Sylvia (2003)

Interesting facts

Sylvia is a 2003 British biographical drama film directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, and Michael Gambon. It tells a story based on the real-life romance between prominent poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The film begins with their meeting at Cambridge in 1956 and ends with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963.

Production

Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, objected to the making of the film and denied BBC Films the rights to her mother's poetry. Hughes published a poem in the magazine Tatler, which contained the line, "They think I should give them my mother's words/To fill the mouth of their monster/Their Sylvia Suicide Doll."

Pawel Pawlikowski was originally attached to direct. However, he left due to the lack of artistic control he was given. "I walked away because the script wasn’t good, and it became a Hollywood film, where you didn’t have much control. With my methods of sculpting and changing things, I would have got fired after a week," he said.

Filming took place between October 2002 and February 2003. Much of the film was shot in and around the New Zealand city of Dunedin, with the University of Otago serving to represent Cambridge.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.