to discuss the production in detail.
Winslet has two movies coming out this season: an Australian film called The Dressmaker and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, which features superb performances f r om Michael Fassbender as the co-founder of Apple and Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, his marketing guru.
Stone was in the recent Spiderman pictures, Academy Award-winning film Birdman and Woody Allen’s latest movie Irrational Man.
The Lobster will be screened at the BFI London Fi l m Festival on October 13, and is released into Picturehouse cinemas on October 16.
As for The Favourite, Lanthimos and his creative team have clearly hit on a historical topic of much current interest. As I revealed recently, Jodhi May, Natascha McElhone and Beth Park will portray Queen Anne, the Duchess of Marlborough and Abigail Hill in Helen Edmundson’s stage play Queen Anne.
It begins performances at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre, Stratford, from November 19.