The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE
Film and conversation
We invite you to a screening of the film The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne as part of the Down&Dirty series. British cinema of the 1980s.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Michał Oleszczyk, curator of the series.
The title character is an unmarried woman living in Dublin in the 1950s—a place and time when women like her were referred to exclusively as "old maids."
Raised in strict Irish Catholicism, Judith lives every day with a sense of guilt, further reinforced by years of caring for her disabled, despotic aunt. When James Madden, a newcomer from New York, appears in her tenement building, Judith's imagination and senses are awakened. Could this be her chance for personal happiness...?
This adaptation of Brian Moore's 1955 novel – written after the author himself left his native Ireland for liberal Canada –is a late masterpiece in Jack Clayton's filmography.
As in many of the director's other films (Room at the Top, The Innocents, The Pumpkin Eater), Clayton takes care to ensure that his actress shines in all her glory, thanks to which Maggie Smith as Judith creates one of the performances of her life.
She is partnered by the unforgettable Bob Hoskins, who creates a character that is both magnetic and repulsive. Fans of Fawlty Towers will be delighted to find Prunella Scales in the cast, and the unforgettable supporting role in A Lonely Passion... is played by Wendy Hiller herself (more than four decades after her iconic role in Powell & Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going).
A feast for actors and writers, and at the same time an empathetic portrait of a deeply wounded human soul trying once again to fight for its own happiness.