An Awfully Big Adventure is the latest film from director Mike Newell and features some of the most exceptional British and Irish film actors working today. Set in the tempestuous backstage world of a Liverpool theatre company in the years following World War II, An Awfully Big Adventure is the story of Stella, a headstrong, starry-eyed young teenager whose passion for the theatre leads her into a grownup world of sex and secrets, menace and manipulation. Based on the popular novel by Beryl Bainbridge, the film stars Alan Rickman (Die Hard; Robin Hood) and Hugh Grant, who reunites with Newell after the tremendous success of their last collaboration, the Academy Award-nominee Four Weddings and a Funeral. Playing the lead in this often comic, often poignant story of innocence lost is newcomer Georgina Cates, who captured the role through a complex ruse truly worthy of the character she plays. Also starring are Alun Armstrong, Peter Firth and Rita Tushingham.
The city of Liverpool suffered tremendously during the bombings of World War II. As our story unfolds, the city and its people are still coping with the war's legacy of poverty and loss, tempered by their unique sensibility and black sense of humor.
Stella Bradshaw (Georgina Cates) never knew her father and was abandoned by her mother at an early age. An aspiring actress who has worked mostly as a telephone operator, she lives with her Uncle Vernon (Alun Armstrong) and Auntie Lil (Rita Tushingham). She is a headstrong girl with a mercurial teenage personality filled with contradictions -- hardened by the suffering she has seen yet still vulnerable, alternately warm and prickly, perceptive and naive at the same time.
Uncle Vernon encourages Stella's theatrical ambitions, hoping that the stage will provide an outlet for her fiery temperament and boundless energy. She soon gets a job as an assistant stage manager at a repertory theatere in Liverpool.
Stella is thrilled to join this sophisticated world and escape her uncle's overprotectiveness. She charms the actors with her innocent and inquisitive nature and her unexpected flashes of insight. She has her first experiments with love and sex, experienced with a very matter-of-fact curiosity rather than pleasure or shock. She soon falls in love -- or imagines she does -- with the theatre's handsome and charismatic actor/manager/director Meredith Potter (Hugh Grant).
Beneath Stella's newly acquired worldly veneer, there is still a very needy child. Whenever she feels lonely or frightened, she talks to her mother on the phone -- although no one is at the other end of the line.
As the company's production of Peter Pan approaches, P.L. O'Hara (Alan Rickman) is summoned back to Liverpool to play Captain Hook. O'Hara is a dashing and heroic figure, roaring into town astride his motorcycle. He is also a man with a past and a guilty secret.
O'Hara is intrigued by the blossoming Stella and she loses her virginity to him. She also loses a little more of her innocence as the company's petty and somewhat sordid little dramas are played out before her wide-open eyes. Potter is the supreme manipulator and predator and, having destroyed his latest victim Geoffrey (Alan Cox), he sets his sights on Stella.
O'Hara and Potter battle for Stella, like the forces of good and evil, until destiny comes into play, forcing events that no one could have predicted.
Set in a world of high emotions and dramatic temperaments, where feelings and personalities are larger than life, An Awfully Big Adventure is the comic yet poignant story of an unforgettable young girl with very big dreams. The novel, written by Beryl Bainbridge, held a personal fascination for producer Hilary Heath. Like Bainbridge, and her lead character Stella, Heath had also worked as a young girl at the Liverpool Playhouse.
Recalls Heath, "I used to go there often with my parents. The company would work ten months of the year, with two months dark, and they would perform a new play every three weeks. During a school holiday, I begged for and got a job at the theatre and was paid the princely sum of one pound a week for the privilege of setting the props, making the tea, sweeping the stage, and calling the actors. It was very much as Beryl described -- I'd get abuse, sometimes teasing, sometimes serious. You had to be quick on your feet to get away from some of the older male actors."
A producer with Portman Productions, Heath called Bainbridge's agent immediately after reading the novel and found she had competition for the film rights. It was then that she sent the book to director Mike Newell, hoping his commitment would seal the deal. Heath, who had met Newell previously as both an actress and a theatrical agent, says, "I had a feeling Mike would want to make this film because he loves actors and it's a piece about actors."
Newell remembers, "I had a message from Hilary saying she had a book she wanted me to read but that she didn't suppose I'd want to do it. As I was working at the time, I passed it on to my wife who also said I probably wouldn't want to do it but that she personally thought it was rather good. There were all these people telling me what I didn't want to do so I read it and liked it a lot." Newell particularly liked the lead character of Stella: "She's a 16-year-old girl with too much flair, much too much sauce for her own good. We had somebody like that staying in the house at that time who was very much like that -- a very, very bright girl who was at the same time a little mad. She was delightful and wondrous to behold but she could drive you nuts. Very theatrical and, of course, very vulnerable at the same time, just like Stella, and I could see the effect she had on people. It was a kind of object lesson that I became very interested in."
At about the same time, the celebrated screenwriter Charles Wood had also come across the novel, as a Christmas gift from his daughter. He too had a particular affinity for the story since he had spent his youth in the world of the theatre as the son of repertory actors. He decided to look into the possibility of buying the rights but found that Heath had beaten him to it. Wood offered his services to Heath, who happily agreed. Wood's obvious love for and familiarity with the world of the novel beautifully eased the story's path from page to screen.
With producer, director and screenwriter in place, it was time to tackle the all-important job of casting. Says producer Heath, "we got such a wonderful cast thanks to Mike Newell. It's part of his genius. He casts absolutely brilliantly and there's no actor he doesn't know. Mike sees everything and reads everything and people are very keen to work with him."
Hugh Grant, who had just finished working with Newell on Four Weddings and a Funeral, was cast as the charming but evil manipulator, Meredith Potter. Newell says, "It's a very different Hugh Grant role. He saw his own opportunity in it to have his own contrast, which is good for him. Hugh behaved with tremendous grace because I was dubious of working with him again so quickly. It's not that you get tired of people but I always like to be curious about an actor and if you've just done six months with a guy, the curiosity factor is less. But he was always on my list to play Potter and he was very, very sweet and I'm immensely grateful to him."
Alan Rickman, whose performances in Truly, Madly Deeply, Die Hard and Robin Hood have earned him an enormous following on both sides of the Atlantic, was chosen to play the dashing P.L. O'Hara. Newell, who had never worked with Rickman, says that he decided to "handle him as I would have handled Elizabeth Taylor -- with great respect and great care. He was marvelous and I developed a great affection for him. He is very good in the film."
The story of Georgina Cates, who was cast in the pivotal role of Stella, is something straight out of the most audacious backstage melodrama. She first heard about the production after reading about it in Screen International two years before production began. She read the book and called Portman Productions every three months to find out when shooting would commence. When they finally told her that they were casting, Georgina's agents approached casting director Susie Figgis. They sent her 8x10 glossy and resume and the initial response was good. However, a month later the agent was told that, although they knew of her work and thought she was very nice, they had decided to forgo a professional and find a genuine 16-year-old girl from Liverpool.
Georgina, who was doing a play at that time, sought advice from a number of people, asking them, "If you really wanted something, would you fib and say you were something that you're not?" The general consensus was no. She was told that she would never work again if she was found out. Completely ignoring all the advice, Georgina had a passport photo taken with a wig on and wrote a letter to Susie Figgis in the style of Stella, the lead in An Awfully Big Adventure. When her letter received no response, she deposited herself on Susie's doorstep. Of course, as soon as Susie saw her, she arranged for her to meet Mike Newell.
She arrived at the meeting, speaking in her best Liverpool accent, still wearing the wig for fear that Susie would recognize her as Clare Woodgate, her real name and the name she had been working under as a stage and television actress. She wasn't recognized but an invitation to take a screen test resulted in a new web of lies to explain why she didn't have a Liverpool phone number.
Mike Newell continues the story: "She said that she was born in Liverpool and her family was still there but her mother was disapproving of her ambitions, as well as being depressed and agoraphobic. I never found out where her dad was in all this. She told me that she'd been coming down every Saturday, taking a very early train to attend amateur classes run through the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. I was very impressed that someone would take a train 200 miles south and 200 miles north again in order to take a three or four hour drama class. That for me signaled real commitment! While she was auditioning, I was introduced to her aunt who came from Essex, with whom she was apparently staying. We all know now that it wasn't her aunt, it was her mother who wasn't agoraphobic at all. At the audition, she'd given herself this very weird costume, makeup, haircut, hair dye and she was -- in hindsight -- very carefully dressed. It was sort of 'unsuccessful provincial grunge,' which made perfect sense for who she said she was. That kid had actually been doing a double performance all the way -- she was playing Georgina Cates and she'd also been playing the role in the film -- it was very remarkable."
For Cates (really Woodgate), the pressure was really on. At her second screen test she was almost caught by an actor from Liverpool who was auditioning for the role of Uncle Vernon. Cates recalls, "He asked me where I lived in Liverpool and the only road I could remember was Hope Street, which is of course the main street. He said he didn't think there were any houses there so I told him I lived above a fish and chips shop!"
Mike Newell admits that during shooting, "everybody felt that there was something not right about Georgina -- something screwy. When she started work she was clearly obsessed by the notion of being an actress and very obsessed with this part, which she'd studied to the point of insensibility. She had such God-given instinct for it that I made a joke in rehearsal that we would probably discover that she was 34 and had a five year contract with Brookside. How close to the truth I was!"
Obviously, Cates identified strongly with the character of Stella. "I read this bit in the book where she goes to other people's funerals and makes herself cry and enjoys it. When I read it, I was so pleased because when I was about eight or nine I used to travel home on the bus trying to make myself cry by imagining that my parents had died or something. You don't think anyone else does that, do you? Stella's so unintimidated as well. She sits up in bed, very proud of the fact that she's beginning to get some tits and says, 'I'm getting the hang of fucking,' whereas most teenage girls are hugging the sheets and imagining that they've done things wrong. I love that."
The characters in An Awfully Big Adventure had their origins in a real post-war theatre company at the Liverpool Playhouse. "All of the characters are based on real people apart from P.L. O'Hara, who was an amalgam," says Hilary Heath, "most notably, Prunella Scales' character who was based on a wonderful woman called Maud Carpenter. We were absolutely terrified of her -- she ruled the place with a rod of iron for years. We had great affection for her but she was certainly a terrifying figure to me as a lowly student."
Continues Heath, "Beryl of course was also a student at the Playhouse in 1947. Her descriptions are just so vivid. Certainly there is no actor who's ever been through rep who won't love this film. Beryl is an extraordinarily exotic creature. She's just wonderful and, thank god, she loves the film. She thought Georgina was especially wonderful."
Newell sees the story as "a piece of anthropology, in that a person from one culture finds themselves living inside another culture, and fails to adjust to the new rules of the tribe. He remembers "the lives that actors had at that stage because I started working in the early '60's -- only twelve or fourteen years after this film is set. Actors lived in very reduced circumstances, they never had any money, their emotional lives were very tragic, gay people were still prosecuted. Even within that community, it was a constant danger. Their lives were very insecure and raggedy. The whole invention of the middle class actor with his country cottage as well as his London house, who is a fashionable member of the community, is a recent development. It's what happened to people when they got rich from television."
Actual shooting began in Spring of 1994, with Dublin standing in for post-war Liverpool. Newell cites two reasons for the decision, one of which being the Irish tax breaks which make shooting there much less expensive than shooting in Britain. Equally important was that Dublin looked much more like Liverpool after the war than Liverpool looks today. Says Newell, "Liverpool got cleaned up after the war but Dublin still has a real smell of times past. For location purposes, Liverpool simply isn't as it was. You can't get a theatre, you can't get a square, you can't get an exterior, you can't get streets that look like they used to. We had wonderful picture research on Liverpool for the 1940's but that Liverpool is simply gone -- not a ship in the docks, nothing there at all."
Producer Philip Hinchcliffe sees the film as a journey of innocence "and that is always appealing, whatever age you are. It's an attractive journey and it's full of suspense. Beryl Bainbridge has a wonderful eye for comic human detail and the ability to see the absurd and comic in somebody's life at the same moment seeing the tragedy. It's this sort of double vision that's present all the way through -- this bittersweet thing. Mike's achievement is in making you laugh at the human foibles in the characters, but at the same time you know they're damaged people."
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