Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre. It describes the background of Mr. Rochester’s marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress, the famous “madwoman in the attic.” Australian filmmaker John Duigan directed the film. If we had a filmmakers’ hall of fame for nudity, he would be one of the first inductees. His very next film was Sirens, the holy grail of film nudity.
Wide Sargasso Sea was adapted from the eponymous novel by Jean Rhys, and there is an interesting story behind the novel. Rhys had been a fairly successful writer in the 1930s, but she went full Salinger around 1940, moving completely out of public life, eventually descending into poverty. She was so reclusive that Selma Vaz Dias, a filmmaker who wanted to adapt one of Rhys’s novels, had to take out a public ad in 1949, asking whether anyone knew how to get in touch with the author. The two women eventually became collaborators and close friends. Following years of persuasion from Vaz Dias, Rhys finally resumed her writing career while in her 70s – after having published nothing for a quarter of a century. It was in this late stage of her life that she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea. She had a heart attack while she was writing the novel, but recovered sufficiently to complete it. Modern Library and Time magazine have placed it on various “top 100” lists.
Rowena King was trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She currently appears frequently in series work. (IMDb listing.)
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“Karina Lombard,” per IMDb, “is an actor, screenwriter and director. She is Italian, French and Native American. Born in Tahiti, the youngest of five children, she was raised and educated in Spain, Switzerland and Peru. She is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian, French and German.” Her career was soaring in the 1990s, when she landed a plum role opposite Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, but her only credit in the past five years was in a grade-B Billy Zane film called The Oath (3.5 at IMDb).
I remember stumbling across this movie one night on HBO as a teen. Biggest bush I’d ever seen. And it still holds up, no merkins here!
Lombard was hotter than shit, heard she got fired off The L Word for being a bitch tho
This Duigan guy has not only gotten Elle Macpherson, Tara Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Shue, Lena Headey & Charlize naked on film, he did the first nude scenes for Angie Harmon & Portia de Rossi, plus he basically discovered Nicole Kidman, Thandie Newton & Naomi Watts ALL in the same movie, Flirting – legendary