malcolmrogersfilm I saw this years ago and thought it was really good, but have recently seen it again and it's interesting to watch it again in a new cinema climate. It is a film with heart, intelligence and genuinely brilliant storytelling. I think I took that for granted as to what a film should be when I saw it ten years ago, but these days when every film is a remake, a sequel, a prequel it is an honor to watch something that reminded me of what film is suppose to be like.Yes it has its flaws, what film doesn't, but it more than makes up for that in grounded, clear, insightful storytelling. The acting is great and the actors are allowed to use their talent to the best of their abilities with a really good, well thought out script. It has made me wonder what other films from that period I over-looked and now should be held up as a beacon of great filmmaking.

Desertman84 Stage Beauty is a romantic period drama about the true story of two performers whose careers were changed forever by a shift in gender roles on the British stage in the 17th century.It stars Billy Crudup,Claire Danes,Rupert Everett,Zoe Tapper and Tom Wilkinson. The screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher is based on his play Compleat Female Stage Beauty that was inspired by references to 17th century actor Edward Kynaston.The film was directed by Richard Eyre.Ned Kynaston is a noted star of the legitimate theater with an unusual specialty.At a time when it was considered unseemly for women to work as thespians, he specialized in female roles, and was described by one writer as the most beautiful woman on the London stage. With the help of his faithful dresser, Maria Hughes,he can turn himself into a striking actress in front of the footlights, and is starring opposite Thomas Betterton in a production of Shakespeare's Othello when, while still in costume after a performance, he is propositioned by theatrical impresario Sir Charles Sedley. The sexually open-minded Sedley isn't discouraged to learn Kynaston is a man, but he is bitterly angered by the actor's flip rejection of his advances. Sedley takes revenge against Kynaston by hiring a gang of criminals to beat him up. With Betterton's production of Othello closed while the leading "lady" recuperates, Hughes sees an opportunity and stages an underground version of the play, casting herself as Desdemona. While she lacks Kynaston's dramatic skills, the daring of her appearance on-stage creates a sensation, and King Charles II, a noted theater buff, is so taken with Hughes that he declares women should play women from now on. But as Hughes' star rises, Kynaston's quickly falls, and he becomes a bitter, forgotten man. When the novelty of Hughes' gender wears off and her failings as an thespian become obvious,she turns to her former friend Kynaston, hoping he can teach her to be as good an actress as he was.Cudrup is fantastic in this movie as he portrays masculinity and femininity with ease and realism.Also,the movie handles topics of gender and sexuality with intelligence and grace.Aside from that,the movie was entertaining from beginning to end as the viewer is absorbed into the ways of the theater in the past.In summary,Stage Beauty is a good combination of comedy and drama.

James Hitchcock The early 1660s were a crucial period in the history of the English theatre. The London theatres had all been closed by the Puritans in 1642, and did not reopen until the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. At this period women were still forbidden from acting on the public stage, so all female parts were played by male actors, just as they had been ever since Shakespeare's day. In about 1662, however, the law was changed to allow women to act in public, and the day of the "boy player" taking female parts was at an end. One of the two main characters in "Stage Beauty" is Edward Kynaston, who was a real-life individual. Kynaston was an actor of the period, who was said to have been a young man of exceptional beauty and was famed for his portrayal of female roles such as Desdemona in Shakespeare's "Othello". The other main character is his stage-struck dresser Maria, who harbours secret ambitions to go on the stage. When the King alters the law, under the influence of his mistress Nell Gwyn who herself has ambitions to become an actress, Maria gets her big chance. Soon, however, a further change in the law forbids men from playing women's parts, and Kynaston finds his livelihood under threat. A further complication is that he and Maria fall in love, even though he has previously been homosexual. This plot involves a few liberties with the historical facts. Kynaston implies that he has been trained all his life to specialise in female parts, rather like the onnagata of classical Japanese theatre, and that he will lose his livelihood if he is forbidden to do this. In fact, Kynaston was born around 1640 and would only have been a young child when the theatres were closed, so would not have received any specialised training in acting. The normal convention in the theatre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was that female parts were played by adolescent boys who normally graduated to playing male roles in their late teens. During the period 1660-62 the real Kynaston played both male and female roles, and after 1662 had a long and successful career playing male characters only. He would have been around 20 years old in 1660, much younger than Billy Crudup who was 36 when the film was made. (The film takes a generally cavalier approach to the ages of historical characters: King Charles II, 30 years old at the time of the Restoration, is played by the 45 year old Rupert Everett, and the poet Charles Sedley, only 21 in 1660, is played by the 57 year old Richard Griffith!) There is, of course, a reason for these liberties. The film is ostensibly a light-hearted, bawdy Restoration romp, but it does try to raise some Big Questions, about social class, about the relationship between acting and real life, and about sexuality and gender roles. The main idea it explores (which will be a controversial one in some quarters, particularly among the gay community) is that sexual orientation is not an innate part of one's character but rather a social construct, something forced on one by the culture and conventions of one's society, and because the known facts about the seventeenth-century theatre do not altogether accord with this thesis, they have to be altered to make them fit. The suggestion is that Kynaston's homosexuality is connected with his feminine on-stage persona, that he is essentially acting out a role off-stage as well as on. When a change in the law forces him to act out a male role on-stage, his off-stage personality also changes and he finds himself falling in love with a woman for the first time. I never found this aspect of the film convincing. Much of the reason for this lay with the casting. Claire Danes was rather dull as Maria, and I could never believe in Crudup as Kynaston. He is handsome enough, but in a rugged, masculine way- not the sort of man who could ever convincingly impersonate a woman. The role called not only for a younger actor but also one with a more androgynous, almost feminine beauty. The attempt to explore serious themes was never well integrated with the more comic aspects of the film; "Carry On" type romps are not the best vehicles for an exploration of gender issues. There are certain similarities with "Shakespeare in Love", which dealt with the London theatre of the 1590s and also featured a woman acting on stage, and also with "Singin' in the Rain", which dealt with an equally momentous period in the history of the cinema, the coming of sound. It is not, however, in the same class as either of those films. As a mildly bawdy historical comedy it is amusing enough, but as serious historical, psychological or sociological analysis it never succeeds. 5/10

Neil Welch I quite enjoyed this, but I'm not wholly sure why.The story was a little muddled in places, at least in terms of consistency, motivation and the like. But the performances were mostly pleasing, not least Billy Crudup who came over as very engaging despite playing a character whose behaviour was at times gratuitously unpleasant.Rupert Everett was a hoot.I have a problem with Claire Danes. I like her, but I'm not convinced she's actually all that good an actress. This feeling seems to be driven by one of her facial expressions which gets massively overused (it shows up here, and also in Stardust and Little Women - I've seen all three films fairly recently), and it's the expression where she looks as if someone has just delivered themselves of the most offensively malodorous flatulence directly under her nose. I'm sure you know the one I mean - if you've seen any of those films, then you're bound to know. And it's an all purpose expression for anything bad, from mild worry to just survived a murder attempt. On the other hand, she does a creditable English accent (as does Crudup in this film).Oh, and I suspect that in Restoration England, it was most unlikely that anyone would say, "Get the f*** off my stage" notwithstanding the provenance of f*** as good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon of the first order. An unwelcome anachronistic Americanism, as out of place as mammoths in Egypt.Whoops, I'm getting ahead of myself.....