Dakota Fanning has been in the film industry since she was 6 years old, but the young actress will take on her first adult role in the upcoming period drama, “Effie.”
The film, which is slated for release in June 2012, follows the disastrous marriage between 19th-century art critic John Ruskin and his young bride Effie Gray. The tumultuous union ended after Effie fell madly in love with young artist John Everett Millais.“It’s the ultimate bad marriage,” Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson, who wrote the screenplay, told the Associated Press. “It happens to be a costume drama, but you could be doing a story with this kind of complexity and oddness in any period.”
Ruskin married Gray in 1848, when he was 29 and she was 19 and according to historians, on their wedding night, something about his bride horrified Ruskin and the union was not consummated. Ruskin claimed it was her personality, but Gray wrote that her husband “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was.”
“We’re talking about a girl who is objectified, and then disappoints a man by being real,” director Richard Laxton said. “If that isn’t relevant, I don’t know what is.”
At the time, divorce was illegal and so Gray suffered through the marriage until she fell in love with Millais, who was part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – a group of painters whose boldness shocked the Victorian art world. Read the rest of this entry »
