This year June 2020 marks the 50th Anniversary of the release of the film 'The Virgin and the Gypsy' based on a novelette written by D.H.Lawrence. It launched the career of two young men, Christopher Miles aged 29yrs Director, and Alan Plater aged 33yrs, Scriptwriter and Playwright.
The film which stars Franco Nero as the Gypsy, and Joanna Skimkus as the Virgin, won enormous critical acclaim both here in England where it ran for 18 months in the West End and in America where it broke the box office records and was voted best film on both sides of the Atlantic.
The drama critically stands the test of time. It portrays two young sisters who return home to the family rectory from a French finishing school. Yvette the young 'virgin', rebels unlike her sister Lucille against the family and her father, the divorced rector played by Maurice Denham. Her sexual desires are supressed by the moralistic religious society of the 1920's she is raised in, and desperately wants romance in her life. She has erotic daydreams when she meets the local filandering gypsy, a free spirit with blue smouldering passionate eyes.
Christopher Miles direction is methodic and sensitive, and visually full of poetry, set in the tranquil idyllic landscape of Derbyshire in the village of Youlgrave. Yvette's passions are finally released in a flood of emotion, when the elements fire, earth and water come together as she is rescued by the gypsy in the dramatic conclusion of the film.
Both Alan Plater and Christopher Miles collaborated together 11 years later in 1981 on another of D.H.Lawrence novel, 'Priest of Love', starring Ian McKellen as the author, and Janet Suzman, his German wife.
Honor Blackman who plays Mrs Fawcett so wittily in the film, died this year 5thApril 2020.
Richard Cole, Author and Artist.
