London’s Leicester Square went all regal on Wednesday night for the world premiere of Keira Knightley’s critically acclaimed new flick, The Duchess.
In the film, Keira plays Georgiana Spencer, an 18th-Century posho who is all-but forced into a loveless marriage with Ralph Fiennes' nasty Duke.
“It was a very exciting character to play,” she says. “I think she was an incredible woman and the fact that the film's getting good reviews is obviously really exciting.”
Georgiana’s life was a decidedly rocky one with the Duke's numerous affairs and her penchant for speaking her mind causing all manner of public scandals - clearly there are parallels between Georgiana’s life and that of her real-life descendent Diana, Princess Of Wales. But while the publicity material is happy to play up to the comparison, it’s not something that the filmmakers want to align themselves with.
“I’m obviously very aware of it, I think you’d have to be pretty naïve not to,” says director Saul Dibb. “This role was written from an Amanda Foreman biography which came out ten years ago and as filmmakers we just weren’t interested in drawing that parallel.
“It’s fine if people want to talk about that after they’ve seen the film, but the film should be allowed to exist in its own right. They shouldn’t have made such an implicit comparison.”
The woman who kicked the whole thing off with her acclaimed biography of the early It Girl, Amanda Foreman, was less concerned with the Diana parallels than with how her book would translate to the big screen. It turns out that her worries were for nought and she’s so happy with the final product that she provided us with a neat pasta analogy.
“The film is a work of art and the book is a work of history,” says Foreman. “It’s as if you take some dough and you squash it really flat and you put it through the wringer and it becomes tagliatelle. That’s the relationship between the book and the film, it’s still dough but it’s now tagliatelle and it’s different but still the same - which is something that I was very happy about.”
The Duchess is released on Friday.