James Wilby
A man becomes haunted by his past and is presented with a mysterious legacy that causes him re-think his current situation in life.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffers from a stroke in the summer of 1953 that's kept a secret from the rest of the world.
ChickLit is a comedy drama about four guys trying to save their local pub from closing down. They group write a chick lit, or more specifically a 'mummy porn' novel in the style of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and it gets snapped up. The only snag is that the publisher insists that the young woman 'author' does press and publicity. The guys have to keep their involvement a secret and so engage an out of work actress to 'role play' the part of the author. This leads to her becoming the star in the film of the book, the tables are turned on the guys and she is in control - leaving them with the awful prospect of having to secretly churn out sex novels for the foreseeable future.
8 August 1963: Britain wakes up to news of the biggest robbery in the country’s history. A train has been hijacked and robbed, 35 miles from its arrival in central London. The country is stunned. Who could be behind it? How did they pull off such an audacious raid?
A mysterious young loner changes the lives of one family and helps them rediscover their roots and deep affection for one another.
Quirky young art teacher Jemima takes up a £100,00 bet to ride through the town naked on horseback like Lady Godiva to keep her beloved Art Factory open.
A wife nursing her terminally ill husband finds herself falling for his friend.
Set in the Clapham district of south London, England, the film is inspired by true events. The paths of several men intersect during a dramatic thirty-six hours in which their lives are changed forever.
An English historian travels to Morocco to work on a study of the painter Delacroix. He hears of a rare series of engravings and embarks on a search for them that takes him through the mysterious streets of the ancient medina. He becomes obsessed with the figure of a beautiful blond woman dressed in white that he sees there. but it appears that she may have died years before.
Lord Louis Mountbatten arrives in India in March 1947 as Britain's Last Viceroy. He is committed to transfer administrative and authoritative power to an independent and sovereign India. Six months later India indeed was set free, but it had also been partitioned and overwhelmed by an orgy of sectarian violence involving Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
From Paris to Venice to Broadway to Hollywood, the lives of Cole Porter and his wife, Linda were never less than glamorous and wildly unconventional. And though Cole's thirst for life strained their marriage, Linda never stopped being his muse, inspiring some of the greatest sons of the twentieth century.
Island at War is a British television series that tells the story of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands. It primarily focuses on three local families: the upper class Dorrs, the middle class Mahys and the working class Jonases, and four German officers. The fictional island of St. Gregory serves as a stand-in for the real-life islands Jersey and Guernsey, and the story is compiled from the events on both islands. Produced by Granada Television in Manchester, Island at War had an estimated budget of £9,000,000 and was filmed on location in the Isle of Man from August 2003 to October 2003. When the series was shown in the UK, it appeared in six 70-minute episodes.
Based on the novel by Agatha Christie In this TV movie, a classic mystery is updated and relocated to a glamorous world of London socialites and secret agents, introducing two unique and compelling investigators and taking us through to the highest corridors of power.
A documentary giving film fans a behind-the-scenes look at the making this Robert Altman film about a murder at an English country estate. Includes interviews with the cast and crew, who relate some of their experiences with making the film, as well as giving their views on all the work that went into it.
Born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, the novelist George Eliot was a woman ahead of her time: a proud and determined individual who continually broke the sexual, religious and social rules of Victorian society. George Eliot: A Scandalous Life explores how the scandals and rumours that plagued her life, never defeated her will or her literary genius; and how, against all odds, she went on to write some of the world's greatest novels including Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner.
The duke of York, nicknamed Bertie, was born as royal 'spare heir', younger brother to the prince of Wales, and thus expected to spend a relatively private life with his Scottish wife Elisabeth Bowes-Lyon and their daughters, in the shadow of their reigning father, George V, and next that of his elder brother who succeeded to the British throne as Edward VIII. However Edward decides to put his love for a divorced American, Wallis Simpson, above dynastic duty, and ends up abdicating the throne, which now falls to Bertie, who reigns as George VI.
In 1930’s England, a group of pretentious rich and famous gather together for a weekend of relaxation at a hunting resort. But when a murder occurs, each one of these interesting characters becomes a suspect.
It is 1997 and Adrian is now 30 and the Head Chef in a top Soho restaurant. He currently lives in the upstairs room of the restaurant; the rest of his family remain in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. He is estranged from his wife Jo Jo, a Nigerian woman who has returned to her home country following their separation, and they are in the middle of a divorce. The real love of Adrian's life is, as ever, Pandora, who is now standing for Labour MP of Ashby-de-la-Zouch and tipped for power as one of Blair's Babes in the New Labour government that follows.
When shy, straitlaced George (Tunde Adebimpe) meets vivacious, adorable Alicia (Natalia Verbeke), he's instantly smitten -- which puts his imminent arranged marriage in jeopardy. He vows to do the right thing, but then he falls in with Gerard (Hippolyte Girardot), a lovesick, voluble Frenchman who overcomes George's sense of propriety and takes him on a meandering road trip to amour.
A British family is trapped between culture, tradition, and the colonial sins of the past.
When Tom Long's brother Peter gets measles, Tom is sent to stay with his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen in a flat with no garden and an elderly and reclusive landlady, Mrs Bartholomew, living upstairs. Because he may be infectious he is not allowed out to play, and feels lonely. Without exercise he is less sleepy at night and when he hears the communal grandfather clock strangely strike 13, he investigates and finds the small back yard is now a large sunlit garden. Here he meets another lonely child called Hatty, who seems to be the only one who can see him. They have adventures which he gradually realises are taking place in the 19th century. And each night when Tom visits, Hatty is a different age, chronologically out of sequence.
In hospital, photographer Jinx Kingsley wakes from a coma after a car crash - a failed suicide attempt, prompted by her fiance Leo jilting her to elope with Jinx's lifelong best friend, Meg. The discovery of Leo and Meg's bodies - brutally murdered in the same manner as Jinx's first husband - makes Jinx the prime suspect. Then, with the help of eminent neuroscientist Dr.Alan Protheroe, some memories begin to surface. Memories of desperation and paralysing terror.
Rising politician Robert Chiltern once sold secret information and is now being blackmailed by Laura Cheveley. She has proof, and it will damage his career and marriage severely. Chiltern calls in the help of his friend Arthur Goring.
Based upon Wilkie Collins Victorian mystery, the gothic tale tells of a pair of half sisters whose lives end up caught in a grand conspiracy revolving around a mentally ill woman dressed in white. As the story unfolds, murder, love, marriage, and greed stand between the two women and happy lives. Their only hope is the secret the woman in white waits to tell them.
Based on Pat Barker's novel of the same name, 'Regeneration' tells the story of soldiers of World War One sent to an asylum for emotional troubles. Two of the soldiers meeting there are Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, two of England's most important WW1 poets.
The true story of a Prussian aristocrat working for German military intelligence during World War II, who, with a group of fellow devout Christians, plotted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in his briefcase.
In 19th century, a disillusioned priest helps a young boy drifter who's a chess wunderkind to move on up in life and social structures using his talent. Years later, he's a success, but game of life and love has higher stakes than chess.
Crocodile Shoes is a British 7-part television series made by the BBC and screened on BBC One in 1994. The series was written by and starred Jimmy Nail as a factory worker who becomes a country and western singer. A sequel, Crocodile Shoes II followed in 1996 and the theme tune "Country Boy" was a hit for Nail too.
Lady Constance Chatterley is married to the handicapped Sir Clifford Chatterley, who was wounded in the First World War. When they move to his family's estate, Constance (Connie) meets their tough-yet-quiet groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors. Soon, she discovers that the source of her unhappiness is from not being fulfilled in love, and in turning to the arms of Mellors, she has a sexual awakening that will change her thoughts forever.
A saga of class relations and changing times in an Edwardian England on the brink of modernity, the film centers on liberal Margaret Schlegel, who, along with her sister Helen, becomes involved with two couples: wealthy, conservative industrialist Henry Wilcox and his wife Ruth, and the downwardly mobile working-class Leonard Bast and his mistress Jackie.
A childless British couple visit a fertility shrine of Gulab Shah in Karachi run by eunuchs and set off a huge culture clash.
Venice, eighteenth century. The young Rosanna, widowed on her wedding day, discovers that she is the sole heir to an enormous patrimony, becoming in this way the most coveted party of the Serenissima.
Laura Simms has an exciting job as a top magazine editor, but her love life's a disaster. Her luck seems to change when she meets Gabriel, a handsome but mysterious man who believes in old-fashioned love and marriage.
Mother Love is a British television drama that first aired in 1989. It was adapted by Andrew Davies from Domini Taylor's novel concerning a mother's obsessive love for her son, vengeful hatred of his father, her ex-husband, and the effect on her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. It starred Diana Rigg, David McCallum, James Wilby, and Fiona Gillies, and was directed by Simon Langton. Christopher "Kit" Vesey and Angela Vesey, a British yuppie couple, enjoy a seemingly idyllic life. Yet there is one troubling factor in their lives - Kit's mother Helena, an eccentric and often difficult woman consumed by anger with Kit's father, a famed concert musician with whom she believes Kit has no contact. Her oddness is confirmed in a series of incidents involving her ex-husband and his second wife, Ruth, an artist. Flashbacks throughout the series reveal bits of Helena's troubled past. Little by little, the young couple's life begins to fall apart as Helena begins to act out her feelings of intense jealousy and desire for revenge, implicating a dear old friend and leading to murder.
A pair of lookalikes, one a former French aristocrat and the other an alcoholic English lawyer, fall in love with the same woman amongst the turmoil of the French Revolution.
English aristocrat Tony Last welcomes tragedy into his life when he invites John Beaver to visit his vast estate. There Beaver makes the acquaintance of Tony's wife, Brenda. Together, they continue their relationship in a series of bedroom assignations in London. Trusting to a fault, Tony is unaware that anything is amiss until his wife suddenly asks for a divorce. With his life in turmoil, Tony goes on a haphazard journey to South America.
A bittersweet tale of lost love, based on a short story ("The Apple Tree") by John Galsworthy.
In this sophomoric comedy, a lusty adolescent British hockey team heads for Holland where they find something far more interesting than tulips and windmills: gorgeous, lusty women. They are so busy pursuing romance that they forget all about their upcoming match.
Exploring the somewhat darker and more mysterious side of the Lewis Carroll's classic book, the movie follows Alice Liddell (the book's inspiration) as an old woman who is haunted by the characters she was once so amused by. As she thinks back on it, she starts to see her relationship with the shy author/professor in a new way and realizes the vast change between the young Alice and the old.
A story about a group of Oxford undergraduate acting students and their troubled lives while producing (and competing between themselves for a role in) a different version of the classic play "The Duchess of Malfi". Love, friendship and rivalry are all part of this intricate project, filmed on actual location in the Oxford University, the very first to achieve such feat.
Documentary about the history of "Merchant Ivory Productions".
