Unsurprisingly, Pride and Prejudice has been the Austen novel most often adapted for film. The first big screen interpretation came as early as 1940, when Aldous Huxley wrote the screenplay for a version which starred Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet, with Lawrence Olivier as Mr Darcy. The film won an Oscar for best Art Direction. More recently Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen stepped into the shoes of the feisty couple in 2005, Knightley was Oscar nominated for her role, and the film was generally well received, although it arguably failed to eclipse the 1995 television adaptation which shot Colin Firth to fame.
Modern Film Versions of Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice also received two modern updates in the early 2000's. In 2003 the story was modernised and Elizabeth Bennet was portrayed as a student in a film starring Kam Heskin and Orlando Seale. In 2004 Bride and Prejudice gave the tale the Bollywood treatment, Aishwarya Rai in the lead role, renamed Lalita Bakshi, and Martin Henderson as an American Darcy giving the movie cross-continental appeal.
Other Jane Austen books have rarely made it into cinemas, although there was a surge of popularity in the mid 1990's, which saw almost all her novels adapted for film. The 1995 version of Persuasion which starred Amanda Root as Anne Elliot and Ciaran Hinds as Captain Wentworth was nominated for five BAFTA awards. In the same year Ang Lee directed Sense and Sensibility, with an Oscar winning screen play by Emma Thompson. Thompson also featured alongside Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman at the head of a fine ensemble cast. In 1999 Patricia Rozema wrote and directed an adaptation of Mansfield Park, and although some purists objected to her version of the story, it was relatively popular with audiences.
Adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma
In 1996 Douglas McGrath was the writer and director of Emma, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow as the eponymous heroine, with Toni Collette as Harriet Smith, and Jeremy Northam as Mr Knightley. As with many Austen adaptations, the film enjoyed a strong supporting cast making the most of minor comic characters. It was preceded in 1995 by another interpretation of Emma, the Amy Heckerling film Clueless. Although updated to a Beverley Hills high school, the plot was remarkably faithful to the original novel. The film featured Alicia Silverstone in the lead role, with Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd also starring.
As well as adapting of her novels, film makers have also found Jane Austen an inspiration in other ways. The 1980 film Jane Austen in Manhattan told the story of two New York teachers vying to put on a play supposedly written by Austen. In 2007 came The Jane Austen Book Club, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler, in which a group of women, and one man, resolve their issues with love and life by reading Austen’s novels. 2007 also saw the release of Becoming Jane, a romantic drama based on Austen’s own life, and starring Anne Hathaway as the novelist, with James McAvoy as the leading man.
Jonathan Squirrell - Jon Squirrell is a freelance writer and 3-dimensional cartoonist currently living on Humberside. As well as writing for Suite 101, Jon ...
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