In the 1850s, Ellen Ternan is a minimally talented actress who catches the eye of the hailed British author, Charles Dickens. Bored with his intellectually unstimulating wife, Dickens takes the educated Ellen has his mistress with the cooperation of her mother. What follows is a stormy relationship with this literary giant who provides her with a life few women of her time can enjoy. Yet, Ellen is equally revolted by Charles’ emotional cruelty and determination to keep her secret. In that conflict, Ellen must judge her own role in her life and decide if the price she pays is bearable.
The Invisible Woman is a drama film directed by Ralph Fiennes and based on Claire Tomalin’s book The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. It had its premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9th, 2013.
Ralph Fiennes directs and stars as Charles Dickens in this opulent period drama about the great novelist’s passionate, years-long secret affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones; Like Crazy).
Actress Nelly Ternan was performing in London’s Haymarket Theatre when she was first spotted by Charles Dickens, who subsequently cast her in a production of The Frozen Deep. The year was 1857. Dickens was forty-five and had been married some twenty years. Ternan was seventeen. The two began an affair, which was kept a secret from the general public for the duration of their lives. Theirs has since become one of the great love stories in literary history, as alluring for the speculation it inspires as for the details on record as fact.
Based on Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ternan, scripted by Abi Morgan, (The Iron Lady, Shame), and directed by the great English actor Ralph Fiennes — whose directorial debut, Coriolanus, screened at the Festival in 2011 — The Invisible Woman is a rapturous chronicle of Ternan and Dickens’s relationship, which prompted the end of Dickens’s marriage, survived a train crash, inspired characters and scenarios in some of the author’s most beloved novels, and continued until his death in 1870.
Felicity Jones’s performance as Ternan brims with passion and intelligence — the latter quality being one of the things that drew Dickens to Ternan in the first place. Dickens himself is embodied by Fiennes as a complicated artist torn between his desires and ideals and his need to uphold tradition and avoid scandal. Enveloped in opulent period detail, The Invisible Woman brings us closer to this giant of nineteenth-century prose — and to the woman who sustained his lust for life in his final years.
The Invisible Woman (2013)
Directed by: Ralph Fiennes
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Kristin Scott Thomas, Tom Hollander, Charlotte Hope, Laurence Spellman, Jonathan Harden
Screenplay by: Abi Morgan
Production Design by: Maria Djurkovic
Cinematography by: Rob Hardy
Film Editing by: Nicolas Gaster
Costume Design by: Michael O’Connor
Set Decoration by: Tatiana Macdonald
Music by: Ilan Eshkeri
MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content.
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: December 25, 2013
Visits: 64
