‘She was there to breed and to endure her husband’s emotional and sexual cruelty,‘ Keira said as we talked between breaks on the set of her new film, The Duchess, which stars Ralph Fiennes as the duke and Hayley Atwell as Lady Elizabeth Foster, the third party in what would become one of the most fascinating menages-a-trois in English history.
That the late Princess Diana could trace her bloodline all the way back to Georgiana adds an extraordinary, 20th-century echo to Georgiana’s life spent with a man with austere emotions but an open fly.
I saw a rough-cut version of The Duchess on Wednesday night and found myself engrossed in an 18th century world where, behind the stately homes, exquisite gowns and gravity-defying coiffures, heartbreaking secrets lurked.
I was gripped right from the beginning of director Saul Dibb’s film, when we see Georgiana’s mother, the superb Charlotte Rampling, negotiating with the duke to marry her teenage daughter.
A scene later, the duke takes a pair of scissors to cut his young wife out of her gown and undergarments.
‘Can’t for the life of me quite understand why women’s clothes are so complicated,‘ he mutters.
‘It’s our way of expressing ourselves,‘ she responds as he continues clipping her out of her bodice.
‘Would you go to the bed,‘ he orders, once he has stripped her of her silk creations.
It’s a moment of visual eloquence that quickly establishes the duke’s exploitation of Georgiana.
Fiennes explores the duke’s coldheartedness but later also makes us feel empathy for him - a rare feat. When he tells Georgiana: ‘I, too, abhor this whole thing,‘ you understand that he, like her, is just a pawn in a game that has the riches of inheritance as its prize.
But it’s Keira who has to carry the film and she suceeds triumphantly. Frankly, just carrying the parade of powdered wigs she has to balance on her head is a miracle in itself. Keira told me they weighed a ton.
The confections (all created by London hair designer Jan Archibald, who won an Oscar this year for the wigs she created for La Vie En Rose) mirror the evolution of her character.
Dibb sent Keira an ostrich feather wrapped in a gold ribbon when wooing her for the part. ‘How could I refuse a man who does that?‘ she laughed.
However, none of the weight crushing down on Keira’s head would mean a thing if she wasn’t able to suggest the weight of Georgiana’s inner turmoil. And she succeeds, with a sublime performance.
There’s lovely work also from Hayley and the fast-rising Dominic Cooper as Charles Grey, the true love of Georgiana’s life.
The film, backed by Pathe, the BBC and others, was produced by Michael Kuhn and Gaby Tana, an American who saw in Amanda Foreman’s bestselling biography of Georgiana ‘a great story screaming to be made into a film‘.
It opens on September 5.
By the way, Devonshire House, the duke’s palatial London digs, is as important a part of the film as the main characters.
The property - which overlooked London’s Green Park - no longer exists, so Dibb and his crew used the exterior of Somerset House on the Strand as a stand-in, and the interiors were shot at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire and Clandon Park near Guildford in Surrey, the latter’s two-storey marble hall replicating the Devonshire House dining room. Chatsworth House, still in the Devonshire family, was also used for filming.
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