*** My Rebecca review and (very spoilery) article ***
“I wonder what she’s thinking about you – taking her husband, and using her name…”
Those tiny twitches when she meets the new Mrs de Winter for the first time, and the increasing nastiness as she regains her composure… the trailer looks sumptuous but I am already overwhelmed by Kristin Scott Thomas as Maxim de Winter’s housekeeper. She looks like a guard to the Underworld, here to protect her dead mistress from grave robbers and usurpers.
Maybe it’s an age thing but I now identify much more with her than either Rebecca or Mrs de Winter. In fact I recently discovered that Judith Anderson, who played Hitchcock’s Mrs Danvers, was six years younger than I am now.
Ben Wheatley’s new adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s classic 1938 novel arrives on Netflix next month – you can watch the trailer below.
A shy young girl marries Max de Winter, an older, wealthy Englishman she meets while working as a rich woman’s companion in Europe. He takes her back to Manderley, his English stately home; though once there she is haunted (not literally) by the presence of his late first wife, the beautiful, vicious and much-loved Rebecca. Maxim’s housekeeper Mrs Danvers adored Rebecca and despises the new and very green Mrs de Winter.
In the book the narrator (and new Mrs de Winter – we never find out her name) is mousy and out of place, though Lily James seems rather self-possessed in this trailer. There’s also no Rebecca listed in the IMDB cast list, so presumably like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film there are no flashbacks to her death and what led up to it. (Though Wheatley’s is definitely NOT a remake of the Hitchcock movie.)
“New” Rebecca is out in Netflix on 21 October, so we only have six weeks to wait before finding out if Mrs Danvers was in love with Rebecca, whether Lily James is an engaging heroine or we want Mrs D to persuade her to jump out of the window, and why Maxim is wearing that hideous mustard suit.