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My blog has quite a lot of posts about Samuel West (Julius Caesar, On Chesil Beach and Darkest Hour) and Charles Edwards (My Fair Lady Australian tour and Henry IX).

Saturday 9 August 2008

Hayley Atwell - Film - The Duchess

From collider.com:
"...Q: Can you talk a little bit about your part in that film?

Hayley: Yeah. I play a woman called Bess Foster who is the friend and confidante of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. They meet at a time when the Duchess of Devonshire has really birthed celebrity. She has become a style icon and she’s been stuck in a loveless marriage with the Duke. This woman comes into her life who’s very front footed, is worldly and is also losing custody of her children due to a messy divorce and they become friends very quickly and an intimacy grows within them that at one point becomes physical which was more common in that day that women would look after each other physically and then what happens is that she also then gets stuck in a love triangle between the Duchess, Georgiana, and the Duke. In true life, Bess Foster was the mediator between them and that’s what kept their relationship and their marriage going all that time because she understood them each in a way that they didn’t understand each other. Eventually when Georgina died, Bess Foster became the next Duchess of Devonshire. The film explores that a little bit but that’s kind of my part in it.


Q: Do you play the character at different times in her life? Are you young, middle aged, old or is it all in one period?

Hayley: Keira starts off as a young girl and she ends up having five kids so it must span about 10 or 15 years I think. The easiest thing about that is because the fashion of that time changed so much and Georgiana set the precedent for the fashion with the wigs that just start to get bigger and bigger and bigger and narrower and that kind of aged us quite well. [laughs]


Q: Sort of like the 80s haircut.

Hayley: Yes, exactly. Lots of volume. They didn’t have Allnet back then. They had to put in bird’s nests and stuff to keep it up..."

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