Unafraid of Virginia Woolf

By SHEILA JOHNSTON

When Michael Cunningham, a respected but little-known American novelist, began work on a post-modern fantasia on a modernist classic, he had no expectation that his fourth book would bring him fabulous royalties.

"I was already planning the best-seller I was going to write next: it would be full of sex and car chases," he recalls. "Then The Hours started to sell, and it won this big prize [the 1999 Pulitzer]. But even after it began to succeed, I remember saying to my agent, 'At least we know one thing. No one's going to want to make this critter into a movie'."

But shortly afterwards, a phone call came from a producer, Scott Rudin, inquiring after the movie rights. And now, a couple of years after that, a US$22 million ($40 million) film has indeed been made by Stephen Daldry with a script by one of Britain's leading playwrights, David Hare, and a stellar cast.

Following a shower of gongs at the American end-of-year critics' awards, it is a frontrunner for the Oscars.

The Hours is scarcely a commercial prospect. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, it weaves together apparently unconnected stories about three different women, whose links emerge only towards the end.

It includes two suicides and two severe cases of depression. And it attempts to dramatise the profoundly interior process of Woolf writing her novel while struggling with madness. In the debate - revived by the movie - about the Bloomsbury group, Daldry stands with those who believe that Woolf, at least, has been grossly maligned. "The real Virginia seemed to me a dangerous animal: somebody who was subversive, had great courage, imagination and tenacity and still speaks loudly and vividly to anybody who engages with her work. We wanted an actress to match that rather than a lookalike."

The choice, Nicole Kidman, had her own reasons for taking the role. After the messy end of a 10-year marriage to Tom Cruise, she was, she says, drawn to sombre material and the brilliant, troubled author.

"One of the things that was most surprising for me was that a lot of times you don't sense her mischief. She was accused of being almost asexual, but she was actually very sexual, and I wanted that to feed into the role.

"At the same time she was terrified of the servants. She has this incredible intellectual strength and an extraordinary emotional fragility."

Meryl Streep, who plays a modern version of Mrs Dalloway, was given Cunningham's novel by her fellow actress and friend Natasha Richardson. After a mild shock, when she stumbled across her own name in the opening chapter (Clarissa, the character she would eventually play, glimpses Meryl Streep on the streets of New York), she was impressed.

"But I never imagined they would make it into a film. Then, when the script came a year later, I thought it was remarkable. Very spare and elegantly laid out.

"Virginia Woolf is not someone of whom you could say, 'She was a great woman writer.' And this film is the illumination of a great mind, of a brilliant intelligence and a sensitive human being. It's not gender-specific."

The third female lead, a Californian housewife in the 1950s who is affected and disturbed when she reads Mrs Dalloway, is taken by Julianne Moore. She offers a somewhat different view. "I don't like to go see a movie unless there's a woman in it, so to have this many female characters is exciting," she says. "There's been this notion in Hollywood that the largest body of movie-goers are young males between 18 and 24. But there are audiences for many different kinds of movies, and I think women want to see movies with women in them."

The Hours has, after all, no car chases nor any sex to speak of, although there are ardent women's kisses. Even with a few Oscars in tow, audiences will need to be convinced that it is not purely a chick flick or a big downer if it is to break out of the art-houses.

Hare and Daldry argue vigorously that it is neither of those things. "I absolutely loathe films that do what's called 'celebrating women's lives'," Hare says. "Those pictures are ludicrously condescending towards women and I don't think The Hours is at all like that."

"I don't find it depressing," adds Daldry. "The women manage to overcome their sadness and move towards the light, towards transfiguration. It's not an easy option; sometimes it can be the hardest option of all and can include the fact that you have to leave your children. So I hope at the end it's not sentimental, but that you come out with a feeling of catharsis."

- INDEPENDENT

* The Hours opens in cinemas tomorrow.