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He’s incredibly elegant and occasionally louche at the same time. He’s just one of those Americans who has been around a bit, but there’s still a quintessential Americanness to him. But it’s not like he’s a raging Anglophile. He has a throwaway humour that is quietly very hilarious. He’s sort of Waspy, terribly well educated, very cultured, sort of diffident. Beckinsale puts this down to the fact that the aristocratic, lineage-back-to-the-Mayflower, New England, Ivy League Stillman is perhaps more like Britons than most Americans are. The adaptation also dovetails perfectly with the drily ironic, slightly repressed Stillman worldview. “That was the amazing thing, realising that no one has ever played these parts – and it’s Austen. At the beginning of her career, Beckinsale faced this issue head-on when she played Emma in an ITV adaptation soon after the movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow was released – and Beckinsale got the better notices. It’s a unique Austen adaptation, in that Lady Susan has never before been filmed, which means the field is clear for all the actors. But in that period, when the constraints on women were so intense, it makes you cheer her on, in spite of her manipulations and schemes.” “The thing that you can’t be trying for in a part like this is likability, with her being so ruthless and selfish. “Reading the novella and the script, you feel she could go either way,” says Beckinsale. It’s a real tightrope performance.Īs Lady Susan in Love and Friendship. Beckinsale is right – you do end up loving her. Beckinsale – more familiar to us of late as the tooled-up super-heroine of the Underworld vampire franchise – reminds us again what a subtle and delicate performer she has always been, giving us a Lady Susan whose desperation to find good husbands for herself and her child is mixed with a beguiling slyness and cast-iron self-assurance. Widowed with a marriageable daughter, Lady Susan is country society’s most dreaded houseguest, ever swanning into drawing rooms filled with people determined not to be swept up in her schemes. Lady Susan is the titular heroine of an Austen fragment, a 60-page epistolary novella that went unpublished in her lifetime, to which Stillman has appended the title of another scrap of Austen marginalia, the story Love and Friendship. Love and Friendship is reaching an audience delighted to find Stillman simultaneously moving into period costume drama and literary adaptation, while retaining that familiar whiff of “doomed bourgeois in love” that is the trademark of his other brittle comedies of manners.