Iris follows the life of acclaimed academic and writer Iris Murdoch, but rather than being a celebration of her life or a eulogy for her passing the film is first and foremost a story about love. “I didn’t want to make a film that was a sort of biopic, that was doggedly faithful in a documentary sense,” said writer and director Richard Eyre. “I wanted to make a love story, a story of enduring love that was actually based on a remarkable real-life story. Enduring love is a very rare phenomenon.”
Spanning forty years, the film charts the love affair between literary legend Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley from their first days together at Oxford to her development of Alzhemiers and death in 1999. Based on Bayley’s books about his wife, the film recounts their lives and the nature of a relationship that saw them inseparable to the end.
“John Bayley’s books opened my eyes to how incredible it was that those two people found each other and that they cared for each other,” said Dame Judi Dench, who plays the older Iris. “When she became ill, he looked after her, it’s a perfect love story.”
The special nature of the pair’s relationship is the focal point of the film and also the aspect that most captivated the film’s cast. “John, through his acceptance of who she was, managed to find her heart and I think it’s a very touching story,” said Hugh Bonneville, the film’s young John Bayley. “They lived in their own little world, John describes them as living like two rabbits in a burrow, and they didn’t need anybody else.”
The older Bayley is portrayed by an excellent Jim Broadbent – nominated alongside Dench and Winslet for a Golden Globe - who found a personal resonance with the film, “My mother had died of Alzheimers,” he told us. “So I’ve made that journey and I was reminded a lot of her. It was a moving experience but it wasn’t emotionally hard for me, I wasn’t depressed by it all, if anything I recognised the reality of it and was slightly at ease with it.”
Attending the British premiere of the film at Mayfair’s Curzon cinema were many famous faces, including Richard E Grant, Derek Jacobi, Vanessa Redgrave and, of course, Kate Winslet, who brings the young Iris Murdoch to life. “I’m very proud of Iris and I’m thrilled that the film
seems to be doing really well and people are enjoying it,” she told us. “Iris was a loose cannon, she was an intellectual who had a heart of gold. She was a very warm and very intelligent woman who simply loved life and wanted to be happy.”
Also present at the event was John Bayley himself, who had already seen the film and was extremely pleased with the final result, which he described as a “wonderful tribute.”
This article appeared on the Empire Online website on January 13, 2002