Crowning glory as Miss World drama of 1970 finally gets made
THEY made some of the biggest hits of British film and television, including Calendar Girls, The Queen and The Crown, but producers Suzanne Mackie and Andy Harries failed seven years ago to get anyone interested at all in a film about the start of the women’s liberation movement.
No one wanted to invest in a story about the 1970 Miss World Competition, despite its real-life drama of a stage invasion and flour-bombing of the presenter, Bob Hope, during an event watched by 100 million viewers.
Now the climate for such projects has changed, filming is to start on Misbehaviour, starring Keira Knightley.
Harries said MeToo had “suddenly activated interest”. He said: “It was written [seven] years ago... People always quite liked the script… but we hadn’t managed to find the right director or the money for it…we couldn’t get it set until about a year ago, when suddenly the world changed, and there was interest.”
He added: “It’s an example of a story that’s been around for ages that finds its time. The zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is about women, the rebalancing of the world… one of the seminal moments when the women’s movement found its voice was 1970 in the UK.”
The “bathing beauty” pageant became the world’s most-watched television show. For the contestants, it opened doors to fame and fortune. Halle Berry, the Hollywood star, was runner-up in the 1986 Miss
USA competition.
But its founder, impresario Eric Morley, found himself defending the event against accusations that it demeaned women and, in 1970, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, women hurled flour-bombs at Hope, chanting: “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry!”
Harries said that, while it marked “the start of the women’s lib movement”, it also saw “the anti-apartheid movement… lobbying Morley and his merry mates because there had never been a black Miss World.”
Miss Grenada was crowned beauty queen, instead of the Swedish favourite. In the film, she is played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, star of Belle, about a biracial aristocrat.
Knightley said she responded immediately to Misbehaviour, as a story in which women challenged the patriarchy. Her casting came after she revealed her three-year-old daughter Edie was “banned” from watching some Disney classics, including Cinderella, because “she waits around for a rich guy to rescue her”. The actress said: “Don “Don’t! Rescue yourself.”
She told Variety magazine she preferred per period drama to contemporary films in w which “the female characters nearly alw always get raped”. But she noted signs of po positive change: “I’m suddenly being sen sent scripts with present-day women w who aren’t raped in the first five pages and aren’t simply there to be the loving girlfriend or wife.”
Mackie said: “This was my idea many years ago. Sometimes you have to be patient an and never give up. The climate will chang change… with the Time’s Up and MeToo mo movement it’s a story for now.”
She is p particularly proud to be leading “a mai mainly female-driven team”. The screenpla screenplay is by Harries’s wife, Rebecca Fr Frayn, daughter of playwright Michael Frayn, and Gaby Chiappe. It is direc directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who w won awards for directing Call the Midwife Mi and Three Girls.