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THE TALE OF BEATRIX POTTER
From the imaginary world of Peter Rabbit,
Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Squirrel Nutkin to a real-life secret love affair. Bringing to the big screen the extraordinary life and times of one of
the world’s most popular authors.
C inematographer Andrew Dunn BSC has, he reckoned, never worked before on a film with
“so many convenient loca- tions.” Until, that is, Miss Potter took flight from London, first to the Isle of
Man and then to the writer’s most famous haunt, The Lake District.
But before that, said Dunn, a West London resident, they were shooting nearby in the likes of Hammersmith, Osterley Park and Brentford. “I could have skateboarded to some of those locations,” he chuckled.
Set in the capital and, of course, Cumbria, the script for Miss Potter sets the true tale of the phenomenally suc- cessful children’s writer/illustrator in 1902 – when Beatrix was 36 - and deals with her life and, especially, her ill- fated love affair with young publisher Norman Warne.
Starring Renée Zellweger – almost exactly Beatrix’s own age for the main focus of the film - Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson, Bill Paterson,
Barbara Flynn and Lloyd
Owen, Miss Potter was written
by Richard Maltby Jr and
directed by Australian film-
maker, Chris Noonan.
It took 10 years for Noonan, an award-winning documentarist (Stepping Out) and TV drama director (Vietnam, The Cowra Breakout), to bring his debut feature to the screen. It was worth the wait, for Babe, an astonishing adaptation of Dick King- Smith’s story, The Sheep Pig, not only won scores of awards but was also a box office phenomenon in the mid-90s.
After several abortive projects since then – as well as producing, with his wife, a TV film, Feeling Sexy, in his native Oz – Noonan first came on board Miss Potter about two years ago when Cate Blanchett was attached to the project,
Said Noonan: “The story’s extremely emotional and I knew I could deliver that,
but until I actual-
ly got involved with this project I’d probably always dismissed Beatrix Potter as a rather cutesy children’s writer. I suppose I had read her books when I was a child but I didn’t have any real memory of them and when I was first approached with this I could only think of those little bunny mugs and plates. Basically, the notion of a story about her didn’t attract me at all in the beginning – probably because I didn’t know anything about her.
Noonan continued: “The script made me think again about her. I saw something in it that maybe others had- n’t seen. That Beatrix, although living as she did in turn-of-the-century London, somehow exhibited the predilections, ambitions and tastes of
a thoroughly modern woman.
“She was, I felt, like a modern lib-
erated woman. So the story to me was, in one way a kind of time-travel piece where you plucked this woman out of the modern world and plonked her down in the realm of a very restrictive London in immediate post-Victorian times. How would she react to that?”
When Blanchett pulled out to pursue another more personal proj- ect, Zellweger, who had been busy when she was first approached for Beatrix, was then, happily, free to step into the breach.
“The ‘money’,” Noonan admitted, “did dictate a big name so the choice among, say, English actresses in that age range was very narrow. The fact Renée wanted to do it made me
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