![]() ![]() Gazing cliffward, and spying something of interest, she hikes up her skirts, clambers, tugs at a rock, then loses her footing and slithers down. It’s shingle all the way none of that balmy nonsense about golden sands. Here she is, then, as the adult Mary, stomping along the beach outside Lyme. ![]() With a shyer or more rarefied actress on deck, “Titanic” (1997) might have sunk. The set of her jaw and the blaze of her glance suggest a self-freeing spirit who knows the path ahead and is determined to take it. In any survey of her films, it’s hard to find an instance in which she has not given stubbornness a good name. The article commends her “to those who like to study character, and are fond of seeing good stubborn English perseverance make way even where there is nothing in its favour.” No surprise, therefore, that the role of Mary, in “Ammonite,” a new movie written and directed by Francis Lee, should go to Kate Winslet. According to an article in All the Year Round, a journal edited by Charles Dickens, she became “lively and intelligent” after surviving a lightning strike in infancy. Mary, the daughter of a cabinetmaker, was one of ten children, and a fossil-finder extraordinaire, who excavated the skeleton of an ichthyosaur before she reached her teens. The nearest American equivalent would be the Academy Awards. The crumbling cliffs along it, dating from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, are a happy hunting ground for anyone seeking the fossilized remains of ancient creatures. One influential example is that of Mary Anning (1799-1847), an Englishwoman who lived in Lyme Regis, on the Dorset coast-or, as it is occasionally and inadequately known, the Jurassic Coast. ![]() These fields include archeology, astronomy, and, to a laughable extent, politics. There are certain fields of human activity to which the keen amateur can make a notable contribution. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |