ELEGY FOR IRIS
SOUTHWOLD, England -- Judi Dench, playing Iris Murdoch, is crouched forward on a windy beach, placing pebbles on some pages torn from a notebook in order to stop them from flying off in the coastal gusts. Her lips pursed in steely, unspoken determination, this Dame Iris barely pauses to respond when her husband, John Bayley (played by Jim Broadbent), approaches with a family friend to ask Dame Iris to autograph a copy of "Jackson's Dilemma," her final novel.
As enacted by Dame Judi, Dame Iris grabs at her own book, showing no recognition whatsoever. She scrawls something indecipherable and then tosses the novel dismissively onto the sand — as the actress's eyes go blank.
At that point Richard Eyre, who is directing "Iris," calls "Cut" and everyone on the set of the screen story about the distinguished writer, who died in 1999 of Alzheimer's disease, goes briefly silent. A few people — including Mr. Eyre and the film's producers, Scott Rudin and Robert Fox — blink away tears.
"It was the empty eyes," said Tor Belfrage, Dame Judi's agent and longtime friend, when onlookers once again felt able to speak. The momentary expressionlessness, said Ms. Belfrage, "made me feel quite shaky — though what's amazing is that Judi comes back to being Judi immediately."
True to form, minutes later, Dame Judi was chatting animatedly, laughing about the Suffolk chill that found her wearing three layers of thermals under a sort of smock, her feet covered only in sandals. (The look, complete with disheveled wisps of hair, might be characterized as Murdoch bohemian.) "I think Iris had no kind of pride," said the actress, who is 66, "or maybe she had a pride about not caring." In any case, Dame Judi added, glancing with a smile at her unaccustomed bulk, "it's very nice when you get out of all this and you think, `Good gracious, look who's here!' "
In addition to Dame Judi and Mr. Broadbent, the film stars Kate Winslet and
Hugh Bonneville (who played the stockbroker who fails to recognize Julia
Roberts in "Notting Hill") as Iris and John in the 1950's, when the couple first
met. Mr. Eyre's script, written with Charles Wood, moves back and forth
between the decades — the young Iris who, in the words of Ms. Winslet,
"was a full- blooded, very bullish bisexual intellectual," and the Iris of later
renown, sadly prey to perhaps the cruelest affliction that can beset a writer.
All the principals were on location one blustery afternoon early in May, which happened to be Dame Judi's final day before she was to return to Canada to resume filming "The Shipping News," the Lasse Hallstrom movie opening in December. ("Iris" is not yet scheduled for release.)
But while Dame Judi was cracking jokes to restore her equilibrium, the filmmakers were enumerating the qualities that make one singular British dame the right choice to play another. Dame Judi never met Dame Iris, who was 79 when she died. "Everybody else seems to have done but me," the actress said; still, she found that "there were kind of guy ropes for me." She meant the points of resemblance between the distinguished Dublin-born writer of novels and philosophical treatises and the Yorkshire-born English theater legend whose blossoming as a film actress in the last four years has won her a best supporting actress Oscar (in 1999, for "Shakespeare in Love") as well as two more nominations.
"She comes from an Anglo-Irish background," Dame Judi said of Dame Iris, "which is the same as mine, and she had Quakerism in her immediate family, as I do: quite small points like that. It seems silly to say I was keen on getting it right; I don't really mean that. I was just very concerned that we would tell the story properly, really."
The larger affinities, said Mr. Eyre, are there to be noted as well. "That sort of disinterested humanity is what comes across in all Judi's dealings and illuminates all her performances," he said. Mr. Eyre staged "Amy's View," which brought the actress back to Broadway in 1999 and got her a Tony mere months after her Oscar.
"You do feel a sense of absolute goodness," Mr. Eyre said, "and that, of course, was at the heart of Iris Murdoch's preoccupation as a moral philosopher and as a novelist." (In 1968, she published an elevated mystery called "The Nice and the Good.")
WHAT fascinated Iris," he continued, "was what is good, and what is the meaning of good and of love, and if I had to put a name to love and goodness, Judi Dench wouldn't be a bad description."
Mr. Eyre is a newcomer to feature films who has worked extensively in British television and for nine years ran the Royal National Theater. (His BBC television series, "Changing Stages," which is both a chronicle of and a tribute to theater, is being shown on Sunday nights on Channel 13 in New York.) And if he exalts his star, Mr. Eyre also sounds pleased at last to be making this film, especially since an earlier project, "Mary Stuart," with Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, disappeared when Ms. Streep dropped out several years ago.
It was while he and Dame Judi were rehearsing "Amy's View" in New York that Mr. Eyre first heard of "Iris," which had originally been talked of as a $20 million venture for Sony Pictures, to be produced by John Calley. (That budget, said Mr. Eyre, "always seemed a bit overoptimistic"; this "Iris" is costing a quarter of that amount.)
When Mr. Calley eventually passed on the movie, Mr. Eyre took it to his friend and frequent theater associate Mr. Rudin, who saw "Iris" as an opportunity to reunite some of the team from "Amy's View" while giving a crucial boost in film to a 58-year-old theater director well regarded on both sides of the Atlantic.
"There's something fantastic," said Mr. Rudin, speaking of Mr. Eyre, "about delivering a movie director who's not a child and who brings a mature perspective on the world." Assessing Mr. Eyre's tenure at the National, during which younger colleagues like Stephen Daldry and Sam Mendes were beginning to move toward movies, Mr. Rudin said: "I sort of felt like Richard was owed a shot. All these people whose careers he had really incepted were getting to do movies, and it was his turn; it needed to be his turn." (Mr. Rudin's pipeline to British theater talent remains open: among his other films in post-production is an adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours." It's the second film from Mr. Daldry, who had worked for years in the theater before directing "Billy Elliot.")
What everyone connected to "Iris" agreed they didn't want to make was a conventional disease-of-the-week
movie. Instead, the aim was to animate the 43-year marriage between Dame Judi (sic) and Mr. Bayley (who is
now remarried, to Audi Villers, an old family friend) while honoring the grotesque irony of her final illness: that
so fearless a communicator and so deft a wielder of language — "at her height," said Mr. Wood, co-author of
the script, "the most important writer in England" — should succumb to an illness blocking her ability to do
both. Drawing on two of Mr. Bayley's recent memoirs — "Elegy for Iris" and "Iris and Her Friends" — the
script shows a couple steeped in one kind of language having to find another beyond words.
For Mr. Eyre, the immediacy of the material was heightened by his having dealt 10 years ago with the death of his mother, who was 72, from Alzheimer's. (Mr. Broadbent also lost his mother to the disease.) "There are moments in the script," he said, "that I observed directly from my mother. She had a very powerful period of violence, and although John would say Iris was never really violent, he slightly contradicts himself by telling stories from which you would have to infer that she was."
Mr. Broadbent said: "The edges of the disease weren't softened in the script; there were no shortcuts taken."
Mr. Bayley, speaking by telephone from his home in Oxford, expressed his own pleasure and surprise that the film was being made. "I never thought they would make it," he said, "because you know how these things are: it goes on and goes on and eventually just quietly fades away." That it has happened, Mr. Bayley added, referring to Mr. Eyre, "is due to that excellent man, whose mother died of Alzheimer's; that had a lot of weight with me, obviously."
Although he was not actively involved in the film and saw only a bit of shooting, Mr. Bayley was sent the script beforehand and was encouraged to comment. "I thought it was very good," he said, "but made one or two suggestions which Richard took quite seriously: matters of detail about Iris's character which I thought they got slightly wrong." Those had to do with the "sorts of things she would or would not say," Mr. Bayley continued, the point being that "even when Iris was ill, she was recognizably almost herself."
That may be why there is something both horrific and heroic in Dame Judi as she charts the title character's simply closing down, her vivacity and keen wit submerged beneath an almost stubborn opacity. "It's uncanny," said Phillida Gili, a visitor to the set who knew the couple well. (Mrs. Gili's daughter, Daisy, 27, is working as a runner on the film.) "For a moment," she said, surveying the two lead actors from a distance, "it felt like it was them, like seeing the past recreated."
And there, up the Suffolk beach — in real life, Dame Iris preferred the Dorset coast, much farther south — is Mr. Broadbent's John Bayley, all stooped solicitude, catering tenderly to a wife who is retreating from him more rapidly than the evening tide. "John never felt he completely had Iris to himself," said Mr. Broadbent, who is 52, "and then Dr. Alzheimer's takes her away."
The movie, said Mr. Rudin, transcends issues of illness to examine "what becomes known to them as a couple when the layers of artifice that have been built up over the years get peeled away."
"What are they left with?" he continued. "What's inside it all? The movie tells an amazing love story that isn't about illness." And yet, he said, "It completely slays you."
Thanks to HG for referring me to this article which appeared in the New York Times on September 8, 2001.