Editor’s Note: If you are feeling generous for the holidays, Gillian Anderson has a long list of charities at her site. After her BAFTA-nominated performance as Lady Dedlock in the BBC’s Bleak House, Hollywood star Gillian Anderson returns to Dickens as Miss Havisham in Great Expectations on BBC1. Also, check out Inside the X.
Anglotopia The centrepiece of this year’s BBC One Christmas schedule is Sarah Phelps’s (Oliver Twist, EastEnders) bold new three-part adaptation of Great Expectations starring Ray Winstone, Gillian Anderson, David Suchet and Douglas Booth.
Gillian as Lady Dedlock in the BBC’s Bleak House,
Here Ray Winstone who stars as Magwitch and Gillian Anderson who stars as Miss Havisham talk about playing two of Dickens iconic characters and why Great Expectations is a must see for viewers who enjoy a bit of Dickens at Christmas.
“Christmas without a BBC show or drama is not really Christmas is it. You have enough to drink and eat and then you sit down by the fire and watch a good drama, and there’s nothing better than Dickens at Christmas,” says Ray Winstone, the East-London born actor who follows in the footsteps of past luminaries such as Finlay Currie and James Mason in the role of Charles Dickens fearsome convict, Abel Magwitch.
Just as Finlay Currie who played Magwitch in David Lean’s 1946 critically-acclaimed version of Great Expectations left his indelible mark on the impressionable young Winstone, Winstone is now set to strike fear into the hearts of a new generation of youngsters when he emerges from the shadows of a foggy marshland to pounce on 11-year-old Pip played by Oscar Kennedy. An encounter which will change both lives forever.
Fast Tube by Casper
“I remember the film came out with Sir John Mills and Sir Alec Guinness it kind of stuck in my mind, especially the sequence at the beginning in the graveyard – it scared me. It was the kind of image that stuck with me all of my life really. It was the character in the film actually, the old boy who played him, the fear you have as a kid, someone coming out of the dark, the kind of thing you have nightmares about,” says the 54-year-old father of three.
The X-Files' Gillian Anderson
“As I got older, I began to realise what the film was all about, it is such great writing. The fact that it’s about where we come from, the inverted snobbery of people from other worlds, and what love is, and how love can be so cold. There’s a hell of a lot going on in it. Maybe as a kid you don’t understand, but you get it when you get older.”
Fast Tube by Casper
Young Philip Pirrip, Pip, the orphan from the forge at the heart of Great Expectations who survives his terrifying ordeal at the hands of Magwitch, is set for heartbreak following his encounter with Miss Havisham, the reclusive owner of Satis House. Encouraged to believe he has a future beyond the forge and also with Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter Estella, his eyes are opened, and he falls in love, but this is all part of a master plan to destroy him.
Fast Tube by Casper
“Miss Havisham draws him in and kind of opens his eyes and his heart, ultimately to crush it,” says Gillian Anderson who was fabulous as Lady Dedlock in BBC One’s critically-acclaimed drama serial, Bleak House.
The star of The X-Files and The Crimson Petal And The White, explains why the role of Miss Havisham was one she could not resist.
“Miss Havisham is an iconic character that kind of pervades our world in various forms. I was kind of interested in what it was that was so appealing about her, why she seems to get under people’s skin, a woman who is deeply, almost psychotically manipulative and potentially really psychologically damaging to the two children that we see her have this direct impact on, and so there was a curiosity there for me.
Fast Tube by Casper
“I don’t know how much of my falling in love with her was about falling in love with my interpretation of her or what I was getting off the page of the script or from the book, the bottom line is knowing that the BBC would do a spectacular production, but also really admiring Sarah’s (Phelps) adaptation, and feeling this was the one I wanted to be involved in.” Read more.
