Mary Reilly

Mary Reilly (1996)

The untold story of Jekyll and Hyde

A housemaid falls in love with Dr. Jekyll and his darkly mysterious counterpart, Mr. Hyde.

Date of release
1996-02-23
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (349)
Runtime
1h 48m
Genres
Drama, Horror, Thriller
Director
Stephen Frears

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Mary Reilly
  • Filmed in: Pinewood Studios and Edinburgh

Mary Reilly is a 1996 American Gothic horror film directed by Stephen Frears and starring Julia Roberts and John Malkovich. It was written by Christopher Hampton and adapted from the 1990 novel of the same name by Valerie Martin.

Production

Producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber acquired the film rights to Mary Reilly in 1989, and optioned them for Warner Bros. with Roman Polanski as director. When Guber became CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment later that year, he moved Mary Reilly to Sony's sister company, TriStar Pictures, where Tim Burton was approached to direct with Denise Di Novi to produce in 1991.

Burton intended to start filming in January 1994 with Winona Ryder in the leading role, after he completed filming Ed Wood. However, Burton dropped out in May 1993 over his anger against Guber for putting Ed Wood in turnaround. Stephen Frears was TriStar's first choice to replace Burton, and Di Novi was fired and replaced with Ned Tanen. Daniel Day-Lewis was TriStar's first choice for the role of Dr. Jekyll and Uma Thurman for the role of Mary.

Principal photography was reported to begin in the spring of 1994. The script would undergo as many as 25 drafts and Frears shot three different potential endings. Frears wanted to go with a more ambiguous ending, but the studio and test audiences reacted to this version negatively as they saw it as too "downbeat".

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

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