Tagline: You’ll learn to love her. Warts and all.
Nanny McPhee movie storyline. The seven Brown children – Simon, Tora, Eric, Lily, Christianna, Sebastian and Baby Aggy – may well be the naughtiest children in the history of the world. Their beleaguered father, Mr. Brown, has his hands full taking care of his troublesome offspring by working long days at the local funeral parlour.
The children’s mother died only a year ago but Mr Brown’s imperious Aunt Adelaide, who supplements his inadequate wages, has threatened to cut off her allowance to the family unless Mr. Brown remarries within a month. Debtor’s prison awaits him if he doesn’t comply, and the fate of the children would be unimaginable.
Mr Brown decides not to tell the children but they find out and assume he doesn’t care enough about them to tell them they’re about to have a new stepmother. As a result, their behaviour worsens, and their acts of outrageous mischief send yet another nanny screaming from the house.
Mr. Brown keeps hearing that the nanny he needs is someone named Nanny McPhee, but he has no idea who she is or how to find her. “There will be snow in August before this family is straightened out,” grouses their weary cook, Mrs. Blatherwick, to their scullery maid, Evangeline, who adores the children in spite of their behaviour. What the Brown family needs is a miracle. What they get is Nanny McPhee.
One night, as the children are wreaking havoc in Mrs. Blatherwick’s definitely-off-limits kitchen, there appears at the front door the legendary Nanny McPhee – a stern and comically ugly little woman whose features include a bulbous nose, a single repulsive eyebrow, a pair of hairy warts, and a particularly unsightly snaggle tooth.
Mr. Brown has doubts about this person he supposedly needs, but finds himself unable to give satisfactory answers to her questions about his children. “Do they say `please’ and `thank you’?” she asks. “In what context?” is his weak reply. Nanny McPhee makes her assessment – “Your children need me” – and finds her way to the kitchen where she encounters for the first time the dreadful behaviour of the Brown children. The children are somewhat put off by this creature with the alarming appearance, but they pretend not to see or hear her and defiantly resolve “to play in the kitchen all night long.”
But one bang of Nanny McPhee’s magic stick changes everything. Suddenly the children’s antics are speeded up beyond their control and they realize they’ll have to play in the kitchen all night long, whether they want to or not, unless they ask Nanny McPhee to let them stop. A battle of wills takes over between Simon and Nanny McPhee as to whether or not he will say “please,” but when it looks as though he’s on the verge of getting “Cook blown up and Aggy boiled,” Simon relents and says the word he never says. And says it politely.
In an instant, the kitchen is neat as a pin, and neither Cook nor Evangeline have any memory of the havoc, or the magic, they just witnessed. But the children remember, and the younger ones worry they may have met their match.
When Nanny McPhee appears in their bedroom, they give her a series of rude names instead of their real names to show that she can’t scare them. But Nanny McPhee knows all their names already, and before she leaves the bedroom she gives them her credo: “When you need me but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go.” “We will never want you,” says Simon, as defiant as ever. “Then I will never go,” Nanny McPhee replies serenely, and disappears down the stairs.
In the days that follow, the children find that any mischief they make will be used against them by Nanny McPhee who seems to enjoy giving them a taste of their own medicine. Meanwhile, a new complication arises for Mr. Brown when Aunt Adelaide arrives and announces her intention to take one of his daughters away to live with her. The children overhear the plan and rebel by dressing up the family’s animals in the girls’ frilly best clothes, hoping the short sighted old woman will take an animal with her instead. But when Aunt Adelaide spies one of the real Brown girls and grabs her, the other children realise they have no choice but to turn for help to the woman who has said that she’d be there for them whenever they need her.
Nanny McPhee answers their appeal and distracts Aunt Adelaide by making the family’s donkey dance. But the reprieve is only momentary, and she reminds the children that someone must be in Aunt Adelaide’s carriage when she leaves. The Brown girls respond with surprising selflessness, but Simon saves the day by asking Evangeline, who longs to be an educated lady, to go with Aunt Adelaide. The switch is made, the girls are safe, and the children begin to reevaluate this nanny whom they thought was their enemy. They also notice that something very mysterious is happening; as they learn Nanny McPhee’s lessons, her looks appear to change. The warts go, the nose gets smaller, the single eyebrow separates into two normal ones. Has she really changed? Or is it just their attitude towards her that has changed?
As Mr Brown’s marriage deadline approaches he begrudgingly invites to tea the dreadful Mrs Quickly, a woman so eager for his affections that she flirted with him throughout her third husband’s funeral. Simon tries to talk to his father about Mrs Quickly, but when his father won’t listen, the boy turns to Nanny McPhee for help. Though she refuses to help directly, she agrees not to interfere if the children try to drive Mrs. Quickly away.
Mrs. Quickly arrives and the pranks commence. A toad in the teapot, worms in her sandwiches, a tarantula lowered into her silly blonde curls all backfire and drive her and Mr Brown closer together. In the end Mrs. Quickly leaves in a fury, sure that Mr. Brown has been attempting to seduce her all afternoon without the benefit of marriage. Left without hope, Mr. Brown confesses all to the children and tells them that the family is about to be pulled apart. Nanny McPhee challenges the children to figure out on their own what to do. The children go to Mrs. Quickly’s house and persuade her to return to Mr. Brown, then persuade their father to propose to the awful woman. That night, Mr. Brown apologises to his children for not trusting them and they apologise to him for their bad behaviour. They are now a happy family once again, if only for the few days before the wedding. Nanny McPhee reveals to Mr. Brown that he has learned one of her most important lessons: to listen. And once again, her looks seem to change.
On the day of the wedding, it seems that the Browns face an impossible dilemma. Will Mr. Brown really have to marry Mrs. Quickly? Will the children be able to figure out on their own how to save the day?
Nanny McPhee’s magic, in tandem now with the children’s own cleverness, brings about a series of hilarious and emotional surprises, transforming the dreaded wedding day into an occasion of glorious happiness for the family and a sad reminder for Nanny McPhee that when children want her, but no longer need her, she has to go.
Bedtime Stories: Thompson and Doran Meet Nurse Matilda
Emma Thompson and Lindsay Doran have been working together as a screenwriting/producing team since 1990 when they met on the production of “Dead Again,” which Thompson starred in and Doran produced. At the time, Doran was in the 10th year of her search for someone to adapt Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” into a feature film. When she saw some episodes of a comedy TV series that Thompson had written (titled, appropriately, “Thompson”), she felt sure she had found the right person for the adaptation, even though Thompson had never written a feature screenplay.
Being a devotee of Austen’s work, Thompson took the assignment just as she was finishing up her role in “Dead Again,” and five years later “Sense and Sensibility” was released. The critical and box office hit was nominated for seven Academy Awards®, including Best Picture, and won Thompson the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture – Drama and the Best Film award from BAFTA.
“Emma is an extraordinary writer,” says Doran. “She has a wonderful sense of both comic and dramatic rhythms, and her writing can be heartbreakingly emotional without ever being sentimental. She also has a remarkable ability to write period language in a way that feels absolutely accurate while at the same time being accessible to the modern ear. Even her stage directions are delicious to read. Every word is considered and precisely chosen.”
Following their experience on “Sense and Sensibility,” Thompson and Doran looked for something else they could work on together, hoping to find the kind of passion project that “Sense and Sensibility” had been for both of them. Though they often contacted one another with ideas, nothing lit a fire with either of them until Thompson told Doran about the Nurse Matilda series of English children’s books over lunch in 1997. “I had never heard of them,” recalls Doran, who at the time was President of United Artists Pictures. “I thought maybe it was just me, but later I learned that very few people have heard of these books, even in England.”
“I found the books on my bookshelf,” Thompson says. “They weren’t my main fare but I loved them and I loved the illustrations. The books were very dry and witty and dark, but also very sweet. I came across the first book again about seven years ago and thought, there’s something rather interesting about this.”
“Emma told me the most basic premise of the story at that lunch,” Doran continues. “And without hearing anything else, without reading the books, without knowing anything except what she told me that day, I thought it was a terrific idea for a movie. As the days went by, the basic concept kept growing on me. I kept thinking about how this would work and how that could work and how it could be funny and how it could be emotional. For me, that’s the best way to begin the development process – in a state of high excitement and enthusiasm.”
After tracking down the three out-of-print books (Nurse Matilda, Nurse Matilda Goes to Town, and Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital) in a public library, Doran optioned them for Thompson to adapt and the development for “Nanny McPhee” began.
The books, written in the early 1960s by Christianna Brand, recount the legend of an unsettling-looking magical nanny who tames a large family of extremely unruly children. She uses magic to teach them lessons, and as they learn the lessons her appearance seems to change. The tales of Nurse Matilda were orally passed down for generations through the author’s family. Christianna Brand was a pen name for Mary Christianna Lewis, an award-winning mystery writer, and she first wrote about the character in her anthology “Naughty Children” (illustrated by her cousin, the famous children’s book illustrator Edward Ardizzone) and then later in her three books.
The books contained a rich well of material that resonated with Thompson and Doran who both felt that the characters, situations and relationships had universal appeal. “What parents would not want to have somebody around who could bang a stick and make their children good?” asks Doran. “Who wouldn’t want that? And what group of children wouldn’t want a magical person to come into their house, even if they were the victims of her magic for a while? It’s just fun to have somebody around who can bang a stick and make a donkey dance. Everybody understands the wish-fulfillment of that.
The process of adapting Brand’s books had more “blood, sweat and tears” in the writing than “Sense and Sensibility” because with the Jane Austen text, Thompson adapted everything in the book, then distilled it down to its essence. Nurse Matilda, she says, “was much more a creation because the books don’t have any plot. There are so many disciplines – drama, comedy, physical comedy, farce, spookiness. But the process has been much more beguiling than anything I’ve ever done before because it’s so multi-layered.”
As Thompson worked on shaping the material into a story, she often turned for aid and comfort to Doran, as she had during the writing of “Sense and Sensibility.” “Lindsay epitomizes the word `producer,’” says Thompson. “There’s no other person I’ve ever worked with who has her qualities – because she’s also a great script editor. My scripts wouldn’t be what they are without her. Especially since I was just beginning with `Sense and Sensibility,’ I would never have gotten that done without her shaping and formulating. She is extraordinary.”
One of the first things Doran and Thompson agreed to change was the nanny’s name. At the time in which the story is set, the word `nurse’ was synonymous with the word `nanny.’ “But after a number of people asked me about my `nurse project’ with Emma Thompson, it was clear we had to change the word from `nurse’ to `nanny,’” recalls Doran. There was also the Roald Dahl book and film adaptation of “Matilda” to contend with, and that was another reason to make the change. “We went through a couple of possibilities, but eventually our nanny emerged as Nanny McPhee,” says Doran. “It was Emma’s mother [the actress, Phyllida Law] who came up with `McPhee,’ and it immediately sounded right.” It is also Phyllida Law who intones the words Mr. Brown hears many times at the beginning of the film: “The person you need is Nanny McPhee.”
By 2002, the five-year process of writing the screenplay was done and “Nanny McPhee” began its search for a director.
Eating the Baby: Director Kirk Jones Joins the Company
When Doran heard that Kirk Jones wanted to meet with her about directing “Nanny McPhee,” she expected to meet someone much older. Jones was the writer/director of “Waking Ned” but had not directed another feature since that film’s release in 1998. “A lot of people thought Kirk Jones was a ninety-year-old Irish gentleman,” Doran says. “It made perfect sense – he made this movie about very old Irish people and then nobody in America heard from him again, so there was this assumption that he had probably died, poor old chap. It was a big shock to me when I found that Kirk Jones was thirty-six years old and not even Irish.”
“Waking Ned” – an emotional comedy about an old man who dies of shock upon learning he has won the lottery, and the small Irish village that bands together to try to claim the money – struck a chord with audiences all over the world.
“`Waking Ned’ is a great film he made for tuppence ha’penny,” comments Thompson, “and it made so much money because Kirk made something universal out of it. The tone of it was exactly what we wanted, funnily enough, because it was about somebody dying, and much of the emotion in `Nanny McPhee’ comes from the subject of the dead mother, while much of the comedy comes from Mr. Brown’s job at the funeral parlour.”
This deft touch at coaxing humour out of dark situations and bringing emotion and humanity to a wickedly funny scenario put Jones permanently on Doran’s radar. “`Waking Ned’ has humour that actually makes you laugh out loud,” she comments. “You don’t just smile, you laugh, and that’s very important to me. Audiences loved that movie and it was an enormous hit all over the world because it’s a story that works everywhere. That kind of universality was exactly what we were striving for in `Nanny McPhee,’ and it was clear that Kirk knew instinctively how to provide it.”
A successful commercials director who had won awards, including the 1996 Silver Lion at Cannes, Jones had been looking for a project he believed in since making “Waking Ned.” “After directing my first film, I found it very difficult to commit to another project,” he explains. “Finding a script is like buying a house – it might take years to find it, the choice might at times be confusing, but when you finally walk through the door of the right one, you suddenly feel at home.”
Jones responded to Thompson’s screenplay just as Thompson and Doran had responded to “Waking Ned.” The relief at finding the right script was enormous. “When I read `Nanny McPhee’ I knew immediately that this was a project that I wanted to direct,” Jones says. “It had a great sense of theatre and magic; it was full of charm, humor and emotion, but above all, it was obvious to me that it had been carefully crafted and nurtured in a way which already made it feel like a classic.”
“This is perfect territory for Kirk,” says Glynis Murray, Jones’s producing partner for over a decade, who co-produced “Nanny McPhee.” “Kirk has a genuineness with which he portrays people. He has an ability to see the whole character, not only the more exaggerated characteristics.”
Doran recognised these qualities in Jones in their very first meeting when he confided that one of his favourite characters in the script was Mrs. Brown’s chair. “Kirk spoke with incredible passion about this chair,” Doran says. “He said if he did his job right, the chair would get a Supporting Actress nomination. It was clear he completely understood the emotion that went with the chair, and he completely understood why it’s both funny and moving when Nanny McPhee bows to the chair as though there’s somebody in it.”
“It was a detail in the script which absolutely fascinated me,” Jones explains. “Mr Brown used to sit in front of the fire in the evening and share his concerns with his wife, and he has just gone on doing that in the year since she died by talking to the little pink chair where she sued to sit. I thought Emma had succeeded in making an inanimate object one of the most important, moving and memorable characters in the whole film.” Jones’s preoccupation with Mrs. Brown’s chair continued through the shoot, particularly when it was injured in a fall. “Colin fell back on it during the tea party scene and one of the legs broke,” he recalls. “I stood over the carpenter as he drilled into the body of the chair, making sure I was at the chair’s side during the whole operation.”
Jones’s strong affinity for the material brought dimensions and scope to the project that even Thompson had not anticipated. “You don’t write a screenplay in order to preserve it,” says Thompson. “You try to write it and build it so well that when a director comes in and starts making changes, it’s still all there but it’s evolved into something larger than what it was originally. The whole point is to find someone with a vision and a sensibility that complements yours.”
Plus, she adds, “the wonderful notion of the children pretending to eat the baby is Kirk’s. He found a reference in one of the Nurse Matilda books to the children pretending to eat a boy and he desperately wanted to get something like that into the movie.”
Pumping up the children’s naughtiness was an exercise Jones savoured. “Putting glue on a door handle was replaced with electric wires on the door handle,” he recounts. “I also thought it was important that Mrs. Quickly actually ate the worm in the tea party scene rather than just put it near her mouth. (Celia Imrie actually did pop a worm in her mouth during this scene). I just know from having two boys of my own that they react very positively to acts which are truly naughty.”
Thompson made it clear from day one that although she was very involved in the project as writer and star, this was Jones’s film. “I never had any concerns about approaching her with changes which developed as the shoot progressed,” he says. “She works very hard to get the script as good as it can be before the shoot, but once we started shooting, if a change needed to be made, if a scene wasn’t playing as well as expected, if the dialogue needed attention then she would address it. She is not precious about the word on the page; she will change it if she thinks it can be improved. I would say, `Emma, we need four extra lines of dialogue,’ and she would give them straight back and they would be brilliant. No thinking time, no reading of the script, no discussion. She is completely in tune with each and every one of the characters that she has created.”
The Zen Master: Breathing Life Into Nanny McPhee
After finishing the shooting script for the film and incorporating Jones’s notes, Thompson’s work on “Nanny McPhee” was only half-complete. “She said from the very beginning that she wanted to play the magical nanny,” recalls Lindsay Doran, “She thought it would be a really fun part.”
Nanny McPhee is a departure for an actress known for poignant, comedic and very human portrayals throughout her stage and screen career. Thompson likens the figure to an eastern Zen Master – from the moment that Nanny McPhee appears at the family’s door, she interacts with their chaotic lives from an inner reservoir of absolute calm. “She’s a kind of chimera but her presence is very powerful,” Thompson describes. “To be a Zen Master doesn’t mean that you’re a vacuum but what you present is an atmosphere or an influence that is utterly non-judgmental. It therefore wields an extremely powerful influence because it allows people the space to see themselves and feel themselves in ways they can’t under normal circumstances.”
This nanny, Thompson points out, does not tell the Browns what to do; rather, she guides them using her extraordinary methods into trusting themselves to find their own right paths. “The whole point of the Zen Master is the dissolution of ego,” she says. “Nanny McPhee has got no ego at all. There’s no person there as we understand a person to be, but there is a calm and a peace and total lovingness right from the start.”
In the script, Thompson remained faithful to Christianna Brand’s physical description of the character and Edward Ardizzone’s simple yet exacting illustrations. But breathing life into this particular character would become a group effort. After a seven-year journey from conception to production, Thompson finally appeared at a costume test in full Nanny McPhee regalia – complete with two large ears, two hairy warts, thick eyebrows that join in the middle, and what Christianna Brand described as “a nose like two potatoes and a tombstone tooth” (all crafted by Academy Award-winning make-up effects artist Peter King). She was dressed, much like the Ardizzone drawings portrayed her, in shape-altering body prosthetics and a dramatic yet whimsical costume designed by costumer Nick Ede.
“Suddenly, two days before we started filming, this complete stranger turned up and introduced herself as Nanny McPhee,” remembers Jones.
The entire cast and crew watched the character come to life before their eyes. “The minute she came onto the set, the effect was so moving,” Doran recalls. “The character just grew out of the look. Suddenly there was a voice and an accent and a way of moving and a tilt of the head that belonged entirely to Nanny McPhee. She doesn’t blink. She looks at people as though she’s never quite seen people before, a weird way of observing that has a slight otherworldly, space alien quality. And none of this had been there in any of the other incarnations that we’d seen while she was rehearsing with the children.”
“We saw this big, fat, humungous lady in a black costume and two warts and a squashed tomato nose, and Holly and Sam were just like, `Ha! Who’s that?” remembers 12-year-old Eliza Bennett, who plays Tora. “And then she goes, `Hello, I’m Nanny McPhee.’”
“It just wasn’t Emma,” adds Jones. “With most actors, no matter how convincing their performance, you can identify them beneath the surface. When I saw Nanny McPhee, the disguise was so complete and Emma’s posture and performance were so convincing that I couldn’t see Emma Thompson anywhere, not even beneath the disguise. There was another person on set, someone I had never met before… and I wasn’t sure I liked the look of her,” he adds.
“She pretended that she killed Emma Thompson,” Daykin remembers with a smile. “So all the children were like, `Ah! Nanny McPhee’s on set!’”
The Harried Dreamboat: Colin Firth Plays Mr. Brown
The otherworldly Nanny McPhee provides a stark contrast to the very human Brown household, overseen by the harried, lonely, and sometimes desperate Mr. Brown. This central character – who provides the connective tissue between the comedic and romantic aspects of the film – was a crucial part to cast. “Let’s face it: we needed an impossible combination,” says Doran. “We needed somebody who was believable as the father of seven children, and we also needed a dreamboat, since the love story is a very important part of the film.” Kirk Jones had no doubts about who he wanted to play Mr. Brown. “Colin Firth had always been top of my list,” he says.
Equally acclaimed for his work in both drama (“The Girl With the Pearl Earring”) and romantic comedy (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”), Firth was game to exercise both disciplines in “Nanny McPhee.” “One of the most interesting manoeuvres a story can make is to take you from tears to laughter and back again,” says Firth. “It’s incredibly powerful and very attractive for an actor to be part of that.”
Thompson notes, “Colin is probably one of the few actors in our country who combines the capacity for farce and profoundly funny stuff with a capacity for romantic drama.” Jones adds, “He was in touch with the broad comedy as well as the sensitivity of the character. A lot of actors can convey both of these emotions but few can mix them so effectively.”
While reading the script, Firth felt like a child being told a story. “`Nanny McPhee’ has all the elements that you want from a story, that you longed for in a story when you were a child,” says Colin Firth. “You wanted to be a little bit scared, well, a lot scared; you wanted perhaps to have a bit of romance. It’s a good solid story. It doesn’t reverse time; it doesn’t go into some impressionistic zone. It’s very funny; its rather menacing; it has romance and a happy ending. It really has all those fundamental, very old-fashioned story elements in abundance, working at a very high pitch. It’s the kind of thing that you hope children are going to sit there watching, wide-eyed, wanting more of, and I certainly felt that myself.”
Mr. Brown, the widowed father of the seven Brown children, is clearly in over his head. He has no faith in himself, or his children, or, at first, the strange figure who appears at his door. He is also muddled romantically, caught between longing for the counsel and comfort of his late wife and the need to release his heart for the sake of himself and for his children. “Mr. Brown is the embattled father of seven extremely naughty children and he loves them all to distraction,” Firth explains. “I think he’s a very sentimental man who wouldn’t deny them anything really and because he’s recently widowed it’s now incumbent upon him to try to keep order and really to keep his life on the rails.”
“We live in a time in the story where very terrible things happen to people who fall into debt,” Firth continues. “The threat that hangs over them is basically debtor’s prison for him, the poorhouse for the kids and the break-up of the family. This is all of course black comedy but his real dilemma is the fact that he’s got to hide it from them, he’s got to hide his anxiety from them, what he wants to present to them is a smiling face.”
“Mr. Brown is very peace-loving; whereas, his children are not,” says 9-year-old Raphael Coleman, who plays the professorial Eric, the second-oldest of the Brown boys. “The kids are mischievous, mean – just evil, really. And he’s the opposite.”
Playing the father of these naughty children required from Firth a great deal of physical comedy, which he points out is both exhausting and panic-making. “It’s a paradox that the very lightest and silliest stuff is often the most agonizing process in reality,” he says. But Firth’s agonies paid off. “He made us all laugh on- and off-set, and delivered a performance which I think is warmer and more comically endearing than anything he has done before,” says the director. “Colin was very sensitive to the level of comedy. He pushed the tone when he knew it was needed but insisted on holding back when he felt there was a danger of overkill.”
Throughout the production, Firth relied on Jones to provide the Nanny McPhee-like centre of calm amidst the madness of the action. “It’s a great strength,” says Firth. “Kirk is uncompromising in getting the shots he wants, yet at the same time very generous in letting other people’s imaginations flourish. If you want to try something different, he will always allow you to try it, but he’s very determined when he decides the way in which we shoot.”
The Spinster Aunt, The Widow, the Undertakers and the Cook
Mr. Brown’s terrible dilemma is exacerbated by the demands of the children’s formidable Great Aunt Adelaide Stitch, played by acclaimed actress Angela Lansbury in her first feature film role in 20 years. “She’s like the Wicked Witch of the East,” Lansbury describes. “She really is an arch-villain but she couches it all in phrases like, `I never break my word.’ You watch her in amazement because you notice what an incredible nose she has, rather like Lord Nelson, and a tiny red mouth, which is the meanest mouth you’ve ever seen in your life. I’m having a wonderful time doing this part because it’s like going back to playing the sort of role that I haven’t done in many years.”
Known and loved by millions as Jessica Fletcher on the long-running series “Murder She Wrote,” Lansbury’s more recent career sometimes obscures her legendary history as a Grande Dame of stage and film – she is a four-time Tony Award winner for her work in Broadway productions of “Mame,” “Gypsy,” “Dear World” and “Sweeney Todd,” as well as a three-time Oscar nominee for her performances in the films “Gaslight,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and, most famously, as the manipulative mother in “The Manchurian Candidate.” Lansbury also starred in Disney’s family classic “Bedknobs and Broomsticks”.
“I obviously worship the ground she walks on and grew up watching her,” comments Thompson. “We didn’t think we were going to have much luck getting her. But she really wanted to play Aunt Adelaide. She knew that she could play this frightful woman, absolutely foul, and she went for it 100%. Fantastic woman and a marvellous artiste.” Firth concurs, “She has an enormous sense of humour, a huge amount of experience, and is prepared to make a complete fool of herself. I do find her really quite terrifying when she’s Aunt Adelaide; she’s very frightening to look at when she’s got that nose and giant hat on.”
Jenny Daykin explains that all the children loved being with Lansbury but also loved pretending to hate her. “All of us Brown children liked acting with her,” she says. “We liked not liking her because it was quite fun to be on the receiving end of her being nasty to us.”
The film’s supporting roles are filled out by a number of acclaimed actors, including Celia Imrie as the garish Mrs. Quickly, whom Mr. Brown seeks to marry to fulfill Aunt Adelaide’s pronouncement that he must marry within the month or lose everything. “Mrs. Quickly thinks she’s rather gorgeous,” describes Imrie. “All the children and everybody else in the town think she’s absolutely monstrous, but she’s awfully good fun to play.”
Imelda Staunton plays Mrs. Blatherwick, the Cook, who carries out her work in the kitchen with military zeal. “She has been in this household for 15 years,” reveals Staunton, an Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner for her work in “Vera Drake.” “She’s always thinking she’s going to go, but she’s been there for quite some time and runs a bit of a strict kitchen. It’s a great opportunity for me to be mad and grumpy downstairs in this fantastic kitchen.”
“Imelda has been a hoot,” says Kelly Macdonald, who plays Evangeline, the scullery maid and Cook’s charge. “She’s just mad. She’s got this mad, red, curly wig and mad, red face. There’s just a plethora of really great, funny, talented people in this film and I feel privileged to be amongst them.”
Staunton did her part to maintain the atmosphere of humour both on- and off-camera – as did Thompson. “We all knew Imelda was going to get tons of awards for `Vera Drake’ so we thought grab her now while the going’s good!”
Also along are Derek Jacobi and Patrick Barlow as the mischievous and joking undertakers, Mr. Jowls and Mr. Wheen, with whom Mr. Brown works at the funeral parlour, Midgewaller and Sons. Says Barlow, “We are his colleagues and we play pranks on him, which we find very amusing but he doesn’t.” “That’s all we do,” Jacobi adds, “make coffins and try and make him laugh.”
“It was especially a thrill to have Derek there,” comments Jones on one of England’s most honoured actors. “He came aboard at a point when his part was only six lines long. He was there every day during the wedding sequence, and I was so grateful to him for agreeing to be part of our cast.”
Jones feels having great actors even in smaller roles ultimately made for a better film. “One of the great things about Emma’s writing is she makes even the small characters very, very attractive. She writes characters that great actors want to play, however minor the role.”
Lansbury was amused and delighted with Thompson’s dual role on the set. “It’s quite a rare and unusual situation, but this whole production is a rare and unusual one,” she says. “When you get a group of people who are so devoted to doing original new kinds of work, you are going to see a lot of wonderful inventive magic in front of your eyes.” Lansbury also saw something else from Thompson in front of her eyes – it was Thompson who was elected to stand off-camera and throw the pie that hits Aunt Adelaide in the face in one of the film’s climactic scenes. In her seven decades as a performer, Lansbury had never received a pie in the face. Thompson accomplished the bulls-eye throw in one take, but both women confessed to being a bit relieved when it was over.
Secret Toast: The Children of “Nanny McPhee”
Though Mr. Brown does not communicate his woes to his children, they have their own way of communicating theirs to him. “They are the most badly behaved children in the history of the world, but there’s a reason for that,” notes Doran. “They’re actually wonderful children who are in a terrible situation that is making them behave badly and of course once Nanny McPhee understands that and treats them accordingly you begin to see how lovely and sweet they really are.”
To find this vital combination of sweetness and mischief, children’s casting director Pippa Hall cast a wide net to find children that would express not only their own unique personalities but also work as a family onscreen.
Limiting the search to the South East of England to ensure similarity of accent, the search encompassed professional actors, drama group children and, children who had never acted before but answered the call to an open audition.
“Kirk looked at tapes on his own; I looked at them on my own; and Lindsay looked at them on her own, and then we would confer afterwards about which we thought were good for recalls,” says Glynis Murray. “And usually we concurred. If more than two of us thought a child was good then we had him or her back.”
The filmmakers made their shortlist, inviting those children to take part in workshops over the course of a few weeks, so they could see the children work as individuals and together, eventually casting a mixture of professional and inexperienced children in the roles.
The oldest child is played by the actor with the most experience. Thomas Sangster, who played Liam Neeson’s heartsick son in “Love Actually,” plays Simon, the eldest of all the children. “Simon is the team leader, so he rounds them all up and thinks up all the naughty ideas,” explains the fourteen-year-old actor. “He is also very separate from all the other children who are all younger than him. He looks after them but behind everything he’s actually quite sad.”
The rest of the group solidified, each with his or her own unique qualities that the filmmakers hoped would carry over into their roles. In addition to Sangster, the Brown brood is played by a group of imaginative and spirited children: Eliza Bennett as Tora, the oldest (and most responsible) girl; Raphael Coleman as Eric, the professorial mischief-maker; Jennifer Rae Daykin as Lily, the romantic; Sam Honywood as Sebastian, who is obsessed with food; Holly Gibbs as Christianna, the embodiment of the children’s sense of loss for their mother; and twins Hebe and Zinnia Thomas as Agatha, the baby.
Director Jones brought in acting coach Celia Bannerman to work with the children throughout the casting process and production. Bannerman’s mandate was to help the children discover their characters and understand the plot, leaving Jones to focus on the performances when they were on set. A father of two boys himself, Jones’s extraordinary patience kept the children in the cast up to professional standards without intimidating their vital spirits. “I think it’s very important to not get overly friendly with the children,” Jones says. “They should know that they’re there to do a job. I always said to them, `You come to the stage as professional actors and actresses,’ and I think they rise to that challenge. They enjoy that responsibility.”
He also observed from the beginning of their work together that these characters were written with exquisite attention to detail in terms of how children actually behave. When Mr. Brown sends the children to bed without supper, the food-loving Sebastian, played by Sam Honywood, is horrified. “I play basically a really hungry character,” says seven-year-old Sam. “He always sneaks down to the kitchen with the others. And he sometimes does stuff in the kitchen that’s really, really naughty.”
When Evangeline, the scullery maid, comes to their room, Sebastian asks, “Could you bring me some secret toast and jam?” When she ignores him, he changes his tactic: “All right, forget the jam, just some secret toast!” “Kirk just loved that detail,” says Doran. “These kinds of beautifully observed pieces of behaviour are what make Emma’s writing so good.”
Emma Thompson describes the spectre of working with so many children over the film’s 12 weeks of production as “blind terror.” “A film set is not a child-friendly environment,” she explains. “It’s dark, it’s dusty, it’s hot, they have to concentrate, be quiet, and above all, perform.”
Jones approached each day with the children in terms of things that could possibly go wrong. “There are tight restrictions, as always, with their education and the amount of time I have with them. I just have a little chat with them to say, `Let’s just remember why we’re here.’ They’re very good kids. They like to have fun and play around, but as soon as they come onto the set, in general they are very, very good. I’m thrilled with their performances.” Thompson adds, “They have coped with it all absolutely brilliantly. Over the months I have become much more interested in watching them than anybody else because they are absolutely wonderful, totally engaging.” “The children are the stars of this story,” adds Lansbury, “they’re so real and charming and wonderful, it’s very hard for me to be mean and nasty to them.”
The desire for a fairy tale ending holds true for the children as well. “Children get such enormous satisfaction from adults loving each other,” says Thompson. “They want the adults who love them to love each other – the two things are of almost equal importance, I think. Seeing their mothers or fathers loving and being loved gives children everything that they need to know about that later on.”
From Scullery Maid to Fairy Princess: Kelly Macdonald as Evangeline
“Poor Evangeline!” writes Christianna Brand of the Brown family’s maid in the first Nurse Matilda book. “She was dreadfully put upon by the rest; but she was a cheerful little lump and I don’t think she really minded.” In Emma Thompson’s adaptation of the Brand books, Evangeline has been expanded from a cheerful little lump into a full-fledged woman played by Kelly Macdonald, the young star of “Trainspotting,” “Finding Neverland,” “Gosford Park” and “The Girl In The Café.” And the film version of Evangeline very much minds how much she’s put upon at the Brown house. She loves Mr. Brown, but he doesn’t seem to notice her at all. She loves the children, but they dismiss her feelings for them as an obligation of her job. She does her best at her work, but meets with nothing but criticism from the grumpy Cook. And she longs to be “an educated lady” that a gentleman might love, but she knows it’s just a hopeless dream. Only Nanny McPhee seems to recognize Evangeline’s sad longings, but she keeps quiet about what she sees as she does about everything at the Brown house.
Macdonald describes Evangeline as “an angry little person. She’s got far too much to do in the house. They’ve not got a lot of money coming in and they’ve only got Cook and herself to help them. She can’t read and that’s a real problem for her. And so, Lily, one of the children, is teaching her to read. She’s sort of ashamed of that.”
Unlike Mr. Brown, Evangeline understands instinctively how to deal with the children’s naughtiness. She knows when to be strict and when to laugh at their pranks: “You’ve been doing measles!” she remarks cheerfully when she sees their crayon-spotted faces on the day they pretend to be sick.
As the story unfolds, circumstances whisk Evangeline away from the house, only to have her return as the educated lady she’d hoped to be. “Evangeline is a character who starts out looking like a grimy scullery maid and ends up looking like a fairy princess,” Doran explains, “but Mr. Brown doesn’t see any difference, and that’s one of the themes of the story. There’s a Norwegian proverb which says, `That which is loved is always beautiful.’ It has resonance not only for the way the family sees Nanny McPhee, but for the way Mr. Brown sees Evangeline. It even applies to the way the children come to think of a stepmother. It never occurred to them that someone they loved could be a stepmother.”
That Which Is Loved: The Transformation of Nanny McPhee
When Nanny McPhee arrives at the Brown house, the children are immediately suspicious. “They don’t really like her,” says nine-year-old Jenny Daykin, who plays Lily. “They think she’s ugly, really nasty and maybe a witch. A spooky, scary nanny.”
Nanny McPhee has five deceptively simple lessons to teach the family: To go to bed when they’re told. To get up when they’re told. To get dressed when they’re told. To listen. To do what they’re told.
With each lesson comes a little magic, a day’s adventure, and the necessity for the children to use their own resourcefulness and child wisdom to put things to right. “There are silly food fights and ridiculous behavior, but these badly behaved kids are little lost souls, really,” says Kelly Macdonald. “And Nanny McPhee teaches them how to save themselves.”
For Simon, the oldest and perhaps most wounded by his father’s distance, learning what this particular nanny has to teach is the rockiest journey. “At first, Simon wants to get rid of her, straight away, like with all the other nannies, and then she doesn’t go,” Sangster says. “She defends herself; she’s got this stick that makes magical things happen. So, he grows slightly more respectful of her over the course of the film, and by the end he really likes her.”
Their receptiveness to her methods hinges on gaining, and giving, trust. As the story progresses, Simon finds himself venturing to Nanny McPhee’s room, where none of the children has yet been, to test out a plan of his and secure her blessing. “When Simon goes to her room, he asks for her help in a very respectful, trusting way,” says Doran. “He trusts she’s on their side, he trusts she’ll keep her side of the bargain, and he trusts that she cares about them. Which is partly why he succeeds in his conversation with her; he trusts her before he says anything. And this is exactly the kind of trust that was missing in his previous conversation with his father.”
Her lessons seem designed to give the children a slightly clearer picture of the consequences of their actions, and the role each of them plays in his or her fate. Thompson likens Nanny McPhee’s effect to a balanced pull of gravity: “She becomes this still centre and all these people, all just up in the air, slowly start to move around her like little quiet planets until suddenly she goes, leaving this settled constellation, a family that’s found its own orbit and is just moving gently and quietly as it should … with the occasional collision.”
They also effect subtle changes in Nanny McPhee’s appearance. Sam Honywood expresses the children’s point of view succinctly, “As we get nicer, one of her ugly bits goes away.”
“The moments at which she changes are very specific,” explains Doran. “When they say `please’ for the first time willingly, she changes. But does she change because they’ve said `please’? Does she change because they’ve started to love her? Does she change because she’s started to love them? Does she actually change at a;;? It’s really up to the audience to decide, just as Christianna Brand left it up to the reader in her books.”
As the Brown family begins to find room for her in their hearts, what Thompson calls her “large wartiness” is no longer visible to them, leaving the children to behold their beautiful Nanny, a vision Thompson describes as “the memory of someone who adored them. She’s as loving and good at the beginning as she is at the end.”
“Nanny McPhee walks into a family full of good people with good intentions and makes them all see their own goodness and each other’s goodness,” says Jones. “Once they all love and trust each other again, it’s time for her to go. She doesn’t make them good. She shows them that they’re already good.”
A House Any Child Would Love to Live In
The story is set some time in late Victorian/early Edwardian England, in a small village on the edge of London. A non-specific fairy tale period without rigorous dedication to any single era liberated Jones and production designer Michael Howells to create an imagined world for “Nanny McPhee.” “It’s late Victorian, but it’s a picture book Victorian,” Howells describes. “We weren’t tied down to any specific dates, which is actually quite nice. It’s just a fantasy Victorian period that people will step into with this family and watch the story unfold.”
Jones created an environment in which Howells, director of photography Henry Braham, costume designer Nic Ede, and hair and make-up designer Peter King could collaborate with unprecedented creative freedom. “I think the four departments have come together incredibly successfully and often you don’t find that,” says director Jones. “You can have very talented heads of department in all of those areas but sometimes they don’t gel because they each see the film differently. I see it as my job to make sure they are all heading in the right direction but then just let them do their thing and try not to restrict them.”
A large portion of that freedom was expressed through the use of colours in the film — a vivid mix of blues, greens, reds, purples, and pinks. Howells, says Jones, “has gone completely bonkers. That’s Michael’s genius.”
Director of photography Henry Braham, who had worked with Jones on “Waking Ned,” elected to use a new film stock which would be best suited to the strong use of colours. “We hit upon this idea very early on,” says Braham. “This is an extreme version of colour photography and design because were using very saturated colour in every area of design. It dictates the look of the film in a very strong way.”
Braham also points out, “There needs to be some reality for the magic to work. Those elements bind together to create a kind of magical, and I suppose timeless, world.”
“One of the things I absolutely agree with Kirk about is that most period English movies have a palette that runs the gamut from black to brown,” says Doran. “It’s as though colour wasn’t invented until some time after Dickens died. Kirk said, `I want to make a movie with bold colours” and that’s exactly what he did. Kirk praises Braham for his efforts. “Henry works very hard outside of his own department and made a significant contribution to the process of selecting the colours which were featured throughout the film.”
The setting at the heart of the film is the Brown house, a rambling mansion that might have belonged to someone very wealthy at one time but which is now in the hands of people with neither the time nor the income to maintain it. Jones imagined a house that any child would immediately want to live in. “I just wanted children to look at it and think,`What an amazing house, that looks like a really fun place to grow up in,” he says.
The size of the family and the amount of action that takes place in the house dictated its size and structure. “It started as a small brown house, and then it grew with the different ideas we came up with,” says Howells. “We used a real mishmash of architecture, pulling favourite details from all over the world – little bits of French Colonial, steamboat gothic, Victorian gothic, and arts and crafts.”
Jones gave Howells a brief about the basic physical requirements, which led to a huge number of designs. “It needed to have a character all its own,” says Howells. “Something that’s attractive to an audience, something that you immediately want to go in and start exploring.”
From both a financial and artistic point of view, the filmmakers decided their best option was to build the Brown house and surrounding village from scratch. “What it means is that you can always tie the two in together,” says Jones. “I think audiences are subconsciously aware when the geography of the set doesn’t exist. Of course you can cut from one location to another, that’s film making, but if you build the sets for real, if you can pan and reveal that sets relate to each other then that can only help the audience believe the world that you have created. It seemed absurd to travel to existing locations which we knew would be nowhere near as visually interesting as what Michael could design.”
The intricacies of the sets were detailed on paper and in small scale models to allow the filmmakers to work out all the kinks prior to building. “The configurations that were fitted together determined the shape of the house,” Howells explains. “To that, we added little flourishes and odd-drawn windows or a porch here or there, but it started from the centre of the house and we worked our way out.”
After looking at two other locations, the production discovered the perfect blank canvas on which to create the world of “Nanny McPhee” on the sprawling grounds of a private estate in Penn, Buckinghamshire. “We chose it primarily because of the quality of the trees,” Howells explains. “There are large trees that are not in perfect condition, but that only adds to the look of the house.”
“It was pouring with rain and very foggy on the day we first visited the Penn estate,” remembers Doran. “Kirk and Michael and Henry and Glynis and I and a few others traipsed through ankle-high mud into the middle of nothing – just big old trees and grass and nothing else. And I looked over at the Kirk and Henry and Michael and they were all smiling these enormous smiles. This was the place. And when you see the film, you have to struggle to keep this in mind – that every single thing you see, everything except the largest trees, was put there for the filming of “Nanny McPhee.’”
Howells, a gardener in his spare time, relished the opportunity to create a wild garden down to the barest details. The team planted hundreds of smaller trees, dense shrubbery, thousands upon thousands of flowers, and built a tree house, a pigpen, a chicken coop, an arbour, and a greenhouse. Explains Howells, “We wanted to create a child’s dream garden – a perfect garden with places to hide and places to play. It’s a magic place. All the way through, we tried to capture people’s imaginations.”
Howells’s art department beaded the grounds with silk flowers and added nasturtiums and grass seed to the furniture and scarecrows to “grow” into the place a sense of time and disrepair. A mixture of meadow flowers was likewise sewn into the hedgerows. “It’s very clear that the Brown family doesn’t have much money,” comments Jones, “and I don’t imagine that Mr. Brown has any time to look after the garden. So we wanted to be surrounded by brambles and nettle beds and uncut lawns. I think that in itself adds more character than a well kempt garden.”
The house itself is held up by 40 tons of steel in its body and the interiors were constructed to allow for maximum flexibility in terms of where Henry Braham put his lights.
Mr. Brown’s study needed to be designed to accommodate the Rube Goldbergian tricks the children spring on Mrs. Quickly during her tea with Mr. Brown. “I wanted to make sure it was believable that the children could be hiding and spying from behind bookshelves and windows but at the same time be dangling spiders on fishing rods and trying to get a jelly on Mrs. Quickly’s head,” explains Jones. “A lot of the early conversations between Michael and me revolved around what was needed from a practical point of view and a comedy point of view.” And that encompassed a space beneath the stairs from which to catapult a gob of porridge and a staircase that would be suitable (and strong enough) for Mr. Brown to tumble down.
One of the most crucial sets was the entryway leading to the front door, where Mr. Brown first lays eyes on Nanny McPhee. “I was very keen that the hall be quite narrow,” says Jones. “I imagined Mr. Brown going down a very narrow, very long hallway and being drawn towards the front door, towards her silhouette. It was very important to me that the design had a practical purpose.”
Extraordinary attention to detail is made evident inside the Brown house in the sourcing of elaborate wallpapers, exquisite fabrics, period furniture, and authentic props, and nowhere more so than in the children’s chaotic nursery. “We found some real gems at auction,” says Howells. “Really beautiful old Victorian dolls and other toys, original pieces that would have been very expensive to recreate and look much better in any case when they’re genuine and show the wear of actual toys that have been played with for generations.”
Says Firth, “It’s an incredible help for an actor to walk onto a set and into this magical world which has been so perfectly created. You can’t help responding to it, it helps you suspend disbelief.”
For a day on which Nanny McPhee takes the children to the seashore, Jones chose to shoot the scene against the backdrop of the cliffs at the remote and nearly inaccessible Durdle Dor, Dorset. “I just find that a lot of locations which are accessible tend to be very flat,” he explains. “They don’t tend to be as dramatic and as rocky as Durdle Dor, and when I saw the photographs and then came down for a location scout, I thought this is exactly where we should be shooting.”
The beach scene, in which the children learn of the impending arrival of Mrs. Quickly, was originally written to take place in the Browns’ garden. “But we decided to move it to the seaside,” says Jones, “to have some big open landscapes and seascapes.” Those landscapes and seascapes came at a price, however. “I thought Kirk was crazy to choose that location,” laughs Doran. “It was a long walk from our base camp to the Cliffside and then 170 stone steps down a very steep cliff to the sand. The equipment was flown in and out by helicopter, but the human beings, children included, had to walk up and down those steps several times each day, including every time we wanted to use the toilet facilities. But now, when I look at the beautiful sequence, I don’t think about the steps or the cold or the wind; I only admire the beauty and perfection of the location. Which is what Kirk knew form the beginning: the discomfort lasts only a couple of days, but the scene lasts forever.”
The art department also built a handful of sets on soundstages at Pinewood Studios. These included the nursery, the bedroom, the kitchen, and Nanny McPhee’s room – mostly composite sets which link to one another to allow the camera to drift in and out of rooms.
Some location shooting also took place at Warren’s Green, a simple rural cottage, which was transformed into Mrs. Quickly’s fuchsia paradise.
Large Wartiness: Nick Ede and Peter King Transform the Cast
Nick Ede and Peter King approached their costume and make-up design work very much as a team. “This is the first time I’ve ever worked on a movie where the make-up person’s first question was who was costuming it,” says producer Doran. “Nic and Peter created the characters together – building, with the actor and director involved, a look for the characters that Emma has written.”
Creating Nanny McPhee’s look was a subject of constant discussion among the filmmakers. “It had to be scary, but not too scary,” says Peter King, who created myriad wizard, trolls and hobbits on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. “It had to be funny, but not too funny or it would detract from the more profound themes in the story.”
“What we began with was the two warts and the nose and the single eyebrow and the tombstone tooth, but it was really Peter and Nick who said, `Maybe we shouldn’t just change the four things on her face; maybe her whole body should change,” Doran recalls. “Maybe her ears begin to get smaller, and her hairline begins to recede. Maybe it’s a wig at the beginning and maybe it’s Emma’s real hair at the end. And maybe the nose grows smaller gradually instead of all at once.”
Nanny McPhee’s extraordinarily gradual change as she grows closer to the Brown family proved a delightful challenge for King. “We had to start off somewhere quite extreme so that we could do that many changes and turn her into Emma at the very end,” he explains.
The transformation required Thompson to wear a prosthetic nose and ears, pumpers inside her mouth to pad her cheeks, warts, a tombstone tooth, one eyebrow, and, of course, a wig. To form Nanny McPhee’s unusual body shape, Ede experimented with different layers of sculptured padding before both he and Thompson were satisfied that they had best emulated the silhouette in Edward Ardizzone’s original illustration, which they’d agreed could not be topped.
Since Nanny McPhee wears only black, Ede sought fabrics with texture to them to ensure the costume would read on film. Howells had recently been to Ghana and mentioned to Ede the exotic and breathtaking fabrics he’d seen there. The lead drew Ede to a shop in Cricklewood with loads of textured fabrics from which to choose, including some from Africa. “I found a black brocade for the skirt, and then this extraordinary crimped fabric for the blouse,” he describes. “We did, in fact, spray a very light layer of pale grey paint onto the blouse, just to bring it up a little further and give it more depth.”
As Nanny McPhee changes from bulky beginnings to the silhouette of Emma Thompson herself, Ede created five different versions of the same costume to accompany her transformation. The creation of Colin Firth’s wardrobe grew out of the filmmakers’ mandate not to strand the film in any particular time period. “If we’d had to stick to the period it would have been very difficult because it was a deeply conservative time,” says Ede. “I wanted to make him look wonderful, as did Peter. He had to look absolutely brilliant.”
So, letting go of period, an experience he likens to “jumping off a cliff,” Ede added much more fullness and fluidity to Mr. Brown’s costumes, creating a wardrobe of rich fabrics in bold colors. He even added a couple of inches to Mr. Brown’s top hat. “I think it’s much easier for the audience to accept a costumed piece if it’s outrageous or if it’s understated, so we’ve got a mixture of the two,” he notes.
Ede was particularly excited by the prospect of dressing the statuesque Angela Lansbury, who “looks fantastic in the clothes.” For Aunt Adelaide, he created costumes which are extremely sophisticated and regal-looking but all in shades of grey to match her very sour mood. “She’s a woman of money, a terrific snob but she has great taste that’s very muted, no colour there at all,” describes Ede. “Hers is the nearest thing we have to a period costume but of course I had to ruin the whole thing by giving her the completely wrong period hat.”
Since the hat winds up on the donkey’s head, “you couldn’t have a little 1880s pill box,” Ede laments. “It had to be a big Edwardian hat.”
Her distinguishing characteristic – an absurdly large nose – became Peter King’s second most challenging prosthetic, as the appendage only shows itself in profile. “The whole designing of Aunt Adelaide’s nose was front-on,” says King. “You couldn’t see that she had a different nose at all. It wasn’t until she turned her head that you actually saw this `hooter the size of Scotland’ as Emma described it.”
Lansbury wore the prosthetic nose like a pro, even thought it was the first of her career. “She was incredibly amicable and very surprised at how easily it went on. I think because of that she went with it and then sort of innocently fell in love with it and couldn’t imagine not having the nose.”
Mrs. Quickly, played by Celia Imrie, is dressed in outrageously flamboyant costumes in vibrant shades of pink and green, with custard yellow hair. “Mrs. Quickly and the clothes are one and the same in the film,” says Ede. “We’re very fortunate that Celia’s a wonderful actress and she wears them with gusto.”
Mrs. Quickly also expresses her love of all things shepherdess in her styling. “I think she thinks of herself a little bit as Marie Antoinette, so I did a sort of quasi-1770s/third half of the 18th Century dress with overtones of Victoriana. It’s an extraordinary conglomeration, really. And the rest of her costume just went from there.”
Ede concentrated on making the children’s basic costumes as contemporary-looking as possible, working with denim, corduroy, and knitwear in muted colours. “I’ve used clothes that would fit in any period, basically,” says Ede. “But more important than that is that modern children will be able to identify with them. We didn’t want them to look ridiculous – unless we wanted them to look ridiculous, and, of course, in their Sunday best they do look ridiculous. Kids will go, `Uggh!’ when they see them, which is what it’s all about.” “Everything about their best clothes is exaggerated,” says Thomas Sangster, who plays Simon. “Everything’s over the top, which is a really nice feel. It feels like you’re living in fairytale land.”
Ede also found himself having to dress animals for the first time in his career – chickens in tiny white mopcaps, a donkey in a hat and shawl, a pig in oversized pearls and a baby bonnet, and Bassett Hounds in straw hats – while King was charged with the task of applying make-up to a pig and dyeing baby lambs acid green and fuchsia pink to match Mrs. Quickly’s wedding dress. “It was an interesting experience,” muses Ede. “But in the end, I think I prefer people. They stand still, and they don’t eat their hats.”
Nanny McPhee (2006)
Directed by: Kirk Jones
Starring: Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury, Kelly MacDonald, Celia Bannerman, Eliza Bennett, Jennifer Rae Daykin, Raphaël Coleman, Samuel Honywood
Screenplay by: Emma Thompson
Production Design by: Michael Howells
Cinematography by: Henry Braham
Film Editing by: Justin Krish, Nick Moore
Costume Design by: Nic Ede
Set Decoration by: Philippa Hart
Art Direction by: Lynne Huitson, Matthew Robinson, Ray Chan, Paul Cross
Music by: Patrick Doyle
MPAA Rating: PG for mild thematic elements, some rude humor, brief language.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: January 27, 2006
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