Film: Icon of her age...

4:10pm Friday 5th September 2008

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The Duchess (12A) Period romantic drama about a glamorous aristocrat, starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes.

SET at the end of the eighteenth century, The Duchess is the story of the beautiful and glamorous Georgiana Spencer, the most fascinating woman of the age.

While her beauty and charisma made her name, her extravagant tastes and appetite for gambling and love made her infamous.

Married young to the older, distant Duke of Devonshire, intimate of ministers and princes, Georgiana became a fashion icon, a doting mother, a shrewd political operator and darling of the common people.

From Georgiana’s passionate and doomed affair with Earl Grey to the complex ménage à trois with her husband and her best friend, Lady Bess Foster, The Duchess is a tale of fame, notoriety and the search for love.

The Duchess, is based on the biography of Georgiana, written by Amanda Foreman, which won the Whitbread prize for Best Biography in 1997 and stayed on the best-seller lists for months. The combination of the script, the role and the book had grabbed the attention of Keira Knightley, who plays Georgiana.” The script was really interesting and had a very strong female role, so when you get offered something like this you certainly don’t turn it down.

“I’ve done films based on books before, but never one based on a biography. I felt the character in the script and the character in the book were quite different from each other. The book is really extraordinary and there is so much in it, you could make so many films out of it.

“The script was quite cleverly done to keep to a very specific story line: the story of a doomed marriage. I think any actress would relish playing Georgiana, she’s an extraordinary character with a real lust for life.”

Cast opposite Knightley is Ralph Fiennes as the Duke of Devonshire. Fiennes explains how he saw the duke as a complex character bound by the codes of behaviour of his time. “I am a bit wary of period costume dramas, but I liked this and thought it was a good story. I liked the character of the Duke a lot, but thought the character could be made a bit more complicated in the interpretation. As written he’s emotionally constipated, rather cold, unemotional and quite cruel, but he’s a man of his time. There were certain values that he holds to and we have to understand those values and not pre-judge them.”

Knightley went to look through some of the archive of Georgiana’s belongings held at Chatsworth, as part of her research for the role. “I was very fortunate. When we were filming at Chatsworth, the present Duchess of Devonshire showed me some of the letters, jewellery and paintings and all the notes from her creditors that showed how much debt she was in.

“When she died she had been terrified of disclosing to her husband the amount she owed, because she was convinced he was going to divorce her or send her away and actually when she died he found out how much she was in debt and said ‘is that all’.”

Shooting in some of England’s most spectacular country houses also helped the cast. Stepping into centuries of history gave them a sense of their characters’ backgrounds.

Ralph Fiennes explains: “I think to shoot in real locations and to have the actual fabric of the times around you is fantastic. Aside from the room you are shooting in, all around you are bookshelves, corridors, paintings, gardens, vistas, and ceilings.

“You soak all this up. Just being in the space that someone of that standing lived their life in does something to you imaginatively. It’s all instinctive stuff. You immediately take on the confidence and the assurance of the place. Chatsworth was inherited and trying to get your head around inheriting a lot of land, a lot of people even, servants, requires such a different mentality from today’s life so it helps to be in the actual place.”