Miss Havisham age...
Isn't she supposed to be much older? I mean, I've read the novel and watched the trailer, and I think that Helena Bonham Carter is too young to be Miss Havisham.
shareShe actually isn't too young to play Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham in the novel needn't be ancient - she could be about 50 by the end of the narrative (her age depending upon how much earlier she had been jilted at the altar by Compeyson), and therefore actually under 40 when Pip first meets her. As Helena Bonham-Carter - and Gillian Anderson - are in their 40s - slap bang in the middle - they aren't really too young. Martita Hunt, the classic Miss Havisham for many, was only about a year older than Bonham-Carter.
But the point was that Martita Hunt seemed very much older, so much less blooming, less buxom. She had thin lips and sharp features; quite unlike the voluptuous lines of Bonham-Carter's face. I guess that in the 1940s, people in their late forties looked a tad older than people of the same age now, and that's even more true of the 19th Century, judging by photographs of people then. (Dickens died at the age of 58, but I think we'd all agree that he looked ten to twenty years older: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Charles_Dickens_cir ca_1860s-crop.png)
So though Helena Bonham-Carter's age isn't particularly wrong in years, she simply doesn't look as old as she should for a woman of her age, at that time, and who has been through what the character has been through.
Dickens describes Miss Havisham thusly:
I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone.Miss Havisham has dried up like an Egyptian Mummy - she is prematurely ancient. But Helena Bonham-Carter is manifestly in the full bloom of health (which no amount of white makeup can disguise), and it's that which makes her such a bizarre choice for the role.
Off the top of my head, Kristin Scott Thomas is very thin, around the right age, and a very capable actress. With the right make-up and costume, she could be a very convincing Miss Havisham.
Call me Ishmael... share
Well, you sure got a point about the sharp features, the lines of Bonham-Carter's face, and about the look of people in the 19th Century, but in the same chapter we see this:
" Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white."
IMO, a woman under 40 is quite hard to have white hair, even in the 19th Century. I've been doing some research and found this:"Although she has often been portrayed in film versions as very elderly, Dickens's own notes indicate that she is only in her mid-fifties. However, it is also indicated that her long life away from the sunlight has in itself aged her, and she is said to look like a cross between a waxwork and a skeleton, with moving eyes."
I know that Wikipedia is not that trustworthy, but it seems right. I believe that she would be around her mid-fifties when Pip meets her, and that she was in the end of her sixties in the end of the novel, which makes Bonham-Carter "too young" to be in her role. But again, you still have a point about the difference between Havisham's and Bonham's features. Still, I hope that Helena delivers a good portrait of Miss Havisham.
Kristin Scott Thomas is a good choice, I can picture her as Miss Havisham.
Let the chips fall where they may
Interesting stuff and I think that it really is a matter of physical issues rather than than age as such.
If I were in a bookish or pedantic mood, (which in truth is not that rare an occurance,) I think I'd still argue the point about Miss Havisham's age. When Pip goes to London and meets Herbert Pocket again, the latter relates how Miss Havisham met and fell in love with the man we later find out is Compeyson, and saying that "this happened five-and-twenty years ago, before you and I were."
For her to have been in her late sixties when she dies, which I believe is no more than five years after the above, she would have been about 38 or 39 when she was jilted, which I really think is too old. She surely couldn't have been older than her twenties. I'm not sure why I say this, except that when she met Compeyson she was "now an heiress"; Herbert does not indicate that she was "on the shelf" - which she surely would have been in her late 30s.
If she was, say, 25 when the abortive wedding took place, she would have been 50 when Herbert Pocket met Pip, and about 55 when she met her end. If my calculations are right - and I'd be quite happy to be proved wrong - Dickens's notes were implying that she was in her mid-fifties when she died, not when Pip first met her.
As to her white hair, we hear that she became dangerously ill following the non-wedding, and I guess we are to believe that the trauma and/or illness made her hair go white prematurely. Even in the natural course of things, a woman in her mid-forties would have looked, to us, far older than a woman in her mid-forties now, but with all that misfortune, she would have seemed older still. So, yes, both Gillian Anderson and Bonham-Carter give quite the wrong impression - they look too young, too well-preserved, too "leading lady" - despite the raggedy costumes and cobnwebbed settings.
Call me Ishmael...
I looked at the still and was immediately reminded of Pris in Blade Runner, which is probably not a good thing.
But, fingers crossed, won't it be great to have some Dickens back on the screen?
Not really, even the bits with Eddie Marsan (the telly one from a couple of years back) palled after a while. They should give Thackeray another go.
Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.
Methinks you are recalling Alan Rickman as the slimiest cleric in captivity.
share"PUDDINGdale?"
No Eddie Marsan was in a Dickens (Bleak Corset?) and got money so did leap-frogs all over the place.
[Little Dorrit]
Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.
Obadiah Slope. No need to hunt for your character's motivations there. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086667/
shareHow about Bulwer-Lytton? Wasn't Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" superb?
shareActually, as an interesting point, European people tend to grey prematurely compared to other races; my mother's hair started turning at 19, her mothers around 30.
And this was 20th Century.
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It's me....Bara...it's always bloody Bara!