Public Servant Lifestyle

All's fair in love and war as Reese Witherspoon brings W.M. Thackeray's very modern adventuress Becky Sharp to life for the big screen.

Vanity Fair

One of America’s most popular big screen stars, Reese Witherspoon (Sweet Home Alabama, Legally Blonde, SFW, Just Like Heaven, Wlak The Line, Election) unites with acclaimed director, Mira Nair, to bring to the screen one of the greatest female characters ever created: ‘Becky’ Sharp.

The new film version of the classic novel Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray introduces a new audience to the beautiful, funny, passionate, and calculating adventuress Rebecca – known as ‘Becky’ – Sharp.

“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! (Vanity of Vanities!) Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied?” - William Makepeace Thackeray

With these words, William Makepeace Thackeray closes Vanity Fair, and it was these lines that in particular inspired director Mira Nair. She states, “The reasons I wanted to make Vanity Fair are Thackeray’s essential, and in my view spiritual, questions – which of us has dreams, and when we achieve them, are happy? What is contentment? What is aspiration? What is the vanity of life? In his novel, Thackeray created a cinema verité of its day. It was completely accurate concerning what was happening and had happened in England, yet the questions are timeless. The extraordinarily rich characters have resonance for all of us today, and I think Becky is literature’s greatest female character.”

Modern Heroine

The daughter of a starving English artist and a French chorus girl, the character of Becky Sharp find herself orphaned at a young age. Even as a child, she yearns for a more glamorous life than her birthright promises. As she leaves Miss Pinkerton’s Academy at Chiswick, Becky resolves to conquer English society by any means possible. She deploys all of her wit, guile, and sexuality as she makes her way up into high society during the first quarter of the 19th century.

Becky’s ascension to the heights of society commences when she gains employment as governess to the daughters of eccentric Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins). Becky wins over the children and the Crawley family’s rich spinster aunt Matilda (Eileen Atkins) as well. The rural Hampshire household comes to find her indispensable, and Matilda comes to confide in the bright young woman.

But Becky knows that she cannot be a true part of English society until she moves to the city. When Matilda invites her to come live in London, Becky eagerly accepts. There, Becky is reunited with her best friend Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai), who – having grown up comfortably – does not share Becky’s more brazen ambitions. Hewing close to the family she already knows so well, Becky secretly marries dashing heir Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy) – but when Matilda discovers their union, she casts the newlyweds out.

Napoleon

When Napoleon invades Europe, Rawdon bravely reports to the front lines. Pregnant Becky stands by distraught newlywed Amelia, whose own husband George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is also called to fight. When George does not survive the Battle of Waterloo, Becky’s friendship with Amelia is strained beyond repair. Becky is reunited with Rawdon and gives birth to a boy, but, post-war, money and comforts are sparse for the trio.

More intent than ever on gaining acceptance into London society and living well, Becky finds a patron in the powerful Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne). Steyne’s whims enable Becky to realise her dreams, but the ultimate cost may be too high for her...

In the spring of 2002, plans for the film coalesced at the newly formed Focus Features, where director Nair, whose picture Monsoon Wedding was finishing up a successful run worldwide, agreed to make and finance the film. Day notes: “Vanity Fair had to be huge and lavish and funny and moving in terms of characters and storylines all having to interconnect and it had to have a real truth and humanity to it. If you watch Monsoon Wedding, Mira did all that, and you cared about every character.”

Gigliotti adds: ”Mira is a great filmmaker with real humanity that is deeply appealing. Her understanding of her own origins and how she’s layered that into the film is spectacular.”

James Purefoy, cast as the romantic lead Rawdon Crawley, comments, “Mira’s background as an Indian director, attentive to the Indian culture that was coming into England in the early part of the 19th century, sets the tone.”

India

The director brings her own interpretation to the classic material. Her Indian childhood complements Thackeray’s own - as the Englishman had spent his early childhood in Calcutta. This fortuitous connection is at once creative and highly personal, and the new film version meditates on how much of domestic imperial England was informed by the cultures across the sea.

Producer Janette Day first began striving to make a feature version of the novel a decade ago. She notes, “I’ve always felt that this was the period film I would like to make; there’s nothing prim about it, and Becky Sharp is very much a modern heroine stuck in the wrong time, in a lavish mad world where she is feisty and difficult and different. The influence of the character is far-reaching and enduring.”

Thackeray

For screenwriters and associate producers Matthew Faulk and Mark Skeet, adapting Vanity Fair “is a dream come true and in fact a privilege. The rich and comic array of characters that Thackeray provides is a screenwriter’s dream. This is a novel about us all.”

Nair’s frequent collaborator, Lydia Dean Pilcher, rounds out the female trifecta of producers on the film. Pilcher smiles, “This is the sixth film that Mira and I have worked on together. Working with Mira is a life experience, because she brings so much passion and humanity to her vision.

In the process of making films, we immerse ourselves in whatever the culture and subject matter are, live it a little bit, and then bring it all in front of the camera. Mira looks for collaborators who can create a synergy with her vision. She’s the fearless leader charging up the hill, and she wants a team who can keep up with her.

Fellowes, an Academy Award winner for his Gosford Park screenplay, signed on to collaborate with Nair for the first time. He reflects, “The challenge of any adaptation is knowing what to leave out and this is doubly so when working on a novel both as long and as loved as Vanity Fair. You want to feel that the key moments have all survived but, at the same time, that you are making the story new for a modern audience.”

Pilcher adds, “Mira likes to have creative energy around her, from people who want to really collaborate. When that happens and you can sustain it and keep working together, you can further that energy.” Sure enough, a number of other previous colleagues joined Nair on the new movie: director of Photography Declan Quinn, editor Allyson C. Johnson, sound mixer Drew Kunin, and composer Mychael Danna, among others.

Fellowes enthuses, “I absolutely loved working with Mira, whom I found to be as creative as any director I can remember. She always gives notes that stimulate, instead of flattening, a writer’s ideas. Like Robert Altman, she has an extraordinary visual imagination.”

Feminist

Despite the filmmakers’ considerable commitment to the material, the film would not have been made without the charismatic leading lady who could bring to life one of the most well-known female characters in English literature. Following in the footsteps of Myrna Loy and Miriam Hopkins some seven decades prior, Reese Witherspoon came aboard and the new movie finally had a confirmed start date. “With the casting of Reese, this picture came together,” states Gigliotti. Day adds, “Reese and Mira had been looking for something to do together, and Vanity Fair was the perfect match.”

For a heroine Becky Sharp is not always a likable character. The late Alistair Cooke once described her as “poor, but pretentious…genteel, but on the make.”

Star of the film – and the woman ultimately responsible for bringing the adventuress to life on screen – Reese Witherspoon has strong opinions on the character she portrays. “In my opinion, Becky Sharp is an early feminist. She is really a very modern character. She’d been deprived of parents and has no place to go in the world – yet she still manages to succeed. Every success she has in her life is based on her own merit, which is a modern idea for a period story.

Heart

“I think she absolutely has a heart, even in an environment where people care very little about other people, a society of buying and selling people. You can buy your way into society and then fall from grace because you lose money. In a world that’s so hard to negotiate, she does a fantastic job of managing. She figures out how to negotiate her way through society.”

Faulk and Skeet comment, “We root for Becky because she speaks for all outsiders, denied their proper place in society through accident of birth. She is one of the great survivors – her resilience and never-say-die attitude are what make her so attractive.”

Fellowes adds, “Reese has that marvellous quality in an actress of being able to play several emotions at once. Her Becky Sharp is always interesting, always intelligent, always complicated. On one level, she is ambitious and practical and hard-headed, and yet we never doubt that her heart is also involved in the process somewhere.”

Nair states, “Reese was extraordinarily engaged and committed, as am I to her. She really wanted to play Becky. She certainly has the kind of wit and intelligence, the guile, the enticing quality, and the fantastic quality that makes movie stars. You cannot help but love her. She has that appeal which I had to have for Becky because I didn’t want to see a movie where you hate the person – and it’s easy to dislike Becky because she can be so manipulative and scheming. So there has to be this irresistibility to the actress in order that the audience is with us for the rise and fall of Becky. This is also Reese in a way she hasn’t been seen yet – sensual, womanly. It’s a lovely journey Reese and I have been on.”

Bob Hoskins, who plays the wily Sir Pitt Crawley, whom he describes as “not a bad old stick, actually.” He adds, “I’ve never found Becky Sharp hard to like. She’s a survivor who uses her head and marries rich. She couldn’t have a career at that time, could she? So she’s got to get herself a husband. If she were my daughter, I would be very proud of her!”

Survivor

Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent (Life Is Sweet, Bullets Over Broadway), who plays the obstinate Mr. Osborne, also admires Becky Sharp: “She is a classic minx who has entered into the national consciousness as the epitome of that particular type of self-seeking attractive girl. She’s a very modern character who knows exactly how to manipulate men and manipulate society – and now you would include manipulate the media.”

Faulk and Skeet report: “We were so delighted to hear that Reese Witherspoon had been cast. She is a superb actress – and she even bears an uncanny resemblance to the Becky that Thackeray, a gifted draughtsman, drew for his own excellent illustrations.”

Witherspoon confirms, “I was so excited when I got the call from Mira that she wanted me to do this film with her. We had met a couple of years ago because I was a big fan of her work and were discussing other projects. We got to talking, and we discovered we have similar sensibilities about women, among other things. I thought she had such an amazing take on this material, wanting to explore the roots of Indian culture in English society. She has this way of explaining things and making them come alive.”

Somewhat surprisingly – given the rich legacy of work Thackeray has left to the world - this new production is the first major adaptation of the author’s work since Stanley Kubrick’s feature film version of Barry Lyndon, way back in 1975. Faulk and Skeet admit, “Reducing a 900-page novel to a movie script was the main challenge. But by concentrating on the adventures of the wonderful Becky Sharp, it became possible. It was a long journey from inception of the project to the final result, but if we make this great novel more familiar to the world, it will be worth every second.”

Screenwriter Julian Fellowes adds: “In Becky Sharp, Thackeray has created a genuinely archetypal heroine, who remains vivid and fresh and relevant for any period or age group.”

Vanity Fair is out now, on DVD.

More information available in Books, DVD / Home Video