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Love in a Cold Climate
Interview with Alan Bates From the BBC website for "Love in a Cold Climate"
Q: Give us some illustration of how he's not politically correct. He just thinks all foreigners are trash. All, and any. It doesn't matter where they're from. It's a sweeping idea that anyone born away from these shores is absolute rubbish. It's an extreme attitude of a period. It's comic because it's ludicrous. Q: Was he based on anybody in particular? Yes, the father of the Mitford girls. Q: Did you read the books themselves or did you confine yourself to the script? No, I read the books and did a little research. Research is strange because you have to know as much as you need to know and almost no more, because you have to be able to let your own imagination go so that you can create a character for yourself. You can't be absolutely rigid, you have to have a little flexibility. You have to be able to respond to the character to a degree.
Q: What was his attitude to bringing up his children? Well, it was so ludicrous. He felt that boys go off to war and girls learn French and know how to ride horses but are given no real education. His girls didn't even go to school. It was so reactionary and blind really. Q: Do you think he had one favourite child? I think so. You feel that Linda in the book is his favourite child. Maybe that's dramatically what Nancy Mitford decided; I don't know whether it relates to life but that's what you feel. Q: Tell us about his lifestyle. Very outdoors; he spends a lot of time on horseback with dogs and guns. He can't abide being trussed up in evening clothes and it brings out the worst in him, he's restless and impatient. I believe the Mitford father himself would take his girls off to these balls and engagements and would just sit in the hall with his cloak and stick. Sometimes he would sit outside for five hours. He wouldn't take his things off. He would be there for his children but he wouldn't actually join in. He was a complete eccentric . Q: He has a couple of nice foibles. What's behind all this is most interesting. His experiences in the First World War made him very extreme. He can cry, he can be deeply moved by hearing a record or seeing a picture, however simple or ordinary the picture may be to someone else, or by the story of Romeo and Juliet, or a song about a diver dying at the bottom of the sea. All the things that move him are things to do with loneliness and cold. I just feel that it's all to do with the First World War. Q: What about his death drawer? Oh, the death drawer? All of us have got people who we don't get on with or at whom you have a flash of blind rage, but he has a huge number of people who cross his path and strike the fuse, so he writes their name on a piece of paper and puts them in his death drawer and it's a way of getting rid of his hatred. He believes that something will happen to the names he puts in the drawer. I think we've all got a bit of a death drawer, haven't we, in our heads anyway.
Q: Are you playing up the batty side of him? Well if you read the script, you don't have to. It's a question of how far you go. You've got to make him a man of feeling because he's certainly that and sometimes it's very moving and wonderful and sometimes it's ludicrously full of rage.
Q: Can you talk about this morning's scene (The Hamptons' Ball)? There are a lot of people in the scene who are main figures in the story. There's Lady Montdore, played by Sheila Gish, and her daughter Polly, played by Megan Dodds, who won't do anything her mother wants, she's the despair of her mother, she won't talk to young men and she won't marry them. There's a character there played by Anthony Andrews who is a friend of the mother who might be having an affair with her but who is also interested in all the girls. There's also Celia Imrie, who plays my wife, and we're there unwillingly because our daughters are there and Fanny, their cousin, is there. We've all got to be there because it's all for Polly, so that it brings out all the tensions and hatreds, particularly those of Uncle Matthew who regards everyone there as a foreigner. He finds himself having to take the wife of the German Ambassador into dinner, which is about the worst fate that could befall him!
That's my entrenching tool. Used it in
1915. Q: Do you think there's anything believable about this liking of all things German within the aristocracy? That particular family, the Mitfords, got very caught up in the mood of the times and it hurt them once or twice but it was the time in which they lived. It seemed to them that Germany was an extraordinary nation at the time, emerging from a terrible economy into strength; finally into horror, but that hadn't yet happened. |||
Ten Key Things About the Mitfords Nancy Mitford's novels "Love in a Cold Climate" and "The Pursuit of Love" are based on the lives of the six Mitford sisters who captivated and scandalised high society during the 1920s and 1930s. 1. Parents: The second Lord Redesdale and his wife, Sydney 2. Daughter one: Nancy (1904-73), novelist famous for co-editing the snob's bible, Noblesse Oblige, which contrasted 'U' (Upper class) and 'non-U' language. She married Peter Rodd in Paris 3. Daughter two: Pamela (1907-94), took to farming and in 1936 she married Derek Jackson, a physicist and amateur jockey 4. Daughter three: Diana (1910-), left first husband Bryan Guinness, son of Lord Moyne, secretly marrying British fascist Oswald Mosley in Germany in 1936 in Goebbels's drawing room. Now lives in Paris 5. Daughter four: Unity (1916-48), fell in love with Hitler 6. Daughter five: Jessica/Decca (1917-1996), eloped at 19 with Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly. Became a communist then took US citizenship in 1944, spending her life writing and campaigning 7. Daughter six: Deborah (1920-), became a duchess, marrying the 11th Duke of Devonshire. Now living at Chatsworth 8. Son: Tom (1901-45), a fascist sympathiser, was killed in Burma 9. Friends: Churchill family, the Guinness family, Lady Diana Cooper, Chip Channon, Lytton Strachey, Sir John Betjeman, the Sitwells 10 Essential reading: Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh edited by Charlotte Mosley, published by Hodder ||| From The Observer, Sunday, 4 February, 2001, compiled by Dorota Nosowicz
Girls will be gels "How we shrieked" was the Mitford girls'
refrain when amused - they were forever shrieking with laughter
(when they weren't in floods of tears over the death of some
insect or vole). BBC1, by distilling two of Nancy Mitford's best-loved
novels into a two-part drama, beginning on Sunday at 8.45pm,
are treading on satirical egg-shells. But relax: there is a treat
in store. Prepare to shriek, as Nancy would say. From the Times, Friday 3 February 2001, review by Valerie Grove. |
I'M ALAN BATES and I'm playing someone called
Matthew, who is the father of all these girls. He's quite an
extraordinary character because he's very volatile, very violent
and very charming as well - very non-PC, not at all politically
correct. You sort of like him but almost can't tolerate him at
the same time. He has a permanent kind of rage, criticism and
prejudice about everything which is sort of frightening at the
beginning. It's smothering a huge love for his family and they
know this, so they take him seriously for the moment, when he's
barking, but they know it's going to pass and that he's really
on their side.
Her characters sprang from her
own life: Fabrice, the dashing Duke, was obviously the colonel
and Lord Merlin was Lord Berners, while Cedric Hampton is a composite
of her gay friends Brian Howard and Stephen Tennant. In the BBC's
faultlessly cast production, I defy anyone to watch the glitteringly
camp Cedric (Daniel Evans) confront and charm Lady Montdore (Sheila
Gish) and not want to play the scene over again. 