SHADOWLANDS

:''For the film starring Anthony Hopkins, see Shadowlands (film). For other uses, see Shadowland.''
'''Shadowlands''' is a 1985 television film about C.S. Lewis that was subsequently adapted into a play and then a cinema film.
The original TV film stars Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. It was subsequently adapted for the theatre in 1990 and was performed on the West End, starring Nigel Hawthorne as Lewis, who successfully took the role to Broadway, and Jane Lapotaire as Joy. In 1993, it was adapted into a film of the same name directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

Contents

Synopsis

Factual inaccuracies

Quotes

See also

External link

Synopsis

The story follows Lewis as he meets an American fan, Joy Gresham, whom he befriends and eventually marries. The story also deals with his struggle with personal pain and grief: Lewis preaches that one should endure suffering with patience, but finds that the simple answers he had preached no longer apply when Joy becomes afflicted with cancer and eventually dies.

Factual inaccuracies

★ According to his biographers, the development of Lewis's personality was more complex than the story suggests. He knew passion before meeting his wife, and some think that he had a love affair with an older woman when he was in his twenties.

★ Joy Gresham had two sons, David and Douglas, but only one (Douglas) appears in the film.

★ C. S. Lewis could not drive, yet his drive to Herefordshire is an important moment in the film.

★ The film covers events between 1952 and 1960 and shows Lewis teaching at Magdalen College, Oxford. However, this is a simplification of reality: in 1954, Lewis accepted a Professorship in Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge and thus discontinued his teaching at Oxford. He did so, however, on the condition that he would be able to return to his home in Oxford for vacations and long weekends during the university term.

★ Joy Gresham broke her leg when answering a telephone call from Kathleen Farrer in her home in Oxford. In the film she breaks her leg answering a call from C. S. Lewis in her house in London.

★ Joy Gresham was treated in hospital in Oxford, not in London.

Quotes

C.S. Lewis as the film concludes:

"Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal."

Joy in the stage version:

"See yourself in the mirror, you're separate from yourself. See the world in the mirror, you're separate from the world. I don't want that separation anymore."

See also

''A Grief Observed'' - Lewis's own chronicle of his reactions following Joy Gresham's death
''Shadowlands'' - Lewis's biography written by Brian Sibley.

External link

★