The British actress said the 117-year-old novel is relevant today, and got advice from Emma Thompson, who won an Oscar for the same role.
It might have been intimidating for British actress Hayley Atwell to sign on for the lead in Starz’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s literary classic “Howards End,” given the long shadow cast by Emma Thompson, who won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1992 Merchant-Ivory film version. But Atwell had some help from Thompson herself.
“Emma’s a friend of mine, and I’m very familiar with her performance in it,” Atwell says. “I e-mailed her to say, ‘They’re doing the impossible, they’re going to attempt to make this,’ and being Emma, incredibly generous and warm, she said ‘You’re about to work with a writer, E.M. Forster, who is one of literature’s first proper feminists. [The character] Margaret will change you — she’s an extraordinary person. You are she and she is you.’ She passed the baton in a way.”
Of the new miniseries, which debuts in the U.S. April 8, Atwell says, “The look of it is different, the energy is different.” For one thing, the novel was adapted for the small screen by Kenneth Lonergan (“Manchester By the Sea”) and directed by British filmmaker Hettie MacDonald.
“It’s adapting in four hours as opposed to a 90-minute film, so there’s more of the book in it, and Kenny’s writing takes so much of the content of the text and the dialogue and lifts it, but puts it into a very fresh way that’s accessible and real, so that it feels relevant to today,” she adds.
The 117-year-old novel continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the greats the 20th century, and Atwell says she sees both the timeless qualities of the story and its appeal to contemporary audiences. Continue reading »