With cameos for Sassoon, TS Eliot and Edmund Blunden, as well as publisher Jonathan Cape, this is a goldmine of vintage literary gossip – but how true to life is it? “If you’d said it was like Downton Abbey, I would have said great, because everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, it’s a movie about poets’,” says Nunez, who makes no apologies for the occasional detour from biographical fact.
If you described the film as Downton Abbey, I’d say great, because everyone will say, ‘Oh, it’s a movie about poets’ William Nunez Their unconventional relationship evolves into a four-person game of swapsies, after Riding reels a starstruck young Irish poet, Geoffrey Phibbs (Fra Fee), into what they called their “holy circle”. Tom Hughes’s Graves is in his mid 30s, shell-shocked and struggling to write, when the bucolic life that he shared with his artist wife, Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) in an Oxfordshire cottage is turned upside down by the arrival from the US of the intellectual adventuress Laura Riding (Dianna Agron). The Laureate gives us that most exotic of domestic arrangements, a menage a quatre. Those years, between 19, turn out to be a gift for a film that follows in a hallowed tradition of lit-pics in which the introverted act of creation comes second to the “creativity” of writers’ love lives – think Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Christine Jeffs’ 2003 Sylvia, or Emma Mackey and Oliver Jackson-Cohen in last year’s Emily, directed by Frances O’Connor, the glamorously fictionalised portrait of the least romantically inclined Brontë. But he regarded himself first and foremost as a poet, memorably declaring that “prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat” – a line that William Nunez, writer-director of The Laureate, reluctantly had to excise from his script because none of the show dogs had yet been born in the years he chose to cover.ĭaniel Craig as Ted Hughes and Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath in Sylvia (2003).
Graves is an unfashionable figure today, known chiefly through I, Claudius, the TV serialisation of two of his novels, starring Derek Jacobi as the Roman emperor. Now the tables are turned, with a cameo of Sassoon in a film about the early career of the man who would go on to become professor of poetry at Oxford and to win the Queen’s gold medal for poetry.
Robert Graves was last seen on the sidelines of Terence Davies’s biopic as the friend of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon ( Benediction). H ow do you make the life of a poet work on screen? It helps if they had scandalous personal lives (Rimbaud and Verlaine in Total Eclipse, Dylan Thomas in Last Call and The Edge of Love).
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