Browser’s Magnificent Seven

Out Of Africa 5.50pm beIN Movies Stars

A TIMELESS love story about a Danish countess’s passion for an English adventurer almost swept the board at the 1985 Oscars.

It won seven awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Sydney Pollack, but stars Meryl Streep and Robert Redford were unlucky to miss out.

They were compelling as real life lovers in the early years of the 20th century who flouted the social norms of stuffy English colonists in Kenya.

Streep is Karen Blixen who had previously married a baron who used her dowry to buy a farm and grow coffee on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. The wayward baron, alias Klaus Brandauer, leaves Karen to her own devices and big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton enters her life. Eventually Karen leaves Africa when the farm goes bust and Denys is accidentally killed when his private plane crashes. She wrote about her adventures under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen.

The stunning wildlife and scenery of the high veldt has never been better captured on film. Other Oscars were for Screenplay, Photography, Music, Art Direction and Sound.

Critic Roger Ebert called it: “One of the great recent epic romances. An old-fashioned, intelligent, thoughtful love story, told with enough care and attention that we really get involved.”