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THE DIRECTOR OF some of the UK’s most highly acclaimed television series and dramas - including Brideshead Revisited and Shackleton - is about to revive one of cinema’s most famous mutts. Charles Sturridge - whose big-screen credits include Runners and FairyTale: A True Story - will start work on a new version
LION’S SHARE:
Above, guess which MGM star is about to make a comeback (clue: she’s got four legs and is at the front). Below, Nicole Kidman (seen left in full Stepford Wife glory) may well play the scary White Queen in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (previously a highly
successful BBC series).
| of Eric Knight’s best-selling 1938 novel, Lassie Come Home, in September.
The canine character, which was based on Knight’s own dog, Toots, was not originally the brown-and-white canine of movie (and TV) fame: she was, Knight wrote, a “classic collie’, which would make her basically black and white. What is more, she didn’t have a white blaze on her forehead: she had a “perfect black mask”.
And, despite the gradual North-Americanisation of the setting, the novel was set in the Yorkshire dales - which is where Knight himself grew up, although he moved to the US with his (American-born) mother at the age of 15. During the war, he became a major in the US Army and died in 1943 in a mysterious plane crash in the jungle of Dutch Guyana.
MGM made the first Lassie movie, also called Lassie Come Home, in 1943 (Knight visited the set, but did not live to see the finished film), sticking fairly closely to the novelist’s original story of a poor family who have to sell their beloved dog to a rich mine-owner. Lassie, however, escapes and… well, if you can’t remember the movie, its title ought to tell you what Lassie does next. It was a prestige project, with a cast headed by Nigel Bruce, Donald Crisp, Edmund Gwenn and Elsa Lanchester, with then child-star Roddy McDowell as young Joe, who loves Lassie best of all.
There were some nine further movies (Son of Lassie, Courage of Lassie, Challenge to Lassie, The Magic of Lassie…) between 1944 and 1958, and a 1994 revival, set in Virginia, with Thomas Guiry as ‘Joe’ (who is called Matt this time around). Plus there was a radio series, a TV series, a set of comic books, a collection of ‘Viewmaster’ slide sets, videos, DVDs…
Sturridge will be telling the original story, which he describes as “a picaresque tale of adventure and landscape set in Britain before the Second World War”. So perhaps not so far from Brideshead, after all.
AS VIRTUALLY THE only actor in the entire
world not to put in an appearance in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Nicole Kidman is reportedly been considering the eye-catching role of the White Witch in Disney’s upcoming big-screen version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
We know this because she has been seen touring the film’s potential locations - which are once again in New Zealand - in a helicopter. The film will, of course, be based on CS Lewis’ children’s classic, which was a hugely successful BBC television series at the end of the eighties. In that one, Barbara Kellerman played the role of the White Witch, who casts a spell over Narnia - the land which Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucie discover by going through the wardrobe - blanketing the country in permanent snow, so that it is always winter (but never Christmas). The children team up with Aslan (the lion) to put things back to normal.
The new film will be live-action and will be directed by Andrew Adamson, who was responsible for Shrek. Production is due to start mid-year, when it will indeed be winter (without being Christmas) in New Zealand. Kidman, meanwhile, will next be seen in another remake: that of The Stepford Wives.
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