I just watched the Masterpiece Theater version of Rebecca and was quite annoyed that they had an actress playing the title role – well, parts of her, anyway. You could see her eyes, heavily lipsticked mouth (with crooked teeth!), garishly painted fingernails and long shots of her with her backed turned. She was just plain wrong. She looked more like Joan Collins than “the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”
So, which actress could play Rebecca? I really can’t think of anyone who is both startlingly beautiful and has an angelic quality she can turn on and off. Can you?
Too bad Annette Bening is getting a bit long in the tooth. She masterfully played a beautiful, manipulative liar in Dangerous Liaisons, opposite Colin Firth.
The Annette/Colin version was Valmont, & she was delightfully wicked, but I hated the Tilly girl in the De Tourvel role in this version! They couldn’t have found someone more stunning to play Firth’s “love” than squinty-eyed Meg? Darn near ruined the film for me, even given Annette’s deliciously wicked performance. Man, she had a chilling laugh in this movie, didn’t she?
Sorry to be off-topic–but as much as I clearly love Rebecca, I can’t think of a person I’d have to have play her. I do like Jennifer Connelly—maybe Kate Beckinsale?
In one of his essays on writing, Stephen King discusses the problem of moving the written word to screen – he speculates that no matter how scary the thing you show, it won’t ever match what people had built in their imaginations.
The same objection applies here. As long as Rebecca is the unseen and perfect First Mrs. DeWinter, both we in the audience and the struggling Second Mrs. DeWinter are competing against the apparent epitome of perfection. The moment you cast her and show her, you lose that. For all that 100 people will find Jennifer Connelly stunningly perfect, there will be one or two that don’t. Keep her unseen, and everyone constructs their own internal image of Rebecca, which is excatly what’s required.
The only scene in the book where I truly would love to “see” Rebecca on-screen would be during her death-scene, when Max has her somewhat cornered in her house by the sea, and she is laughing at him while he confronts her. The book is so descriptive of the way she was standing, the expression on her face, her ridicule of Max and her cruel laughter (as Max recalls it) that I’d love this one moment to be represented in someplace other than my imagination.
At this point, Rebecca is about to become something more substantial for the 2nd Mrs., an evil persona & not just a tragic spirit of ghostly beauty and perfection haunting Manderly…it might make a nice transition to see R. in person as the 2nd Mrs. realizes that.
I think that’s exactly right. The actresses mentioned, lovely as they are, just aren’t her, somehow.
I know what you mean. Still, she was never more present than in that scene in the Hitchcock film. Having her actually there in the mini-series version was jarring.