Stephen Dillane portrays Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard Woolf, the renowned Bloomsbury critic and author whose devotion to his wife had a controversial influence on Virginia's emotional life and writings.  For Dillane, figuring out who Leonard Woolf was became part of the intrigue of joining the cast of THE HOURS.

And he explains:  "Some people think Leonard Woolf may have been over-protective and obsessively controlled Virginia's life.  Many others say Virginia both needed and wanted Leonard's protection from her own self-destructive instincts.  Who can ever know the truth?  In the end, the audience must judge whether this particular interpretation of Leonard and this marriage leans more towards careful, loving solicitousness or towards selfish, fearful control.  My instinct is always to make judgment of this sort as difficult as possible by making the relationship as complicated as possible."

While Dillane was uncertain about how to approach Leonard in the beginning, he had no doubts that he wanted to be a part of THE HOURS.  "I had read the book and thought the adaptation was excellent, very poetic and extremely moving," he says.

Then, to learn more about Leonard, Dillane delved further into Woolf's life, becoming fascinated by his bold intellectual explorations and especially by his alternately tumultuous and tender relationship with Virginia.  "As I read Leonard's autobiography, his fiction, Virginia's letters to him and also comments from contemporaries, I developed quite a fondness for him, a certain loyalty and protectiveness, as well as respect for his honesty, vulnerability, stoicism and intellect," he says.

Dillane continues:  "Leonard was a remarkable man in his own right.  He was deeply committed to ideals both in his personal life and politically.  He was a man who tried to live according to his beliefs and he records, with disarming sincerity and honesty, his successes and failures in this endeavor."  In his reading, Dillane also gained insight into Leonard's involvement in the Bloomsbury movement.  "The Bloomsbury Group were writers, artists and thinkers creating their own waves with sexual, domestic and moral experiments," he says.  "They were idealists trying to live, moment by moment, in the light of their artistic consciousness."

As for his interpretation of the Woolf marriage, Dillane sees it as defying easy analysis, as all intimate relationships ultimately do.  "I think Leonard wanted Virginia to be 'well' both for his own sake and for hers.  He saw it as his duty and his desire to look after her," he notes.  "But I didn't want to view theirs as some unbalanced patriarchal marriage.  I thought it far more potent to investigate the intricate, intimate dynamics of love and cruelty, dominance and submission as they occur within the context of an essentially kind and supportive relationship."

Mrs. Dalloway’s Close-Up

A 1925 classic morphed into a 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner, then into a magical movie. Here’s how it happened.

Many people, including Michael Cunningham, who wrote the “The Hours,” didn’t think the novel could be turned into a movie. It’s the hardest kind of tale to transcribe to the screen—internal, literary, more reliant on sensibility than plot. Fortunately, this view wasn’t shared by Scott Rudin, who optioned the book, or by screenwriter David Hare.

“I NEVER THOUGHT IT WAS difficult to adapt,” Hare says. For him, the biggest challenge was to convey what the three heroines were thinking without resorting to voice-over. “That would have made it feel ‘literary’.” Cunningham was only afraid the filmmakers would be “too reverential” to his Pulitzer Prize winner. “Michael was incredible,” Hare says. “He told me, ‘I inherited it from Virginia Woolf, and now you must go off and alter it as freely as I adapted “Mrs. Dalloway” ‘.” Though Hare’s screenplay went through myriad drafts—changing further when director Stephen Daldry, fresh off “Billy Elliot,” came aboard—in the end “the structure is almost exactly what it was in the first draft.” Daldry and Hare’s seductive, brilliant movie takes place during a day in the lives of three women in three different eras: the writer Virginia Woolf in 1923; the unhappy California housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), who is reading “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1951, and a contemporary New York book editor named Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep)—nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway—who is preparing to throw a party for her ex-lover, a poet dying of AIDS. To Daldry, “these women all have the feeling they’ve been miscast in life.”

Woolf is the presiding spirit. (Her suicide by drowning in 1941 frames the movie.) Her devoted husband, Leonard (a superb Stephen Dillane), concerned about her mental instability, has confined her to the London suburb of Richmond, where she is struggling to write “Mrs. Dalloway,” a novel that takes place in 24 hours. But she bucks the constraints of convalescence—death in life for her—longing for the vitality and danger of the city.

Clara Brown is drowning in her marriage to a stolid husband (John C. Reilly), feeling hopelessly inadequate as a mother and a housewife. Her only solace is in the pages of Woolf’s book, which distracts her from her near-suicidal despair.

Clarissa has a more settled domestic life, with a grown daughter (Claire Danes) and a lover (Allison Janney) she’s lived with for 10 years. But she’s trying to fend off the feeling that her life is trivial, trying to hang on to the memory of her affair with Richard (an emaciated Ed Harris), a New York poet who left her years ago for a man. Few actresses can express their inner lives without a line of dialogue as eloquently as Streep: her warm, flustered performance allows us to become mind readers. Harris is more problematic. Though he admirably plays against stereotype, there’s a sense of strain; he doesn’t seem totally at home with Richard’s florid proclamations.

The first thing everybody will say about Kidman is that she’s unrecognizable. True, but the wonder of her performance is how she instantly, through her hunched shoulders, her hooded, skeptical eyes and her deepened voice, reveals Woolf to us—challenging, troubled, brilliant, witty, both contentious and defensive. Moore, as the most tortured of these women, is heartbreakingly good as this lost soul. But there’s a glint of steel under her fragility—a cruelty, we discover, that she’ll need in order to survive.

'The Hours' Named Best Film, First Award of Season  (an excerpt)

by Martha Graybow

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "The Hours," the story of three women linked by Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway," was named best film of the year on Wednesday by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, whose annual Top 10 honors kick off the film awards season that culminates with the Oscars.

Industry watchers look to the New York-based society's picks and other upcoming awards for hints on possible Academy Awards contenders.

"The Hours," based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was followed by "Chicago," "Gangs of New York," The Quiet American" and "Adaptation."

"The Hours," slated for release this month, stars Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and interweaves the stories of three women from different eras, including the character of Virginia Woolf as she begins to write the novel "Mrs. Dalloway."

Campbell Scott was named best actor for the dark comedy "Roger Dodger" and Moore best actress for "Far From Heaven," a drama set in the 1950s...

"Talk to Her," from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, was named best foreign film.

Rounding out the Top 10 film winners were "Rabbit-Proof Fence," "The Pianist," "Far From Heaven," "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing" and "Frida."...

The board was founded in New York in 1909 to forestall movie censorship and began selecting its "10 best movies of the year" in 1919. The group's screening membership includes film professionals, teachers, students and historians.

The group will present its awards on Jan. 14 in New York.

Clarissa Dalloway in a Hall of Mirrors

by Matt Wolf

LONDON
MRS. DALLOWAY said she would buy the flowers herself."

In the new film "The Hours," Virginia Woolf, in the exceedingly unlikely, utterly transformed person of Nicole Kidman, writes those words, the opening of the classic 1925 novel "Mrs. Dalloway."

Decades later, Woolf's book turns up in the hands of Julianne Moore's Laura Brown, the emotionally frayed and anxious 50's housewife who reads about Clarissa Dalloway in a Los Angeles tract house.

Completing the triptych on which the shimmering narrative of "The Hours" depends, Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary Manhattanite played by Meryl Streep, echoes the book's first line by calling to her sleeping lover on the morning of a party, "Sally, I think I'll buy the flowers myself." With that, she sets off on a series of encounters, almost all of them echoing in various ways the separate yet inseparable psychic battles of both Woolf and Laura Brown; and her day will end with a scene tying together all three strands of the story.

The interwoven tales in "The Hours" were created by Michael Cunningham in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel. Its fragmented, interior narrative does not seem a likely candidate for adaptation to the screen. Then again, the preternaturally glamorous Nicole Kidman is not necessarily the actress who comes immediately to mind for the role of Virginia Woolf, described in Mr. Cunningham's novel as "craggy and worn."

But that is pretty much how Ms. Kidman looked in June 2001, when a visitor arrived at the rural railway station where Ms. Kidman was shooting one of the film's defining scenes — a face-off between Virginia and her abject if well-meaning husband, Leonard, played by Stephen Dillane. She was unrecognizable. Her Australian accent had been replaced by an English bark. Her satin-skinned allure had been obliterated by a long false nose and an almost baleful downward gaze.

Transformations equally profound if not so physically extreme had been in evidence on two earlier trips to the main set of "The Hours," at Pinewood Studios. That March, Ms. Streep was testing different inflections for her apparently casual remark about buying the flowers herself — they are the first words Clarissa speaks in the movie. "It's the first line in the novel," Ms. Streep would say later, "so it's meant to have a real reverberation." She laughed, paying tribute to the skill of Sir David Hare, the English dramatist who adapted "The Hours" for the screen: "Like a lot of things David writes, it conveys five meanings at once."

A week later, Ms. Moore was saying little but suggesting much in a scene that found Laura Brown retreating in unspoken despair from her bedroom to the bathroom, entreaties from her husband (John C. Reilly) falling on panicky and possibly suicidal ears. "She's lost," Ms. Moore explained, commenting on that particular scene and on the character in general. "She's just completely lost. She's the kind of person who doesn't even want to be in her life. She wants to be in her book" — "Mrs. Dalloway" — "where she feels excited and alive and in control and in touch."

Ms. Moore said that Mr. Cunningham's novel had had much the same effect on her. It had left her, she said, "thrilled and exhausted and spent and alive." She added that she never doubted that so apparently difficult a source could offer up something of very real substance on screen. But the film, which is set to open on Dec. 27, did not have an entirely smooth passage from page to screen: among other things, "The Hours" went through three composers, and a major scene near the end was reshot some 10 months after most of the rest of the movie was filmed. The film was so slow aborning that its producers, Scott Rudin and Robert Fox, made another movie in England, "Iris," after shooting the segments featuring Ms. Streep and Ms. Moore, but before Ms. Kidman had played even one scene as Virginia Woolf.

"Iris," which came out in December, also had literary roots and literate characters — it was about the writer Iris Murdoch. It went on to garner several Oscar nominations and a supporting actor trophy for Jim Broadbent. The producers are hoping for a replay with "The Hours," and they are already strategizing to position its three female stars for optimal awards exposure.

It was Mr. Rudin who first thought of making a film out of Mr. Cunningham's emotional mosaic of a novel. "I read it in the time it takes to watch a movie, about 100 minutes," said Mr. Rudin, 44, "and it read to me like a movie." Laughing, the producer went on to say that he had overseen "probably 30 drafts" of Mr. Hare's screenplay. "In retrospect, of course, I see the challenges more. But it didn't occur to me at the time that there was anything that was especially daunting."

Mr. Cunningham said he saw the project as just another in a series of pleasing if unexpected turns in the novel's history. "Everything about the way the book has been received has been a surprise," said Mr. Cunningham, who turns 50 on Wednesday. "I firmly believed I was writing my little arty book that would sell maybe two to three thousand copies and retire with a certain battered dignity to the remainder table."

He was pleased to be proved wrong when "The Hours" began to sell. But, he said, he figured the best-seller list would be the end of the road, telling himself, "I know no one's ever going to want to make a movie out of this, since there are no sex scenes or car chases in it." Then he got a call from Mr. Rudin.

ALTHOUGH best known as a film producer, Mr. Rudin has long had an equal passion for the theater. He saw Mr. Cunningham's trio of women as three versions of Susan Traherne, the live-wire heroine of Mr. Hare's 1978 play "Plenty." So he asked Mr. Hare, who is also a screenwriter, to adapt the book. To direct, Mr. Rudin called on a friend and erstwhile colleague of Mr. Hare's, the English theater director Stephen Daldry.

Mr. Daldry, who won a Tony in 1994 for "An Inspector Calls" and more recently directed Mr. Hare's solo play, "Via Dolorosa," in London and New York, has a gift for eliciting behavioral detail from actors. "I knew that Stephen knew how to bank emotion," Mr. Rudin said, "how to hold back, so that when you let it happen, it takes the top of your head off." When Mr. Rudin offered him the chance to direct "The Hours," Mr. Daldry had not yet received his 2001 Oscar nomination for his first film, "Billy Elliot." In fact, the movie had not even been released. Mr. Daldry, speaking by phone from Manhattan, where he is directing Caryl Churchill's play "Far Away" for the New York Theater Workshop, said he had liked the idea of starting a second film on the heels of his first one: "I wanted not to wait, and to keep learning, so it felt like a good idea to get cracking straight away." Besides, he said, why pass up the chance to work with Ms. Streep, Ms. Kidman and Ms. Moore — "three fantastic actresses," said Mr. Daldry, "all very different women who work in very different ways."

Mr. Rudin had his leading ladies in place before he even signed Mr. Daldry. "I felt that in order to know I was going to be able to raise the money, I had to know who was going to be in it." (A co-production of Paramount and Miramax, "The Hours" cost some $22 million, a bargain given the talent involved.)

Ms. Kidman, 35, was the first of the leads to sign on. "As an actress," she said, "you never get the chance to do this. To have three really beautifully written, fully fleshed-out female roles in one film is such a rarity."

Ms. Streep, 53, had been given Mr. Cunningham's novel by her friend Natasha Richardson and was familiar with the story when Mr. Hare's script arrived. "They sent it," Ms. Streep recalled in a telephone interview, "and I thought it was really a beautiful, beautiful rendering of the book — different but true, and true to the feeling of it."

Ms. Moore, 41, seized the chance to animate from within a none-too-happy homemaker. "Just when you think it couldn't possibly get any worse," she said about Laura's distress, "that's the moment that it does, which is what I liked: the places where we have most clarity often occur when we're alone and internal, and how do you communicate the reality of that?"

Because the film was shot in three brief, discrete blocks of time — Ms. Streep's story followed by Ms. Moore's and then, after a break, Ms. Kidman's — the filmmakers were able to attract an unusually lustrous supporting cast. In the sequences about Ms. Streep's Clarissa, Allison Janney plays her present lover, Ed Harris her former one and Claire Danes her daughter. Toni Collette is a friend and, for a fleeting moment, rather more than that to Ms. Moore's Laura. Dame Eileen Atkins, herself a notable Virginia Woolf on stage (in "A Room of One's Own") and the author of the script for the 1998 film "Mrs. Dalloway" (starring Vanessa Redgrave), makes a brief appearance as the Greenwich Village florist who helps Clarissa choose those party flowers.

Some gaps in the production had been scheduled. But others were unforeseen. A scene involving an aged version of Ms. Moore's character was reshot when it became clear that no other actress would portray Laura as an old woman more convincingly than Ms. Moore could. Ms. Moore and the rest of the cast were due back at Pinewood Studios for the reshoot on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001, a date that became unworkable on Sept. 11. The ensuing uncertainties of travel were followed by the death of Ms. Streep's mother and the approaching holidays. The date was moved back to January. "The obstacles were incredible," said Ms. Moore, who by that time was seven months pregnant with her second child, Liv. Ms. Streep said, "Everybody's lives were pushed upside down."

Separate delays were occurring in the film's scoring, which passed from the Oscar winner Stephen Warbeck ("Shakespeare in Love") to Michael Nyman ("The Piano") before coming to rest with Philip Glass, the minimalist composer Mr. Rudin said he had wanted all along.

Some films allow setbacks to get the better of them. (Here's another: a planned premiere for "The Hours" at this summer's Venice Film Festival ran aground because of what Mr. Rudin refers to as "unresolved issues" between him and Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax.) But none of the problems, Mr. Daldry said, has affected the resulting film. "What is up there, we meant," he said. Ms. Moore put it this way: " `The Hours' was an intense movie to make, fraught with difficult choices and time pressures. But we all made the movie I think the book warranted."

Mr. Cunningham agrees. The film version of his novel, he said, "has surpassed my wildest dreams and expectations" — and he said so even though the tiny scene he got to play with Ms. Streep all those many months ago is nowhere in the final cut.

Hollywood star evades the spotlight at station
 

by Tom Pegden
   

Hollywood came to Loughborough then threw a security cordon around the Great Central Railway which stopped people from catching a glimpse of superstar Nicole Kidman.

The railway has become off-limits for two days as Tinseltown's hottest property films key scenes at the station for her latest film.

Restrictions have been so tight at the station that, after having a chat with a publicist, even the Leicester Mercury was yesterday politely, but firmly, asked to move on by a man-mountain of a security guard.

Two paparazzi, who are used to life in the fast lane, also failed to catch a glimpse of the star when she whizzed past in the back of a luxury car.

Not that the cordon seemed to bother many in Loughborough.

Just a handful of fans were waiting outside the station to try to see the film star while the rest of the town got on with its everyday business.

Retired sales director Malcolm Allen, 63, from Woodhouse Eaves, was one person who did manage to cross the cordon, as one of 70 extras being paid £50 a day.

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, he hoped the small part might land him in the big time.

"I did it because I thought I might have a chance to see Nicole," he said.

"But I've not seen any big stars and I haven't been discovered yet."

Joanne Eveleigh, from nearby Beeches Road, was less enthusiastic. She thought all the commotion was too much as she tried to get past the police cordon with daughter Jessica.

She was turned down as an extra two weeks ago because of her short hair.

Mrs Eveleigh said: "We came up here two days ago and the film people were looking at us as if to say ‘what do you think you are doing up here'.

"They are going over the top a bit. It's not as if we are going to do anything."

Publicist Sarah Clark said staff at the GCR had been incredibly obliging, but stayed tight-lipped about Nicole Kidman's movements on set.

Stephen Daldry, who made hit film Billy Elliot, is directing the movie.

It is based on a book by award-winning American novelist Michael Cunningham and will also star Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris and Clare Danes.

Nicole in Woolf's clothing

by Baz Bamigboye

Nicole Kidman has been spending her days before the cameras - and her nights at a secret London location savouring some quality time in the city. 

The actress is appearing in a fictionalised chapter of Virginia Woolf's life in Stephen Daldry's film The Hours.

Nicole has what she terms a supporting role, although it's her story that binds the film's three distinct sections - the others feature Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore - together.

While Nicole's children Isabella and Connor are looked after by a nanny in the U.S., she has been busy shooting scenes with Stephen Dillane, who plays Leonard Woolf, Miranda Richardson as Vanessa Bell, and Linda Basset as the Woolfs' housekeeper.

This particular part of the film is set in 1923, when Woolf was writing her novella, Mrs. Dalloway.

"It's a bit nerve-racking, because I'll be playing Virginia, and I don't want to get that wrong," Nicole told me recently when we met to discuss another of her films, Baz Luhrmann's incandescent musical Moulin Rouge.

"I haven't been before the cameras since October, but I'm delighted to be in the hands of Stephen Daldry."

Nicole had hoped to bring the children with her.  She told me how she had planned to rent a house in South-West London so she could visit the park and see the river, she said.

Filming on The Hours will continue for a further two weeks.  Producers Robert Fox and Scott Rudin (the same men behind the movie Iris, starring Judi Dench and Kate Winslet) hope to release the picture in America at the end of the year, where it's bound to be an important Academy Award contender.

The Hours is based on the prize-winning American novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham.

Costume drama brings star Nicole to county

by Nic Ridley

Hollywood superstar Nicole Kidman will film scenes for her new film in Leicestershire within the next three weeks.