#ralph touchett

[byronicherobracket]

The Byronic Hero Bracket: Qualifying Round Batch C #8

Ralph Touchett from The Portrait of a Lady vs. Cable from Marvel

Reasons under the cut (spoilers for both)

(All sources from TV Tropes)

Ralph Touchett:

Ralph Touchett from The Portrait of a Lady is brooding, but completely devoted to his true love Isabelle Archer.

Cable:

Cable started out like this, as he was a time traveler from a time in constant strife and harbored a ruthless nature, though he has since gone from this to standard Anti-Hero territory. This tends to be Depending on the Writer. When operating alone Cable has no problem using any means at his disposal to achieve his goals, such as torturing Captain America prior to Avengers vs. X-Men. But he has a habit of teaming up with morality pets to rein himself in, not unlike a certain other time traveler.

[light20sblog]

"You've been like an angel beside my bed. You know they talk about the angel of death. It's the most beautiful of all. You've been like that; as if you were waiting for me."

The Portrait of a lady, Henry James

[justforbooks]

Richard Chamberlain

Dashing American actor best known for his many roles in hit TV series including Dr Kildare, The Thorn Birds and Shogun

Despite becoming a lauded stage and film actor, Richard Chamberlain, who has died aged 90, carried the label of soap-opera star around his neck for most of his career of more than five decades.

It began with his huge success in the hospital television series Dr Kildare (1961-66), in which Chamberlain’s clean-cut good looks were the prime attraction, bringing him thousands of fan letters a week. Chamberlain’s other immensely successful television roles came in three mini-series, Centennial (1978-79), Shogun (1980) and The Thorn Birds (1983).

His perfectly chiselled features, which made him ideal for romantic leads in soap operas, prevented many producers from visualising him in more demanding roles. However, through talent and determination he starred in numerous films and on the stage in parallel to his television work.

Born in Los Angeles, he had a cool relationship with his alcoholic father, Charles, a salesman, but a warm one with his mother, Elsa (nee Von Benzon). At Beverly Hills high school, he excelled in athletics, and his good grades enabled him to study art history and painting at Pomona College, southern California, where he was able to satisfy his dream of becoming an actor in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Arthur Miller. After graduating, Chamberlain served 16 months in Korea, where he was made company clerk of his infantry company, later promoted to the rank of sergeant.

On his return to the US, Chamberlain studied acting with Jeff Corey, who became renowned as a teacher after being blacklisted in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Although Corey’s sense-memory Stanislavskian method is not immediately apparent in Chamberlain’s performances, the actor claimed to have learned how to tap into his own emotions and psyche. At the time, he was struggling with having to “live a lie” about his sexuality.

In 1959, Chamberlain, Leonard Nimoy and Vic Morrow were among the founders of the Company of Angels, a repertory theatre in Los Angeles. While playing there in La Ronde and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Chamberlain started to get parts in television series. His first feature films were The Secret of the Purple Reef (1960), a low-voltage, low-budget thriller shot in Puerto Rico, and A Thunder of Drums (1961), a western in which he was hardly noticeable as a young cavalry officer.

Then came the role of Dr Kildare, for which Chamberlain beat 35 other candidates. In the first episode, the senior medic Dr Leonard Gillespie (Raymond Massey) tells Chamberlain, as the young, earnest, caring James Kildare, an intern at Blair general hospital: “Our job is to keep people alive, not to tell them how to live.” Kildare ignores the advice, thus supplying the basis for most of the plots of the next 190 episodes across five seasons.

In 1962, with his popularity at its height, he recorded a hit song, Three Stars Will Shine Tonight, based on the music of the show’s hummable opening theme. It revealed that Chamberlain had a fine singing voice, which he used on a number of singles and an album, Richard Chamberlain Sings (1962), and much later as leads in stage musicals such as My Fair Lady (1993), The Sound of Music (1998), Scrooge (2004), The King and I (2006) and Monty Python’s Spamalot (2009).

When Dr Kildare ended, Chamberlain decided to prove that he was not just a pretty face, by appearing in summer stock productions of The Philadelphia Story and Private Lives (both 1966).

He then worked for three years in Britain, on television, stage and film. He was excellent as Ralph Touchett in the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1968).The role got him noticed by Peter Dews, the artistic director of Birmingham repertory theatre, who offered him the chance to play Hamlet in 1969.

The play was a sell-out for its limited five and a half week run, and in the main, the British critics were positive, with the Times reflecting the consensus: “Anyone who comes to this production prepared to scoff at the sight of a popular television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet, will be in for a deep disappointment.” The Daily Mail commented that “the perturbed spirit of Dr Kildare may rest at last. In Mr Chamberlain we have no mean actor.”

In films, he was a noble Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar (1970), and a striking Lord Byron in Lady Caroline Lamb (1973), and he was able to express some of his own angst and sexual liberation as a gay Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971). At this time, it was an open showbiz secret that Chamberlain was romantically involved with the US actor Wesley Eure.

The rest of the films he made in the 1970s – The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), in which he played Aramis; The Slipper and the Rose (1976), almost typecast as Prince Charming; and the disaster movies The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Swarm (1978) – were lucrative but hardly challenging. He was more stretched in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), shot in Australia, where he was the initially smug lawyer defending a group of Indigenous Australians accused of murder.

In the meantime, Chamberlain had made a triumphant Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1976-77) at Circle in the Square theatre. According to one critic, Chamberlain, as the defrocked priest now a tour guide, “captures the self-lacerating torment of Reverend Shannon”. During the run, he started a relationship with Martin Rabbett, a production assistant on the play. They remained together until 2010, and later resumed their partnership.

In the 80s, Chamberlain established himself again on television, earning the nickname “king of the miniseries”. Shogun, based on James Clavell’s novel, starred Chamberlain as Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, an Englishman trying to gain acceptance in early 17th-century Japan. Chamberlain, long-haired and black-bearded, held his own among a cast of superb Japanese actors that included the dynamic Toshiro Mifune.

In The Thorn Birds, he was sexy Father Ralph de Bricassart, the Roman Catholic priest who carries on a tortured, illicit romance with Meggie Cleary, played by Rachel Ward, in the Australian outback. It was disliked by Colleen McCullough, the author of the original 1977 bestseller. She said: “It was instant vomit! Ward couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag and Chamberlain wandered about all wet and wide-eyed.” Nevertheless, the 10-hour, four-part, $23m show became one of the most watched TV series ever.

Chamberlain continued to move between films, television and theatre, and his homes in Hawaii and Los Angeles, over the next decades. He was a guest star on the TV comedy series Will & Grace (2005), and his final film role came as an acting coach in Finding Julia (2019).

In 2003, in his memoir, Shattered Love, he wrote about his dislike of himself for not being true to himself in order to protect his matinee idol image, but in coming out he “finally made friends with life”.

He is survived by Rabbett.

🔔 George Richard Chamberlain, actor, born 31 March 1934; died 29 March 2025

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[7r0773r]

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

She was virtually separated from her husband, but she appeared to perceive nothing irregular in the situation. It had become apparent, at an early stage of their relations, that they should never desire the same thing at the same moment, and this fact had prompted her to rescue disagreement from the vulgar realm of accident. (p. 211)

***

Isabel had in the depths of her nature an even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith; but the depths of this young lady's nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces. (p. 224)

***

"Of course you are displeased at my interfering with you," said Mrs. Touchett.

Isabel reflected a moment.

"I am not displeased, but I am surprised— and a good deal puzzled. Was it not proper I should remain in the drawing-room?"

"Not in the least. Young girls here don't sit alone with the gentlemen late at night."

"You were very right to tell me then," said Isabel. "I don't understand it, but I am very glad to know it."

"I shall always tell you," her aunt answered, "whenever I see you taking what seems to be too much liberty."

"Pray do; but I don't say I shall always think your remonstrance just."

"Very likely not. You are too fond of your liberty."

"Yes, I think I am very fond of it. But I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."

"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.

"So as to choose," said Isabel. (p. 259)

***

"I know what's the matter with you, Mr. Touchett," she said. "You think you are too good to get married."

"I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole," Ralph answered; "and then I suddenly changed my mind."

“Oh, pshaw!” Henrietta exclaimed impatiently.

"Then it seemed to me," said Ralph, "that I was not good enough.”

"It would improve you. Besides, it's your duty."

"Ah," cried the young man, "one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?"

"Of course it is—did you never know that before? It's every one's duty to get married." 

Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good fellow. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave, and there is always something fine about that. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar arts; but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges matrimony upon an unencumbered young man, the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse. (pp. 282-83)

***

Mrs. Touchett had spoken of [Miss Stackpole] to Isabel as a "newspaper-woman," and expressed some surprise at her niece's having selected such a friend; but she had immediately added that she knew Isabel's friends were her own affair, and that she never undertook to like them all, or to restrict the girl to those she liked.

"If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you would have a very small society," Mrs. Touchett frankly admitted; "and I don't think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend them to you. When it comes to recommending, it is a serious affair. I don't like Miss Stackpole—I don't like her tone. She talks too loud, and she looks at me too hard. I am sure she has lived all her life in a boarding-house, and I detest the style of manners that such a way of living produces. If you ask me if I prefer my own manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I will tell you that I prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows that I detest boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it, because she thinks it is the highest in the world. She would like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on together, therefore, and there is no use trying." (pp. 287-88)

***

"It's a great question, as you say; it's a very difficult question."

"I don't expect you, of course, to answer it outright. Think it over as long as may be necessary. If I can gain by waiting, I will gladly wait a long time. Only remember that in the end my dearest happiness depends upon your answer."

"I should be very sorry to keep you in suspense," said Isabel.

"Oh, don't mind. I would much rather have a good answer six months hence than a bad one to-day."

"But it is very probable that even six months hence I should not be able to give you one that you would think good."

"Why not, since you really like me?"

"Ah, you must never doubt of that," said Isabel.

"Well, then, I don't see what more you ask!"

"It is not what I ask; it is what I can give. I don't think I should suit you; I really don't think I should."

"You needn't bother about that; that's my affair. You needn't be a better royalist than the king."

"It is not only that," said Isabel; "but I am not sure I wish to marry any one.

"Very likely you don't. I have no doubt a great many women begin that way," said his lordship, who, be it averred, did not in the least believe in the axiom he thus beguiled his anxiety by uttering. "But they are frequently persuaded."

"Ah, that is because they want to be!" 

And Isabel lightly laughed. (p. 301)

***

Henrietta had a long interview with them on the Piccadilly pavement, and though the three ladies all talked at once, they had not exhausted their accumulated topics. (p. 338)

***

"I don't see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don't want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do.”

"There is nothing she can do so well. But you are many-sided."

"If one is two-sided, it is enough," said Isabel. (p. 345)

***

"I judge more than I used to," [Madame Merle] said to Isabel; "but it seems to me that I have earned the right. One can't judge till one is forty; before that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition too ignorant. I am sorry for you; it will be a long time before you are forty. But every gain is a loss of some kind; I often think that after forty one can't really feel. The freshness, the quickness have certainly gone. You will keep them longer than most people; it will be a great satisfaction to me to see you some years hence. I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain—it can't spoil you. It may pull you about horribly; but I defy it to break you up." (p. 384)

***

"You ought to see a great many men," Madame Merle remarked; "you ought to see as many as possible, so as to get used to them."

"Used to them?" Isabel repeated, with that exceedingly serious gaze which sometimes seemed to proclaim that she was deficient in a sense of humour—an intimation which at other moments she effectively refuted. "I am not afraid of them!"

"Used to them, I mean, so as to despise them. That's what one comes to with most of them. You will pick out, for your society, the few whom you don't despise." (p. 443)

***

"I am rather ashamed of my plans; I make a new one every day."

"I don't see why you should be ashamed; it's the greatest of pleasures."

"It seems frivolous, I think," said Isabel. "One ought to choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that."

"By that rule, then, I have not been frivolous."

"Have you never made plans?"

"Yes, I made one years ago, and I am acting on it to-day."

"It must have been a very pleasant one," said Isabel.

"It was very simple. It was to be as quiet as possible."

"As quiet?" the girl repeated.

"Not to worry—not to strive nor struggle. To resign myself. To be content with a little." He uttered these sentences slowly, with little pauses between, and his intelligent eyes were fixed upon Isabel's with the conscious look of a man who has brought himself to confess something.

"Do you call that simple?" Isabel asked, with a gentle laugh.

"Yes, because it's negative."

"Has your life been negative?"

"Call it affirmative if you like. Only it has affirmed my indifference. Mind you, not my natural indifference—I had none. But my studied, my wilful renunciation." (p. 462)

***

"You turn things into ridicule without seeming to do it, though not, I think, without intending it," she said at last. (p. 507)

***

Why shouldn't I like Mr. Osmond, since you did?"

"I never wanted to marry him; there is nothing of him."

"Then he can't hurt me," said Isabel.

"Do you think you are going to be happy? No one is happy."

"I shall set the fashion then. What does one marry for!"

"What you will marry for, heaven only knows. People usually marry as they go into partnership— to set up a house. But in your partnership you will bring everything."

"Is it that Mr. Osmond is not rich? Is that what you are talking about?" Isabel asked.

"He has no money; he has no name; he has no importance. I value such things and I have the courage to say it; I think they are very precious. Many other people think the same, and they show it. But they give some other reason!"

Isabel hesitated a little.

"I think I value everything that is valuable. I care very much for money, and that is why I wish Mr. Osmond to have some."

"Give it to him, then; but marry some one else." (p. 536)

***

Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never—to his own sense—been so clever as when he observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values, Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master, as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it, from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose—pose so deeply calculated that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of calculation. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose. His life on his hill-top at Florence had been a pose of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of impertinence and mystification.

His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it. It made him feel great to play the world a trick. The thing he had done in his life most directly to please himself was his marrying Isabel Archer; though in this case indeed the gullible world was in a manner embodied in poor Isabel, who had been mystified to the top of her bent. (pp. 597-98)

***

What kept Ralph alive was simply the fact that he had not yet seen enough of his cousin; he was not yet satisfied. There was more to come; he couldn't make up his mind to lose that. (p. 599)

***

Pansy might captivate any one—any one, at least, but Lord Warburton. Isabel would have thought her too small, too slight, perhaps even too artificial for that. There was always a little of the doll about her, and that was not what Lord Warburton had been looking for. Still, who could say what men looked for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it. (p. 619)

***

Ah yes, if Gilbert was jealous of her there was perhaps some reason; it didn't make Gilbert look better to sit for half-an-hour with Ralph. It was not that they talked of him—it was not that she complained. His name was never uttered between them. It was simply that Ralph was generous and that her husband was not. There was something in Ralph's talk, in his smile, in the mere fact of his being in Rome, that made the blasted circle round which she walked more spacious. He made her feel the good of the world; he made her feel what might have been. He was, after all, as intelligent as Osmond—quite apart from his being better. And thus it seemed to her an act of devotion to conceal her misery from him. She concealed it elaborately; in their talk she was perpetually hanging out curtains and arranging screens. It lived before her again—it had never had time to die—that morning in the garden at Florence, when he warned her against Osmond. She had only to close her eyes to see the place, to hear his voice, to feel the warm, sweet air. How could he have known? What a mystery! what a wonder of wisdom! As intelligent as Gilbert? He was much more intelligent, to arrive at such a judgment as that. Gilbert had never been so deep, so just. She had told him then that from her at least he should never know if he was right; and this was what she was taking care of now. It gave her plenty to do; there was passion, exaltation, religion in it. Women find their religion sometimes in strange exercises, and Isabel, at present, in playing a part before her cousin, had an idea that she was doing him a kindness. It would have been a kindness, perhaps, if he had been for a single instant a dupe. As it was, the kindness consisted mainly in trying to make him believe that he had once wounded her greatly and that the event had put him to shame, but that as she was very generous and he was so ill, she bore him no grudge and even considerately forbore to flaunt her happiness in his face. Ralph smiled to himself, as he lay on his sofa, at this extraordinary form of consideration; but he forgave her for having forgiven him. She didn't wish him to have the pain of knowing she was unhappy; that was the great thing, and it didn't matter that such knowledge would rather have righted him. (pp. 638-39)

***

In reality, Isabel would as soon have thought of despising [Countess Gemini] as of passing a moral judgment on a grasshopper. She was not indifferent to her husband's sister, however; she was rather a little afraid of her. She wondered at her; she thought her very extraordinary. The Countess seemed to her to have no soul; she was like a bright shell, with a polished surface, in which something would rattle when you shook it. This rattle was apparently the Countess's spiritual principle; a little loose nut that tumbled about inside of her. She was too odd for disdain, too anomalous for comparisons. (pp. 653-54)

***

Isabel received Miss Stackpole freely in her own sitting-room, and took her repeatedly to drive, face to face with Pansy, who, bending a little forward, on the opposite seat of the carriage, gazed at the celebrated authoress with a respectful attention which Henrietta occasionally found irritating. She complained to Isabel that Miss Osmond had a little look as if she should remember everything one said. "I don't want to be remembered that way," Miss Stackpole declared; "I consider that my conversation refers only to the moment, like the morning papers. Your step-daughter, as she sits there, looks as if she kept all the back numbers and would bring them out some day against me." (p. 695)

***

Isabel took a drive, alone, that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. (pp. 723-24)

[ugfriends]

In the Henry James novel “The Portrait of a Lady” a young woman Isabel Archer is sitting alone with a book in a house in Albany and hears footsteps in an adjoining room. This sounds like the beginning of a horror story and after meeting Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle you may certainly wonder. Isabel greets the visitor and tactlessly says “you must be our crazy Aunt Lydia!” Isabel is taken by this aunt to England. Isabel meets her uncle the elderly Mr. Touchett who is sufficiently charmed to alter his will in her favor although it is her sickly cousin Ralph’s idea for him to do so. She receives but rejects offers of marriage from Lord Warburton who lives nearby and Caspar Goodwood who has pursued her from Boston to try to continue his courtship. Also coming over from the states is Isabel's opinionated friend Henrietta Stackpole whose amusing friendship with Robert Bantling is a delightful aside in the novel. One of the main themes going here is freedom which is important to Isabel as she makes clear to her cousin Ralph. “I’m very fond of my liberty.” And later Ralph can’t believe the change in her. “You were the last person I expected to see caught.’ ‘I don’t know why you call it caught.’ ‘Because you’re going to be put into a cage.’ ‘If I like my cage, that needn’t trouble you,’ she answered.” Of course Isabel doesn’t like the cage to which hubris has delivered her. “It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation." Osmond remarked about his marriage "We're as united, you know, as the candlestick and the snuffers." Late in the novel when Caspar is still pitching woo at Isabel he says: “The world is all before us” which is an allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Isabel much like Milton’s infernal crew pursued freedom and got bondage instead. In England old suitors haunt her as revenants from her past and Isabel decides to go back to Rome. If she were an anachronistic Shaggy she might be saying "Zoinks! Like, let’s get out of here, Scoob!” I will remember best from this novel who Isabel thought of as "a beautiful blameless knight" Mr Bantling who when visiting Henrietta in America delighted in being able to order ice cream in railway cars.

[azacello]

On the last 100 pages of portrait of a lady and Ralph touchett is my Ivan Karamazov. If anyone cares.

[filmes-online-facil]

Assistir Filme Retratos de uma Mulher Online fácil

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Retratos de uma Mulher - Filmes Online Fácil

Bela, rica e liberal, a americana Isabel Archer viaja pela Europa em busca de sua própria identidade como pessoa e como mulher. Ao mesmo tempo em que habilmente se desvencilha das investidas de Caspar Goodwood, um insistente americano que a seguiu até a Inglaterra, Isabel estreita a amizade com o próprio primo, Ralph Touchett. Porém, através da misteriosa Madame Merle, Isabel conhece Gilbert Osmond, um colecionador de objetos de arte, que a seduz e acaba casando-se com ela.

[thestrangegirl091200]

A moodboard for The Portait of a Lady by Henry James.

Pictures not mine.

[sofoulandfairaday]

Remember that if you have been hated, you have also been loved

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

[mxcottonsocks]

finished reading The Portrait of a Lady and feeling a renewed appreciation of the rejected suitors in Dracula

[byronicherobracket]

Byronic Hero Bracket Round Of 128 Batch B #4

Cheryl Blossom from Riverdale vs. Cable from Marvel

Reasons under the cut (spoilers for both)

(All sources from TV Tropes)

Cheryl Blossom:

Cheryl Blossom is an intelligent Ice Queen, intuitive, and a huge narcissist and snobbish Attention Whore prone to violent mood swings and switching sides at the blink of an eye. She has a domineering personality, but she is also extremely emotionally dependent on people, such her her brother, Jason and Toni Topaz. No wonder she is such an emotional mess, she is the heir to an aristocratic family, and both of her parents are abusive and cold and didn't provide Cheryl with much love and support. Her twin brother Jason, who she was extremely close to, ended up being murdered by her own father. After his death, she completely lost it and never recovered emotionally. Cheryl is also a Goth girl wo loves to quip, pull most macabre pranks on people and has a passion for painting.

Previously Beaten: Dark Pit

Cable:

Cable started out like this, as he was a time traveler from a time in constant strife and harbored a ruthless nature, though he has since gone from this to standard Anti-Hero territory. This tends to be Depending on the Writer. When operating alone Cable has no problem using any means at his disposal to achieve his goals, such as torturing Captain America prior to Avengers vs. X-Men. But he has a habit of teaming up with morality pets to rein himself in, not unlike a certain other time traveler.

Previously Beaten: Ralph Touchett

[light20sblog]

There was an everlasting weight on her heart—there was a livid light on everything. But Ralph's little visit was a lamp in the darkness; for the hour that she sat with him her ache for herself became somehow her ache for him.

The Portrait of a lady, Henry James

[bunnyinatree]

What if I left a review on my GoodReads updates for The Portrait of a Lady and just wrote “rage”? :P 

[clarasimone]

On the relativity of time, using Iain Glen as a marker

One thing I love about discovering all of IG's past work, is to gage where I was in terms of my own trajectory (as a person in love with art in general, film and performance in particular) when specific works of his came out. In 1996, when IG was in Martin Guerre and being this man:

I was really engrossed in the following film and thespian (Nicole Kidman in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady):

So this is them in 1996, Iain Glen and Nicole Kidman, 2 years before The Blue Room, and wouldn't they have made a great pair in Campion's film already ? IG could have easily played NK’s real love interest in this story, Ralph Touchett, played in the film by Martin Donovan (a non-star, just saying - and hey! Touchett dies in the end, see ? perfect for IG ;-). Sigh.... but let’s not go there.

What's funny, and what I meant to say really, is that Martin Guerre seems like a very long time ago for IG, but Portrait doesn't for NK. Not in my mind because I've kept company with this film through the years, as it became a staple of my film classes. The experience of time is indeed relative. 

See, fangirling has its scientific merits ;-)

[inacornerofthepalebluedot]

Retrato de una Dama - Pasajes del libro

· "A veces adoptaba un continente severo para agradecer los cumplidos y trataba de zafarse de ellos lo m��s pronto posible. Sin embargo, a este aspecto solía juzgársela mal, pues se la consideraba insensible a ellos cuando, en realidad, lo que hacía era ocultar lo muchísimo que le agradaban. El mostrarlo habría sido mostrar demasiado."

(Retrato de una Dama, sobre Isabel Archer, pág. 55)

· "París conduce a todo y a todas partes. Usted no puede ir a ninguna parte sin antes haber pasado por París. Todo el que viene a Europa tiene que pasar por aquí."

(Retrato de una Dama, Edward Rosier a Isabel, pág. 192)

· "Tienes demasiada capacidad para pensar y, sobre todo, demasiada conciencia. Es increíble la cantidad de cosas que te parecen mal. No analices tanto. Purga tu fiebre, abre tus alas, elávate sobre la tierra, que en ello no hay mal."

(Retrato de una Dama, Ralph Touchett a Isabel, pág. 198)

· "La noción que Isabel tenía de la vida aristocrática era sencillamente la unión de una gran cultura con una gran libertad, correspondiendo a la cultura infundir la sensación del deber, y a la libertad la sensación del posible disfrute."

(Retrato de una Dama, pág. 383)

· "(...) el verdadero pecado consistía en tener una inteligencia independiente."

(Retrato de una Dama, pág. 384)

[kshumir]

"Onun yelkenlerini biraz rüzgârla doldurmak isterim."

Bir Kadının Portesi’nden Ralph Touchett