THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

Speranza

On a makeshift stage, Ralph Fiennes is playing Charles Dickens in his mid-40s as he rehearses his travelling theatre group – and doing so with gusto and verve.

We know Dickens primarily as one of our greatest WRITERS, but here, in Fiennes’s portrayal, he is multitasking energetically.

Dickens the host has effusively greeted four actresses who have made a long journey to be present:

Mrs Frances Ternan (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her daughters

Maria (Perdita Weeks)
Fanny (Amanda Hale) and
Ellen Lawless (nicknamed Nelly) (Felicity Jones).

Dickens the father has proudly introduced them to his two teenage daughters and five young sons.
Dickens, the director and actor-manager, herds his cast and orders his stage-hands about with enthusiasm and a kindly wit.

And Dickens the showman swaps banter with his writer friend Wilkie Collins (Tom Hollander), whose play "The Frozen Deep" he is directing, playing it for laughs by chiding him for being late for his own rehearsals.

In this large group, there is no doubt as to who is in control.

All eyes are on Dickens, whom Fiennes plays with a brand of charisma peculiar to successful public figures.

We are in:

Drapers’ Hall in the City of London

-- which is standing in for Manchester’s imposing Free Trade Hall, the real venue for this production of The Frozen Deep in 1857.

The rehearsal is a key early scene in The Invisible Woman, a film adapted from Claire Tomalin’s remarkable biography.



The book details Dickens’s secret affair with Ellen LawlessTernan, whom he first met on this occasion, when she was only 18 years old.

Such was Dickens’s love for Ellen Lawless Ternan that it was to lead to the breakdown of his 22-year marriage.

The film takes place in two distinct time periods:

-- 1857 and the eight years following the couple’s first meeting, up to 1865.


-- 1885 (Dickens died in 1870), when Ellen Lawless Ternan Robinson, now in her mid-40s, is a headmaster’s wife in Margate, reflecting on her relationship with Dickens, its effect on her subsequent life and what being an ‘invisible woman’ has cost her.

Fiennes is doing double duty in the film – as its director and lead actor.

‘I’m familiar with Dickens through adaptations Fiennes says, ‘but then reading Abi Morgan’s script and Claire’s brilliant book, I loved the story of Ellen Lawless Ternan Robinson.

I found the nub of it is his pursuit of her, and what it did to his marriage and family.

I also felt a rather weird, perverse sympathy for him.

Everyone wags their finger of judgment at Dickens.

And yes, he didn’t behave so well, especially in defending himself.

You rather wish he’d just shut up about it.

But his public self-justification was probably the most uncomfortable thing about it, not that he fell in love with Ellen Lawless Ternan Robinson.

Fiennes's sense is Dickens was flailing around and he felt a bit lost.

Dickens sees Ellen and he projects so much on to her.

 
Yet Fiennes thought the story was even richer when seen from Ellen Lawless Ternan Robinson’s point of view.

Actresses in the early Victorian era needed to be careful not to compromise their reputation.

As it was, sections of the public regarded them as little better than prostitutes.

The Ternan women lived humbly and frugally.

Nelly needed to work, and her own instincts recoiled sharply against such an affair.

Fiennes recalls:

‘The thing that led me to make the film was to look at what made Ellen Lawless Ternan Robinson contemplate a relationship with Dickens, and come to a point of finally saying, “I’m in this, I’m with you.”’

Back on set, Fiennes again becomes Dickens in actor-manager mode, chivvying his cast, making them laugh and – as Dickens plays a character who is dying – directing events while lying on the floor.

Fiennes bounds about smiling, wisecracking, gesticulating and generally conveying the merriment Dickens generated in keeping several plates spinning at once.

‘In this sequence, we’re trying to establish a lot of elements about Dickens,’ Fiennes says.

‘He’s in charge, he embraces the social side of the rehearsals and organising his family.

I’ve tried to show his attentiveness as he welcomes the Ternan women, and his social vitality and gregariousness.

It extends to a party scene afterwards where he’s dancing and playing a memory game.

I’d never really played that in a role before.

But it’s good to get all that across early, because as the story progresses, things become more tormented for Dickens and Ellen Lawless Ternan Robinson.

Similarly, though the comic elements of the rehearsal scene add a touch of levity to the atmosphere on set, it is underpinned by a fierce desire on Fiennes’s part to make the film as authentic as possible.

As a director, he really knows his mind.

He’s completely focused on this film.

He is also incredibly visual.

He draws beautifully and does all his own storyboards.

What makes a job stressful is 100 last-minute requests.

He doesn’t do that at all, because everything has already been discussed.

Fiennes went to the South Kensington Museum (now Victoria and Albert) to research 19th-century photographs, some of them not even on public display.

It's a way of trying to get under the skin of people of the period,’ Fiennes says.

‘It was great to talk with Maria and  Michael O’Connor about being accurate to the period.

I told them, “Give me an education.”’

Fiennes's insistence on accuracy involved all aspects of the film: the make-up and hair designer Jenny Shircore tells me that Fiennes even had strong opinions about mid-19th- century women’s hair.

 ‘The main bulk of the film is set in 1856 when women had very clean lines to their hairstyles.

Ralph’s favourite is the centre parting, tightly drawn curtains either side of the forehead.

He loves that line.

He said it’s architecturally compatible with the bonnets of the day.

That’s the level of what we had to achieve for Ralph.’

Charles Dickens has been a dominant figure in Ralph Fiennes’s professional life for some three years now; he played the part of Magwitch in Mike Newell’s adaptation of "Great Expectations", which was released just over a year ago.

‘It was serendipitous, because they came along at the same time,’ he recalls.

‘I’d already got a script of "The Invisible Woman", an early draft the BBC had developed without me.

I was intrigued.

I didn’t really know anything much about Dickens.

People have been shocked I hadn’t been made to study Dickens at school, but he never seemed to be on any syllabus.

I’m half inclined to call my old English teacher and ask why.

Maybe Dickens wasn’t in favour back then.

He loved playing Magwitch and is now attacking the role of his creator with such relish that one wonders if Fiennes feels some kind of kinship with Dickens.

At some level I think I identify with bits of him,’ he concedes.

He’s in charge, he embraces social life…’ He lets the sentence trail away.

But Dr Florian Schweizer, the director of The Charles Dickens Museum in London, who has paid frequent visits to the set, sees a clear link.


When Ralph visited the museum, I showed him some notes Dickens had made in his annotated prompt books, because theatre plays a huge role in this story.

They show how obsessive he was, a real control freak.

The notes lay out stage directions.

He knew where he wanted every piece of furniture to go.

He wanted things his way, and he subjected everyone around him to his will.

I think he needed that control as a balance to his immense creativity and flow of ideas.

And I can see that in the way Ralph’s playing the part.

He has so much energy; he’s running around the set, everything goes through him.

Clearly, someone who agrees to direct and play the lead role in a film – which Fiennes has already done in his well-received adaptation of Coriolano in 2011 – will necessarily have strong opinions and a comprehensive knowledge of everything that is happening on set.

‘Some days were close to chaos and you feel your brain being squeezed,’ Fiennes admits.

‘And then I got a terrible eye infection, which looked awful and we couldn’t hide.

One day it started to come up, and we had to keep shooting. But it’s very hard to play cheerful and gregarious with something like that on your face.

You’re constantly aware of it.

Finally we rearranged our schedule to allow time for the thing to calm down.

When acting and directing, Fiennes likes to lighten his load by having a couple of actors in his cast whom he knows and likes.

In Coriolanus he gave a significant role to his actor pal Paul Jesson.

As for The Invisible Woman, he and Hollander are firm friends (Fiennes has played a guest role in Hollander’s TV series Rev).

FIENNES and Kristin Scott Thomas co-starred as lovers in "The English Patient" in 1996.

‘Tom also looks like Wilkie Collins,’ Fiennes says.

‘It’s almost uncanny.

And I felt Kristin Scott Thomas would be great.

Often we see her in roles where she’s brittle and withholding, but here she has this vulnerability when she’s expressing her concern about Ellen Ternan ’s future.

She’s wonderful playing a mother who cares.

One recurring motif in The Invisible Woman is Dickens’s fame.

He was recognised and acclaimed wherever he went.

He was one of the first big celebrities who was not a politician – and he was a popular figure,’ Fiennes says.

The film includes a scene with Dickens at Doncaster races, where he is initially noticed by a few people, and eventually mobbed.

‘Someone wrote a slightly mischievous piece saying he was attending on a young lady,’ Fiennes says. This, of course, was Nelly Ternan.

Dickens’s sense of celebrity, his readers and increasingly the audiences who attended his readings, were all very important to him.

In one of the film’s key sequences, the betrayed Mrs Dickens (beautifully played by Joanna Scanlan) tells Ellen Ternan, ‘You'll never be sure if it’s you or his public he loves the most.’

In 1865 his divided loyalties dealt a blow to his relationship with Nelly when the couple were on board a train that was derailed, leaving many people needing medical attention.

When recognised, he chose to deny that they were together and insisted he was travelling alone.

Stewart Mackinnon of Headline Pictures, who first acquired the film rights to Tomalin’s book, saw a profound irony in the story.

Dickens was undoubtedly a great story-teller who created so many timeless, iconic characters who showed us what was hypocritical and wrong in society.

Yet he felt the need to deny the very existence of the person he loved.

Whether or not Fiennes is obsessive in his working methods, he has captured that irony and successfully delivered a portrait of a brilliant man: multifaceted, flawed and contradictory.

Fiennes admits to being enthralled by his dual role as actor-director, and says he’s starting to hit his stride.

I feel galvanised to find something else, because I feel comfortable being on a set and saying, “This is what I want to do.”

There’s an appetite for it.’ And the only way to sate it is to get back and do it? ‘Yes. It keeps the blood pumping.’