Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic

Márta Minier, Maddalena Pennacchia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317185550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Beginning with the premise that the biopic is a form of adaptation and an example of intermediality, this collection examines the multiplicity of 'source texts' and the convergence of different media in this genre, alongside the concurrent issues of fidelity and authenticity that accompany this form. The contributors focus on big and small screen biopics of British celebrities from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, attending to their myth-making and myth-breaking potential. Related topics are the contemporary British biopic's participation in the production and consumption of celebrated lives, and the biopic's generic fluidity and hybridity as evidenced in its relationship to such forms as the bio-docudrama. Offering case studies of film biographies of literary and cultural icons, including Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Diana Princess of Wales, John Lennon, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Beau Brummel, Carrington and Beatrix Potter, the essays address how British identity and heritage are interrogated in the (re)telling and showing of these lives, and how the reimagining of famous lives for the screen is influenced by recent processes of manufacturing celebrity.

Chapter 1
Culturally British Bio(e)pics: From Elizabeth to The King’s Speech

Maddalena Pennacchia

In Staging the UK, Jen Harvie builds on the concept of ‘imagined communities’ – first theorised in Benedict Anderson’s highly influential book of the same title (1983) – in order to argue that “national identities are neither biologically nor territorially given; rather they are creatively produced or staged” (2005: 2). Such an approach implies an awareness of the shifting nature of nationhood, for “if national identities are creatively imagined that means they are dynamic” (Harvie 2005: 3). This holds particularly true of Britishness. As ‘a unified form of identity’, Britishness has indeed become increasingly troubled since the end of the twentieth century, when deep political changes were brought about in the UK by the decentralisation programme supported by the New Labour (see Wilson and Stapleton 2006: 1–10).¹ Notably, in a period of identity crisis, British film production has been playing an important role in the process of imagining and performing a sense of national belonging. In fact, as Andrew Higson clearly puts it, “cinema is one of the means by which national communities are maintained”, because it creates “particular types of stories that narrate the nation imaginatively, narratives that are capable of generating a sense of national belonging among their audiences” (2011: 1).² It is, accordingly, worth noting that in the period of time just mentioned a number of ‘culturally British’ biopics have been produced, either on large or small screens, i.e. films that depict the life of British historical characters and are more often than not transnational productions that have both fostered and questioned a sense of British heritage.

In this respect, it is well known that the debate around ‘heritage cinema’ has tremendously developed throughout the 2000s in British film studies, “where it has become associated with a powerful undercurrent of nostalgia for the past conveyed by historical dramas, romantic costume films and literary adaptations” (Vidal 2012: 1).³ More specifically, two film genres have played a prominent role in the British film industry recently – and enjoyed a great popularity: the historical and the costume drama. Both Chapman (2005: 1–12) and Higson (2011: 191–219) draw a dividing line between them, highlighting how they tap into different sources – actual historical facts and canonical literary texts. Moreover they display different visual styles – historical films are characterised by large-scale action and sublime grandeur, while we are led to experience closeness to characters through ‘faithfully’ reproduced interiors and picturesque landscapes in costume films. Nevertheless, the two critics also make clear that crossovers are more frequent than not. The British bio(e)pic, in my view, is just such a crossover.

We may generally define a bio(e)pic a film that while offering an intimate approach to history through the life of some notable historical character also bends towards the epic genre, a genre which deals with “motifs crucial to the formation of national identity” (Burgoyne 2010: 10) with a high potential of myth-making and (consequently) myth-breaking.⁴ In her work on the heritage film, Belén Vidal notices that “national cinemas turn to the past at different moments in their histories in search of their own foundational myths” (2012: 3); while agreeing with this statement I would also add that at moments of radical changes bio(e)pics partly offer themselves as ‘ritual’ formulas that both show and try to handle on screen “tensions and ambiguities resulting from the conflicting interests of different groups within a culture” (Cawelti 1976: 35).

In British bio(e)pics we usually meet a ‘hero(ine)’ – an historically true statesman or woman – who is represented as performing a decisive role in matters of state at moments of crucial military, political or social crisis, thus contributing to make British culture what it is now; in other words, a sense of continuity between past and present is essential to culturally British bio(e)pics.

Moreover, by fostering the contemporary hunger for access to the private life of celebrities, preferably shown in their naked pettiness and fragility, new specimens of bio(e)pics have been produced of late, films that enhance “the illusion of intimacy” (Schickel 1985: 4) and all those aspects that are related to a ‘backstage’ view of historical characters of ‘national’ importance. Although the protagonist of such films is not necessarily of royal blood, it must be acknowledged that the actual examples of this kind of movie often stage the life of a princely character.⁵

As “th’expectancy and rose of the fair state” (Shakespeare 1989: 3.1.154) the Prince (of male or female gender) has always been a privileged discursive site that can keep together narrations of self-development as well as of nation-formation. “The glass of fashion and the mould of form,/ Th’observ’d of all observers […]” (Shakespeare 1989: 3.1.155–6): thus Ophelia recalls for Elizabethan theatre-goers a few stereotypical images linked to the Renaissance princely model (the “glass”, the “mould”, the “rose”), while mourning Hamlet’s failure to rise up to that lofty ideal. Indeed, Princes have often been represented as those special individuals who symbolically mirror the best qualities and/or worst defects of the community of their subjects; this is also a marker of epics as a classical literary genre where myths of origins are concocted, and the hero-as-leader bestows his qualities to a newly founded community, as it happens in the Virgilian archetype, the Aeneid.

Two British monarchs have enjoyed an extraordinary popularity on screen in the 2000s. The first one, Queen Elizabeth I, has dominated, one may almost say obsessed, the British imaginary from the turn of the Millennium well into the first 10 years of the twenty-first century. Even though several biographical films have been produced in that decade, I will here limit myself to Elizabeth (1998) and The Golden Age (2007); I will also refer in passing to two TV miniseries: The Virgin Queen (2005, dir. Coky Giedroyc, BBC, featuring Anne-Marie Duff) and Elizabeth I (2005, dir. Tom Hooper, HBO/Channel 4, featuring Helen Mirren). The second sovereign is the reasonably lesser-known King George VI, who, quite unexpectedly, came front stage in 2010 in an Oscar-winning production: The King’s Speech (2010). These bio(e)pics, far from showing their protagonists as faultless creatures, represent them as persons who learn, with great pain and some final reward, how to act as ‘mirrors’ of the community of their subjects: their main achievements precisely stemming from the awareness of their role as performers. When everything around them seems to fall apart, they are staged as heroically-standing figures who are capable of leading the country through moments of identity crisis towards new stages of self-awareness. In their bio(e)pics Elizabeth I and George VI both face moments of impressive breaking up with the past, moments when ‘modernity’ seems to suddenly rise from the mists of future; they are shown as people whose special gift is that of embodying some ‘national’ characteristics that come to be highlighted (and celebrated) together with their own personality.

The Body of the Nation: Elizabeth (1998) and The Golden Age (2007)

In his extended and thorough analysis of Elizabeth, Andrew Higson defines the film as “a product of Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’” (2003:194), further specifying that “if the film is not a celebration of Englishness, it can certainly be read as an exploration of Englishness” (2003: 198).

This 1998 biographical film, as well as its sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, released in 2007, was produced by Working Title, the London based company that, after achieving fame and fortune with Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, dir. Mike Newell) and Bean (1997, dir. Mel Smith), was mostly identified during the Blair years (1997–2007) with the new British film industry. It released global box-office hits such as Notting Hill (1999, dir. Roger Michell), Billy Eliot, (2000: dir. Stephen Daldry), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001, dir. Sharon Maguire), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2007, dir. Beeban Kidron), and Love Actually (2003, dir. Richard Curtis), including the first British feature film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005, dir. Joe Wright), as well as adaptations from eminent contemporary authors like Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2007, dir. Joe Wright). Elizabeth, however, was the first biographical film in the company’s story. The script was by English screenwriter Michael Hirst, who went on to pen the acclaimed BBC series The Tudors (2007–2010) a few years later, but the film was directed by an Indian man, Shekhar Kapur, who had gained a name in Cannes with Bandit Queen (1994), a harsh independent film on the abused life of Phoolan Devi. The selection of Kapur to bring back to life one of the most revered of the British monarchs was felt by many as a brave decision if not altogether an outrageous one.

Elizabeth received much critical attention since its first release. Against those critics who rebuked the historical inaccuracies (if not mistakes) of the script, others have remarked that it is “the accuracy of appearance”, i.e. the visually-detailed reconstruction of the historical period, that ensure the audiences’ perception of authenticity “so that greater narrative freedom can be taken” (McKechnie 2002: 219). What may be added, however, is that the authentic aura of the film is not only generated by the accuracy of setting and costumes, but, in my view at least, it is also the result of a convincing re-enactment of a number of Elizabethan aesthetic strategies. These strategies have been brilliantly detected by a series of critical studies on Elizabeth’s icons that have their roots in Frances Yates’s ground-breaking work on “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea” (1947). I am referring above all to Roy Strong’s analysis of the “cult of Elizabeth” (1977) – which focuses on her many impersonations of charismatic female characters from Cynthia to Gloriana to the Virgin Mary (for the latter see also Hackett 1995) – as well as to Louis Montrose’s sophisticated new-historical approach to her gendered cultural politics (2006).

In fact, Kapur’s flamboyant pictorial style appears at its best in its deliberate remediation of Elizabeth’s most renowned portraits; one striking example (out of many to be found in the two films) is the faithful adaptation from painting to cinema of the original Coronation Portrait in Elizabeth (1998). The high style of the cinematography that portrays Cate Blanchett as a living Elizabeth who becomes, at crucial moments, literally frozen into a pose and turned into a magnificent picture, seems to re-enact, in a different medium, the Renaissance painters’ political strategy of transforming the natural body of the Queen into an enthralling awe-inspiring icon. Blanchett as Elizabeth, therefore, not only strikes the viewers with a sense of overwhelming majesty, but even awakes a deeper and less rational sense of worshipping, with the help of her own status as a Hollywood celebrity.⁶

Gender-oriented readings of the film have already highlighted the displacement of the theme of ‘virginity’ from a merely physical level to a broader, metaphorical one, where the Queen’s painfully achieved sexual restraint (her self-imposed transformation into the ‘Virgin Queen’) is seen, in the film, as the means through which she wins her battle to be recognised and respected as a female monarch (Pigeon 2001). Further than that, however, what Kapur seems to be aiming at in both films is fuelling the audience’s admiration towards a new kind of political leader, one whose adamant belief in the social value of rationality and ‘common sense’ over the blind power of fanaticism will lead the country towards a new golden age. It is through a female gendered body politic that this sense of novelty is conveyed.

To bring evidence to my argument I would like to recall a sequence in Elizabeth that I find particularly remarkable. In the unstable aftermath of her accession to the throne, we are shown the young Queen taking her seat in Parliament in order to ask for the passing of the Act of Uniformity. All dressed in scarlet between two wings of black-clothed bishops and lords, Elizabeth tries to explain that in order to stop the fragmentation of the country “a single church of England” is needed “with a Common Prayer book and a common purpose”. Her statement causes much turmoil, so much so that the Queen can hardly make herself heard. The camera peeps over the black shoulders of these powerful men, as if the cinema-goers, as watchers, were present and involved in the discussion (a very common trick in baroque painting). Elizabeth keeps her nerves and insists that the Parliament passes this Act “not for myself but for my people, who are my only care”, a sentence we have already seen her obsessively rehearsing in her nightgown in a previous sequence. At last, when a bishop replies that “by this act you force us to relinquish our allegiance to the Holy Father”, the turning point of the whole film occurs, marking both the story of Elizabeth’s life and the history of England. Elizabeth, by way of what is represented as sheer intuition, starts playing with her gender identity, that is with her ‘natural body’, by answering the Bishop in a seductive tone, “How can I force you, Your Grace? I am a woman”; a cut to Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), Elizabeth’s spy master and one of her strongest supporters at Court, who is watching the scene from a distance, shows his approval of the Queen’s political coming of age, thus inviting the offscreen audience to share his reaction. Once she has obliged the onscreen male audience to smile, and just seconds after having monitored it, she switches to her role of monarch speaking as a ‘male’ English sovereign, “I have no desire to make windows into men’s soul. I simply ask, can any man, in truth, serve two masters and be faithful to both?” A few bishops start shouting that she has just spoken heresy, to which she replies: “No, your grace, this is common sense, which is” she concludes with a relaxed smile “a most English virtue”, thus provoking a conciliatory laughter that finally defeats those who were opposing her opinion.

This pivotal sequence adapts for the screen a celebrated quote – “I have no desire to make windows into men’s soul” – that was famously attributed to Elizabeth by Francis Bacon who reported it in order to witness Elizabeth’s toleration in religious matters (as for the historically ambiguous meaning of the sentence see Montrose 2006: 188). The phrase has been adapted also in the TV series Elizabeth I starring Helen Mirren, but in that case it was spoken in a very intimate context, i.e. in the Queen’s privy chamber during a private conversation between herself and her beloved Robert Dudley concerning her presumed intention to marry the French catholic Duc d’Anjou: “The Duke’s religion is a private matter, Robin, as is yours. I will not make windows into men’s souls”. The reference to “common sense [as] a most English virtue” in Kapur’s film, however, is completely Michael Hirst’s invention and an anachronistic one at that. It was, indeed, only at the start of the eighteenth century that “common sense came also to mean, in English, those plain, self-evident truths or conventional wisdom that one needed no sophistication to grasp and no proof to accept precisely because they accorded so well with the basic (common sense) intellectual capacities and experiences of the whole social body” (Rosenfeld 2011: 23, emphasis mine). What interests me here is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Biopic: An Introduction
• 1 Culturally British Bio(e)pics: From Elizabeth to The King’s Speech
• 2 Life and Death in the Media Spotlight: The People’s Princess as Royal Celebrity
• 3 Reframing the Royal Performance: Helen Mirren’s ‘Transformative Acting’ and Celebrity Self-presentation in The Queen
• 4 Joining History to Celebiography and Heritage to Documentary on the Small Screen: Spotlight on the Content of the Form in the Metamediatic Royal Bio-docudrama The Queen
• 5 Shakespeare’s life on Film and Television: Shakespeare in Love and A Waste of Shame
• 6 Austenmania, or the Female Biopic as Literary Heritage
• 7 Beyond ‘Sex and Drugs and Lyrical Ballads’: High In/fidelity in Julien Temple’s Pandaemonium
• 8 ‘Screening’ the Dandy: Beau Brummell between History and Glamour
• 9 Straightening the Skein: Art, Biography and Gender Politics in Christopher Hampton’s Carrington
• 10 “The child is father of the man…” – and the Author: Screening the Lives of Children’s Authors
• 11 Nowhere Boy, A Portrait of John Lennon as a Young Man
• Index