The series – written by Guy Andrews – followed Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper), a lifelong Jane Austen fan who finds her mundane London reality suddenly swapping places with her favourite author’s storyline from Pride and Prejudice. After discovering that a small door in her flat leads to Elizabeth Bennet (Gemma Arterton)’s world, the two women trade places, only to find that the switch makes things more complicated for both of them.

Naturally, Ephron plans to switch the setting to New York, but with Sam Mendes on board as a producer, we’ll be hoping it maintains the requisite decorum. There’s no word on when it’ll get started, but Ephron will be behind the camera as usual. The film may find itself overlapping a bit with the similarly themed Austenland, wherein Keri Russell plays a modern girl given tickets to an Austen-style immersive holiday, complete with Mr Darcy type (JJ Feild). That’s directed by Jerusha Hess, and based on Shannon Hale’s novel.
James White

Source

A scan from FHM’s Sexiest List – unfortunately not a new pic, but better than nothing. And 11 gorgeous new Production Stills from Lost in Austen!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Scans: Clippings From 2009
- Lost in Austen: Production Stills

We thank Cath for letting us know about these fabulous new photos from Gemma’s 2008 Daily Mail photoshoot. What we didn’t know before is that apparently it was a shoot taken to promote Lost in Austen because it also features actress Jemima Rooper. Enjoy!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Daily Mail (2008)

GALLERY LINKS:
- Lost in Austen (2008) : Episode 4 (September 25, 2008)

The moment Gemma Arterton heard she’d be the new Bond girl is ingrained on her mind for ever. She was on a boat, just off the coast of Gibraltar, filming the comedy Three and Out with Mackenzie Crook. Dressed in full scuba-diving gear – what else would a prospective Bond girl be wearing? – Arterton answered her mobile phone to her agent, who immediately began humming the James Bond theme down the line; the role of Agent Fields in the 22nd 007 film, Quantum of Solace, was hers. So moved was Crook, he shed a tear for his co-star and uttered, “This is such a big moment in your life.”

Crook’s assessment has not been lost on the 22-year-old. Raised “in a house of women”, as she calls it, Bond was not a big influence on her childhood, yet she’s well aware of what it means. “It’s such an institution in Britain, and such an iconic thing to be involved in,” she says. “I’m so proud of it.” At 5ft 7in, with pale skin and a chirpy estuarine accent, she may not be typical Bond girl material. What’s more, how many Bond girls can claim to have been born with six fingers – on each hand? “It’s my little oddity that I’m really proud of,” she says. There’s something devil-may-care about her attitude that makes her perfect casting.

The last time I met Arterton was 18 months ago, when she had come to Cannes to promote St Trinian’s, the garish update of the film series in which she played the head girl of an anarchic private school. A total unknown, she was still in full costume after a promotional photo-shoot: black bob, crisp white blouse, pencil skirt, seamed stockings and killer high-heels. While she might’ve been looking “a little bit dominatrixy”, there was still a fresh-faced innocence to the girl who had left drama school to come to Cannes. “This is my first feature film, so it’s quite exciting,” she said, breathlessly. “The casting director said to me, ‘You don’t know what’s hit you yet.’ And I said, ‘No I don’t!’”

Since then, her rise in the industry has been nothing short of staggering. Even before Quantum of Solace hits the screens, Arterton has already this autumn appeared in Guy Ritchie’s gangster flick RocknRolla, and taken key roles in two primetime television dramas, Lost In Austen and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. With a forthcoming cameo in Richard Curtis’s pirate-radio comedy The Boat That Rocked, you’d think her life would be unmanageable by now. “It’s been kind of good,” she reflects. “I’ve been working, working, working, and not had time to do anything else. I don’t go out and go to parties and do all of that. That’s when you start feeling the change … I haven’t had the opportunity to really be around any fuss, so I don’t feel that different – just a bit more tired.”

Little wonder she’s feeling the strain. When we catch up again, Arterton has just finished a day’s filming at Pinewood Studios and is planning a less-than-glamorous evening at her gym in Muswell Hill. She’s midway through shooting Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a huge-scale adaptation of the popular Arabian Nights-style video game that will make Quantum of Solace look like a no-budget short.

So far, her anonymity has been preserved because she’s barely recognisable from one role to the next. As Thomas Hardy’s fated heroine Tess, she has chestnut-brown locks down to her waist; for Bond, she is a redhead. And Prince of Persia has forced her to darken her hair from its natural brunette colouring. “The other day, we were looking at pictures of my career so far – photo-shoots and things like that – and I wouldn’t even recognise myself! That’s handy because people don’t recognise you, which is really nice for me, as I like doing normal things.”

Quantum of Solace is set to change all that. Pairing her with Daniel Craig, now in full command of James Bond in what is his second outing, Arterton can claim her casting was destiny. “I was in the car on the way to the audition and the Bond theme tune ‘Nobody Does It Better’ came on the radio,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘This is a sign!’” Playing Agent Fields, Bond’s MI6 contact in Bolivia when he arrives to investigate a mysterious group called Quantum, she claims that the film is set to continue the reinvention of the franchise that 2006′s Casino Royale began. “It’s a lot more – I hate to say edgy but it is more edgy. It’s dirty and ragged. This one’s a desert movie with loads of scummy places. It’s not as crisp and slick.”

There’s no question, Arterton brims with the confidence of youth. You might even call her fearless. “I remember on my first day, everyone saying to me, ‘Are you nervous? Are you nervous?’ And I was going, ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ But I wasn’t. If Daniel had been wearing a tux that day, or said one of his catchphrases, I might’ve felt intimidated but he didn’t.” Still, she had to kiss Craig on that first day, “another surreal moment in my life” as she puts it. “At the time I can remember thinking: ‘What on Earth is going on? This is insane! If I phoned up my mates now they would be killing themselves laughing.’”

Curiously, she compares her character to both Bond’s lovelorn secretary Miss Moneypenny and Rosaline, the similarly “haughty” character she played in a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at The Globe that first convinced the Bond casting directors to offer her an audition.

“With the Bond films, the women are so unobtainable to a normal guy. I wanted to make her someone you could go down the pub with,” she says. “She’s not particularly hot. She’s just this girl that ends up sleeping with Bond. It’s not like she’s really saucy or anything. She’s normal looking and not glamorous. But it is funny – people always say, ‘Ah, you’re the Bond girl, you’re the Bond girl’, and I don’t feel like one at all!”

Perhaps this is just as well, given the so-called “curse of the Bond girl” that has often called time on the careers of those who play them. Arterton appears to have taken the whole experience in her stride, which includes acting opposite the series’ renowned regulars. “I probably should get a bit more star-struck but I never do,” she says. “I think it’s because I’ve got my head in the clouds. I just turn up and do it. I remember the day Judi Dench [who plays MI6 chief M] was on set. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s Judi Dench and now I’m going to act with her.’ I didn’t get that worried about it. I probably should get really nervous but I just enjoy working.”

Whatever Bond does for her, Prince of Persia is liable to do even more. Starring opposite Jake Gyllenhaal, she plays the Arabian princess Tamina in a sixth-century adventure she describes as “Indiana Jones meets Gladiator“. Arterton represents yet another astute casting choice by the über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who previously gave Keira Knightley her international breakthrough when he put her in Pirates of the Caribbean. How does she feel about the inevitable comparisons? “Well, Keira has done incredibly well,” she says, carefully. “I’d love to get the parts that she gets. If I’m being compared with her, who knows…?” She pauses for a second as a thought occurs. “It’s funny,” she says. “Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets. I don’t belong in the same bracket as Keira. I’m completely different, from a very different background. I’m confident enough in my own ability to not worry about being compared with other people.”

Brought up on a Gravesend council estate, Arterton’s working-class roots – her father is a welder, her mother a cleaner – certainly differentiate her from Knightley. Raised with her younger sister Hannah, she went to a grammar school, which she left when she was 16. “I liked learning but I hated being confined in a space and being talked at,” she recalls. “That’s why I left.” She didn’t read much. “I was quite lazy,” she says. “I was too busy going ‘Argh!’ and being silly.” In truth, she sounds like a St Trinian’s misfit. “I was quite naughty at school,” she grins.

After her parents divorced, she and her sister remained with their mother. “She encouraged independence in us,” notes Arterton. “I think that’s really brilliant. She never tried to control us, and we’ve both ended up being really successful in what we wanted to do. She’s very free and creative, and it kind of rubs off.” Her mother’s side of the family all have “this arty-punk streak”, she says. “Her uncle was [the new-wave singer] Wreckless Eric so it’s all trickled into us. There’s something about being a punk rocker that stays with you even when you’re older.”

If punk flows through her veins, so does a restless desire to succeed. After leaving school, where she had first started acting, she went on to a sixth-form college to study the discipline more seriously. From there, she won a place at Rada but it didn’t stop there. Winning her first role, on the TV show Capturing Mary, while still a student, by the time she won the role in St Trinian’s there was little point in graduating. The industry was taking notice, as demonstrated when she took a cameo in RocknRolla. “We loved her,” says Guy Ritchie. “We thought she was class. She only came on set for a day, but we all thought there was something brewing there.”

While Arterton is well aware of the effect she has on men, if anything points to her potential, it’s that she appeals to women as well. Her TV work this autumn proves that. In the quirky Lost in Austen, she was charming as Pride and Prejudice‘s heroine Elizabeth Bennett, who inadvertently swaps places with a modern girl, but it will be as Tess Durbeyfield that she will be long remembered.

She got the role during the middle of filming Quantum of Solace and literally jumped for joy, for this was her chance to prove she can really act. Understandably, she avoided watching Nastassja Kinski’s take on the character for the classic Roman Polanski film. “I wanted it to be my Tess,” she states, confidently. It’s clear this role meant more to her than anything she’s done to date. “I could not keep my mind off it,” she says. “I was really nervous. I put everything into it.”

Given her meteoric rise, I wonder how she’s managed to stay so down-to-earth. “All the people I hang around with are really grounded,” she answers. “Everyone wants me to be myself. I want to be myself. I feel sometimes that people think you’ve changed because you get picked up in cars or sent things, but they’re things you don’t ask for. They’re perks – and it’s easy to see how you could change, because you could get used to that. But I don’t want to and I don’t feel as if I have.”

If anything has been difficult for Arterton during the last year-and-a-half, it’s been finding time for love. “It’s hard maintaining relationships,” she says. “You have to have people who really understand you and your life, and trust you, and trust that you want to be with them and spend time with them – but you really can’t because you’re on the other side of the country.” This is the point that her real friends have “come out of the woodwork”, she’s discovered. With all the craziness that’s about to engulf her, she’ll need them more than ever.

Quantum of Solace opens on 31 October

Interview by James Mottram
Saturday, 18 October 2008

Source: The Independent

Guy Ritchie’s latest action flick RocknRolla won’t hit theaters here in the U.S. until Oct. 31, but in case you can’t take the wait, here are six clips to give you a sneak peek. In the film, London’s toughest criminals go head to head in the race for a bunch of money. Gemma appears briefly in the fifth clip.

In the meantime, I’ve kept myself busy capping the first episode of Tess.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Episode 1 (September 14, 2008)

GALLERY LINKS:
- Lost in Austen: Production Stills
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Production Stills

If you thought that there wasn’t enough Gemma in last week’s episode of Lost in Austen… Well, think again! There was even less in this week’s episode! She only appeared in the “previously” and “opening credits” bits.

Fortunately, we’ll be able to rejoice (okay, maybe that’s not the most appropriate word for a tragic story, but you get the point) with Tess of the D’Urbervilles this Sunday (at 9pm on BBC1).

GALLERY LINKS:
- Lost in Austen (2008) : Episode 2 (September 10, 2008)

Gemma Arterton romps with 007 in the new James Bond but now she’s gearing up for the ultimate Tess.

She told TV Land that playing the lead in Tess of the D’Urbervilles is “the highlight of my career so far”. And having seen the first episode, starting Sunday night on BBC1, I have to agree.

“When I found out I’d got the part, I was ecstatic,” she says. “I never thought I’d get to play a leading role in a period drama at the BBC.”

And to make matters even more magical, she got to film at Stonehenge.

Gemma recalls: “We were overcome just thinking, ‘Wow this is where Thomas Hardy imagined the scene to take place.’ When you walk in, there’s something spooky about it.”

Less magical was filming a rape scene.

But Gemma says: “I’m not the sort who takes it with them. I’d be in a bleak scene all day and come out talking about shoes!”

Well Gemma, that’s certainly no mean feat.

Source: Mirror.co.uk

GALLERY LINKS:
- Quantum of Solace (2008) : Production Stills
- Lost in Austen (2008) : DVD
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008) : DVD
- Magazine Scans: TV Choice (UK) – September 13-19, 2008, thanks to Lorna
- Magazine Scans: TV Times (UK) – September 13-19, 2008, thanks to Lorna

I took screencaps from the 1st episode (out of 4) of Lost in Austen that aired last Wednesday on ITV1. Gemma was absolutely lovely as Elizabeth Bennet. Too bad she didn’t have that much screen time, especially if we compare it with Jemima Rooper’s. I hope we’ll get too see more of Miss Arterton this week!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Lost in Austen (2008) : Episode 1 (September 3, 2008)

It was Bond girl Gemma Arterton who was both shaken and stirred when the wind got up as she was filming a crucial scene in Panama for the new 007 film Quantum Of Solace.

For Gemma, who plays alluring undercover operative Agent Fields, revealed rather more than she bargained for as she and 007 left a hotel in a hurry on the trail of a man Bond is chasing.

‘I had to wear a mac and boots with nothing underneath,’ she said, ‘and I had to be really careful because the mac kept blowing open.’

It was a problem 22-year-old Gemma had encountered before, at the premiere of her first major movie, the 2007 schoolgirl comedy St Trinian’s.

‘I was given a beautiful Louis Vuitton dress,’ she told Tatler magazine. ‘I didn’t know I’d put it on back to front until I was on the red carpet. I got out of the car and the wind blew, exposing my bum.

‘My publicist came over and said, ‘Gemma, I think you’ve got your dress on back to front.’

‘So I was running around the red carpet going, ‘Oh no! Oh no!’ She said, ‘Well, you’ve just got to style it up and say you put it on back to front for a reason.’

Luckily, the Press were more interested in Russell Brand, who was on the red carpet at the same time.’

Gemma – who can currently be seen playing Elizabeth Bennet in ITV1’s Lost In Austen – has several other sexy scenes in the film, including a bedroom encounter with 007 Daniel Craig.

But she said that auditioning opposite Craig was ‘probably the scariest day of my life’.

‘I said something really stupid to try to break the ice. I said, ‘I hope I don’t make you feel inadequate because I’m taller than you in heels.’

‘I was trying to be funny but it wasn’t funny at all. Then I thought, ‘Oh well, I’ve blown it’.’

Gemma, a welder’s daughter from Gravesend, Kent, is tipped to follow Keira Knightley’s success in Hollywood.

She plays the heroine in the new £50million Disney blockbuster Prince Of Persia.

* The full interview with Gemma appears in the October issue of Tatler, on sale from Thursday.

By James Tapper
07th September 2008

Source: Daily Mail

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Tatler (2008)

Today Gemma Arterton is a rising star of everything from Bond films to bodice-rippers.

But lean times are not hard to forget and Gemma, whose mum brought her up alone while working as a cleaner, has an eye for a bargain at Primark.

Last night four million viewers watched Gemma, 22, playing Lizzie Bennet in ITV’s comedy period piece Lost in Austen. And she will soon take the starring role in Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, the BBC’s new costume drama.

But it’s not just prime-time TV that Gemma is fast conquering.

Following her big screen debut in the St Trinian’s movie, Guy Ritchie cast her in his latest gangster flick RocknRolla.

Gemma also saw off 1,500 hopefuls to become a Bond girl in the 007 thriller Quantum of Solace.

She is now in Morocco filming the action adventure Prince Of Persia.

But if you think this meteoric rise has gone to her head you couldn’t be further from the truth. For starters, she still shops at budget fashion store Primark.

“I still have student debts to pay off,” says Gemma. “I’ve used most of my earnings buying bits from Primark.”

And anyway mum Sally, who raised Gemma single-handedly after splitting from her father Barry, a welder, makes sure her talented daughter keeps her feet firmly on the ground.

“I was brought up quite liberally by my mum,” says Gemma. “My sister Hannah and I were quite confident kids. Everyone always used to say to us, ‘You seem older than you are,’ which was helpful.

“Mum’s very proud but she doesn’t go on about it. She was never that into film when I was growing up.

“When I got to drama school there were all these people going, ‘Oh, my dad used to watch Ken Loach films’ and I would be thinking, ‘Who is Ken Loach?’ ”

She might not have grown up in an acting environment but Gemma was drawn to performing from an early age.

While at Gravesend Grammar School for Girls, in Kent, she first appeared onstage in an amateur production of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Boy Who Fell Into A Book.

Jane Fenlon, secretary of the Gravesend and District Theatre Guild, recalls: “We’ve got a lot of talented youngsters and you get used to seeing them, but Gemma was one of the better ones.

“I remember her being a pretty girl who was friendly and really enjoyed acting.”

Kay Caroll, who runs the drama group, adds: “Gemma was doing well as a child. She appeared in the school play, which was entered into a competition at a local festival, and won the best actress prize.”

Gemma left school at 16 to go to acting college and then the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She could afford her place at Rada only because she got a full Government grant and says while she was there she “got up to my eyes in debt with a student loan”.

Life was hard but she never lost her drive and determination.

Gemma’s relatives, who live in Gravesend and Rochester, are still in awe of her incredible success.

Trace Arterton, 42, who is married to Gemma’s cousin Gary, says: “It’s incredible for us to see her starring in Hollywood films and TV shows.

“The family feel very proud but it’s also very strange seeing her on the television.

“We saw an advert the other night for Tess of the D’Urbervilles and it’s really funny when her face appears on the telly.

“Her parents are both hardworking people and she wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

“But she’s always had this incredible presence ever since she was a kid.

“When Gemma walks into the room everyone knows it. Then she’ll break the silence by saying, ‘Hello!’ and coming over to chat.

“She’s got a very nice personality. She’s bubbly and always makes the effort to make conversation.”

Glowing words, yet it seems nobody is prouder of Gemma than her dad.

“Barry keeps saying he can’t believe how well she’s done,” says Trace.

“He’s still a welder, so for him to see his daughter being so successful so early on in life, he can’t believe it. He’s gone to Morocco with her stepmum Theresa to be with Gemma while she’s shooting the Prince of Persia out there.”

Her family are not the only ones reeling from her success – Gemma is, too.

It wasn’t so long ago that she was working on a beauty counter to pay her rent after drama school.

She says: “It has actually been quite freakish. I don’t think it usually happens this quickly so I haven’t had time to get my head round it. It all feels very unreal.

“My family are very down-to-earth people. We are not showbizzy at all.

“They are proud and excited and want me to be me as long as possible. They are not from this world, which is really nice. I just want to stay as grounded as I can.

“The whole acting thing is quite alien to my family. When I got to Rada, dad kept saying: ‘But can you really make a living from this?’”

Clearly she has proved that you can. In fact, given that she is so much in demand as an actress, it is surprising she can find any time for romance.

Earlier this year she split up with her live-in boyfriend John, a 27-year-old animatronic modeller, and she is now being romantically linked with Spanish stuntman Eduardo Munoz.

They met on the set of Prince of Persia, where Eduardo, 19, was hired to teach her to ride a horse.

“Gemma has made no secret of her romance on the set,” says a source working on the movie.

“She and Eduardo are always kissing and cuddling. They are inseparable.”

She is happy to be a sexy Bond girl but Gemma believes less is more: “You don’t need to show flesh to get attention.”

That confidence is part of the secret of her success. When she started out she was determined to aim for what she wanted – even turning down a West End theatre part in favour of film projects.

“If you do this big film it will open the doors for all these other brilliant things, “she says. “But you have to do the big film first. It’s like the Keira Knightley thing.

“Everyone ridiculed her for doing the Pirates films but now she’s getting great parts. She can choose what she wants.”

Gemma is under no illusions how hard it is for women to make it in male-dominated Hollywood.

“It’s difficult for a young girl like me,” she says. “Because there’s a certain time for young actresses, which is like a really juicy period when all the parts are love interests and young heroines. Of course, there’s always work for men whatever age they are.”

Source: Mirror.co.uk

Today I’ve added 6 new Tess stills to the gallery, as well as a scan from the Sun featuring an iconic image from the book/movie: Tess tasting strawberries. Be sure to check out the Magazine Scans category for more Tess (and Lost in Austen) related material. There are plenty of good articles and pretty photos that aren’t in the Tess of the D’Urbervilles category itself.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008) : Production Stills
- Magazine Scans: The Sun (UK) – September 5, 2008, thanks to Lorna

Jemima Rooper plays Amanda Price, a Jane Austen addict, who began last night living a typical (harsher critics might say stereotypical) twentysomething life in Hammersmith, complete with rubbish boyfriend burping away on the sofa. But then her literary heroine, Elizabeth Bennet (Gemma Arterton) suddenly stumbled through a door in the space-time-fiction continuum to pitch up in the bathroom. When Amanda went through the other way, without Lizzie, the door inevitably locked behind her, leaving her stranded in the Bennet family home.

Admittedly, some viewers may have felt this was a bit implausible. There is, however, one obvious counter-argument: who cares? On reflection, Life on Mars possibly wasted too much effort trying to make the time-travel both believable and significant. Here, once Amanda’s adventures were under way, it never seemed remotely important how she got there.

The first family member she met was Mr Bennet, who allowed Hugh Bonneville to demonstrate once again that no other actor – except perhaps Jim Broadbent – can do benevolent perplexity quite so well. From their conversation, Amanda realised that she’d arrived just at the start of the novel, with Mr Bingley newly installed at Netherfield: a fact instantly confirmed by the sound of female hysterics off-stage. (“My wife,” explained Mr Bennet resignedly.)

After that, the culture clashes were soon cheerfully piling up. At the Bingleys’ ball, where Mr Darcy (Elliot Cowan) put in a suitably brooding performance, Amanda made the mistake of necking too much Regency punch, popping outside for a fag and snogging Mr Bingley (Tom Mison) himself – who responded with an astonished but grateful “Gosh!” Now, duly mortified, she’s trying hard to make everything turn out as it does in the novel.

Through all of this, Lost in Austen manages the neat Life on Mars trick of showing the qualities and drawbacks of both eras. Amanda may think she prefers the old courtesies – at least when she’s not been on the punch. The programme itself gently reminds us how limited the Bennet girls’ lives are. It also throws in plenty of nice little touches. Mr Bennet, for example, was able to look more perplexed than ever when Amanda said Hammersmith is in London, rather than a small village several miles outside it.

Source: Telegraph

Lost in Austen (ITV1)
4 stars out of 5

Carpers will say you can have too much Jane Austen, but Guy Andrews’s Lost in Austen is a funny, clever breeze. Amanda (Jemima Rooper) is a Pride and Prejudice fanatic, a dreamer with a loser boyfriend. One day Elizabeth Bennet (Gemma Arterton) appears in her bathroom — through a door in her wall lies the world of the novel. Amanda ends up with the Bennets, and Elizabeth in present-day Hammersmith. It is a culture-clashing, time-clashing Walnut Whip of frothy nonsense with the intriguing proposition that Amanda may be able to change the outcome of her fictional touchstone. But what’s Elizabeth getting up to in Hammersmith?

Source: Times Online

Guys and gals, we have plenty of new scans for you today! Most of them thanks to our faithful collaborator Lorna. But that’s not all. Tran was also kind enough to send us a scan from the Australian magazine Frankie. Please take a look to our last uploads to see what’s new.

Lost in Austen premieres in the UK this Wednesday, on ITV1, at 9pm. Be sure to watch it! However, I have to admit to admit that, while I love Jane Austen film adaptations, I’m most excited about Tess. I love Roman Polanski’s works and his 1979 film. In fact, I love period films and films based on masterpieces of literature. The BBC’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles website was updated with a trailer, but unfortunately you can only view it if you’re in the UK.

Gemma didn’t attend the London premiere of RocknRolla, that’s why you’re not seeing any photos from it in our gallery.

Last but not least, rumour says the second Quantum of Solace trailer will be on the 9th September 2008 at 9:00am CET instead of the 11th.

GALLERY LINKS:

Out of our recent gallery additions, I’d like to highlight the following articles:

- Magazine Scans: Frankie (Australia) – Issue 25 (September / October 2008), thanks to Tran
- Magazine Scans: Sky Magazine (UK) – September 2008, thanks to Lorna
- Magazine Scans: Sunday Times (UK) – August 31, 2008, thanks to Lorna
- Magazine Scans: Daily Mail Weekend Supplement (UK) – August 30, 2008, thanks to Lorna

“Oh my God, I have been told that I’m hideous, not to Bond-girl standard, that the only reason I’m working is because I must be shagging someone in the industry . . . I’ve read that everywhere. At first, I was like, ‘I’m an actress, I went to drama school, I did theatre, I’m serious.’ And then you go, ‘Ah, it’s some fat t*** with no life who wrote that, so they can sod off.’ I’ll just do my work, which I seem to be getting, and see what happens.”

Arterton is starring in two of the autumn’s biggest bonnet dramas, but gives them a modern edge

Gemma Arterton owns this autumn. First up, she’s playing the lead in BBC1’s mega-budget Hardy adaptation, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Next, she’s slinking her way through Quantum of Solace as the cool MI6 handler Agent Fields (just don’t mention that she was taller than Daniel Craig when she wore heels). Then she’s punky and sharp-tongued in ITV’s twisted bonnet comedy, Lost in Austen, in which Arterton as Elizabeth Bennet swaps lives with a modern girl played by Jemima Rooper.

With roles in St Trinian’s and Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary, and a healthy stage career — all by the age of only 22 — you would expect a ripple from the regulars at the Hampstead pub when she glides through the crowd with a mischievous grin on her face. But nobody so much as blinks. And, to be fair, I’m not entirely sure this actually is the woman I’m supposed to meet. In Bond she’s a redhead with milk-white skin; in St Trinian’s she sports a jet-black bob; and as Tess she looks like the healthy daughter of a country farmer. But this woman is dark and sultry, with a pout that would flatten Rachel Weisz.

She laughs when I explain my hesitation. “I’m a Persian princess,” she announces. “So I’m darkened up a little bit.” Jerry Bruckheimer, it transpires, has cast her as the lead in his next Pirates of the Caribbean-style franchise, Prince of Persia. “I never look like myself on screen.”

She was recognised once, however. She was in an Indian restaurant behind Euston station in London with her mother, when a woman asked for a photograph. Arterton asked why. “I thought, ‘Is it an art project, or does she like my top?’ And she said, ‘No, I want a picture of Gemma Arterton.’ And I went, ‘Mum, this is a moment in my life. This has never happened to me before.’ I told the woman, ‘You’re my first.’ Although sometimes people double-take and say, ‘Isn’t it that girl who was in that shit movie?’ ” And she giggles in a way that can only be described as wicked, with echoes of her Gravesend council-estate upbringing in England.

Now things are changing. When she was cast in Bond, the media descended on her parents and grandma, camped outside the house, poked through the letter box. To say her route from the former dock town has been meteoric is like saying the universe is quite big. She enjoyed acting at school, did a course at sixth-form college, won a paid place to Rada and was working on Capturing Mary while still a student. She has barely stopped since. She got Tess having failed an audition for something else so spectacularly, she thought she’d never get called again. But the casting agent phoned the director of Tess, David Blair, to say: “You have to meet Gemma Arterton. She’s Tess.”

Arterton finds this story amazing, but when I ask if she is, in fact, Tess, she laughs. “No — there are similarities, but I’ve got too much of a sense of humour. Poor old Tess doesn’t have much of a laugh. She doesn’t think things through, she just feels them. And I’m like that. I don’t rationalise, I just feel. I suppose if I had been born 150 years ago, it might have been into the same sort of life. There’s a similar background — normal family life, not middle-class. I look after my family. I’ve always been quite a mothering person, and Tess is like that. More than similarities in character, I think there are similarities in the way I operate as a person and the way I think and feel. But I can’t really pin them down. She’s much more restrained and shy and gentle. [She laughs again.] I’m more — abrupt, shall we say.”

She fell in love with Tess as intensely as Hardy, the character’s creator, did. She wept when she read the script and glows when she describes Tess. “She’s simple as you like. She’s a pure, straightforward girl who grows into a woman with simple ideas and simple goals, and that’s really attractive. People come along and chip away at her life, but she still keeps this sense of strength and dignity about doing the right thing for her family, her baby and her love.”

Hardy’s gritty story of an innocent’s downfall could have more powerful echoes for fame-obsessed, post-X Factor Britain than other frock-and-frolic favourites. Indeed, that appears to be the mission for period pieces across the autumn. Tess kicks off a season of gold-plated bonnet dramas that seek to reflect our own shortcomings. ITV’s Lost in Austen sees a modern girl swap places with Elizabeth Bennet — with Bennet played by Arterton. The BBC’s mammoth 15-part Little Dorrit is pitched firmly at credit-crunch culture, while Channel 4’s The Devil’s Whore uses its stellar cast and civil-war setting to explore terrorism, belief and whether freedoms should be sacrificed to preserve them. All, it should be pointed out, sizzle with 21st-century sensuality, and none more so than Tess.

Does Tess’s story have parallels with our times? Her tragedy begins when her father discovers his Durbeyfield surname connects him to the aristocratic d’Urbervilles. From then on, her parents try to pimp the girl out in a bid for cash and status, like pushy theatre mums determined their little one will sup at the bowl of celebrity — celebrity, after all, allows entry to the new fame aristocracy.

Arterton sees the connection. Although her family was of working-class Gravesend stock — her dad a welder, her mother a cleaner — her mother’s side, the Heaps, had always nursed talent. Indeed, Arterton found she could draw on her own relationship with her mother to create Tess’s fraught struggles with Joan. She could also relate to Tess and Angel Clare’s doomed relationship, having fallen in love with unsuitable men herself. She recently split from the animator John Nolan.

What troubled her most, however, was portraying Tess struggling to cope with her rape by Alec d’Urberville. “When I first read the script, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do that, because I’ve never been raped and millions have.’ ” She speaks slowly and thoughtfully. “So I started talking to people. I met one woman who said, ‘You want to know how it feels? Dead and desolate. The whole time.’ ”

In the end, to film the long walk home, she prepared by listening to classical music, then took a buttercup and repeated her earliest childhood memory: someone stroking her neck with the soft yellow flower. “If you don’t feel dead and desolate and young and vulnerable doing that scene, the audience is just watching an actor trying to make themselves cry,” she says simply.

Bond was less of a stretch, but she’s hugely grateful to the timing coincidence of Tess, Quantum and Austen. The curse of the Bond girls is all too real, so when she heard she had got Tess while still filming as Agent Field, she literally screamed with joy. “I thought, ‘Now I can show everybody I can act,’ ” she explains. “Although, in Bond, my character’s cool. She’s not a typical Bond girl: she’s funny, and real, and someone you could know from down the road. I’m quite tough — I have to arrest Bond at one point — but I go to bed with him, of course. So it is a good part.” And she looks conspiratorial. “But more than anything, it’s so that my grandkids can say their gran was a Bond girl. They’ll be, like, ‘Look at her now. You’d never know.’ ”

So, how is she preparing for the autumn of Arterton, when the legend her grandchildren will tell is created? “By going to Morocco and escaping from it all — I’m going to be in the depths of the souk. In a hut,” she giggles. “All the reviews will come out and I’ll be in a hut. Because I read every review, I can’t help myself. I’ve read so many bad ones now — people saying such horrible things about me as a person.”

Such as? “Oh my God, I have been told that I’m hideous, not to Bond-girl standard, that the only reason I’m working is because I must be shagging someone in the industry . . . I’ve read that everywhere. At first, I was like \, ‘I’m an actress, I went to drama school, I did theatre, I’m serious.’ And then you go, ‘Ah, it’s some fat t*** with no life who wrote that, so they can sod off.’ I’ll just do my work, which I seem to be getting, and see what happens.”

Interview over, we walk down the busy London main road that leads to the station while she chats about listening to Oasis before going out clubbing — “It was just this big rock’n’roll sing-along that we’d always play before we went out.” Halfway down the hill, she says she has to nip into Tesco to get some milk and steps into the road, which is suddenly completely empty. “See ya later,” she calls.

“At the Oscars,” I joke.

“Yeah,” she turns back and meets my eye with a throaty chuckle. “Dame Gemma.”

Lost in Austen starts on ITV1 on September 3;

Tess of the d’Urbervilles starts on BBC1 on September 14;

Quantum of Solace is released on October 31

Source: Times Online

The Question: “what if?” has been a staple of television drama since Dr Who‘s police box turned out to be bigger on the inside. The recent success of series such as Lost, Heroes and Life On Mars just proves that the formula has lost none of its viewer appeal.

But what if that same approach was applied to one of television’s sacred cows, the costume drama? Suppose you took a Life On Mars-style time traveller, with all the scope for cultural misunderstandings that entailed, and dropped her into the plot of a classic novel. Let’s say you chose Pride and Prejudice. What would that look like?

The answer is Lose In Austen, a major four-part comedy drama which premieres on ITV1 this week. It’s scripted by Guy Andrews, who cheerfully admits he is mangling the nation’s favourite book, and stars 26-year-old Jemima Rooper who is more used to appearing in cult programmes such as Channel Four’s As If and Sky One’s fantasy drama Hex, where she was cast as a lesbian ghost.
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Rooper plays Amanda Price, a sassy 21st century Londoner who finds in Jane Austen’s novel all the romance her burping slob of a boyfriend fails to provide in real life. More to the point, she also finds in her bathroom a portal into the Bennett household. Elizabeth Bennett has opened it and clambered through and is playing with a light switch when we first meet her. Don’t laugh: it could happen.

Amanda crosses the threshold the other way to see for herself what the fictional house looks like, but as she does the door clicks shut behind her. So now she’s trapped in Pride and Prejudice wearing jeans and a very inappropriate top. Realising she is at the start of the book she knows what’s supposed to happen next – but that doesn’t stop her getting drunk and snogging Mr Bingley. Unsurprisingly, the stern Mr Darcy doesn’t take to her at all.

“It’s genius,” Rooper cackles, flashing a tattooed right wrist as she scrumples her dark hair. “I think what Guy has achieved is that he’s got all the elements that people love about the novel Pride and Prejudice, or even the BBC adaptation of it, but then he’s dealt it this very witty twist. He’s kept all the nostalgia, all the affection you have for Mr Darcy and Elizabeth, but then he’s made it up-to-date and punchy and interesting.”

We are talking in the green room of London’s National Theatre where Rooper is currently appearing in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s play Her Naked Skin. It’s another lesbian role, her fourth if you don’t count George in The Famous Five, made when she was just 13. Exactly how punchy Guy Andrews has made Lose In Austen is evident in one telling early scene. Thinking she may actually be in a very cruel reality TV show, an angry Amanda flashes Lydia Bennett, who has crept into bed beside her in the night.

“What have you done to yourself?” asks the wide-eyed Lydia, staring at the naked midriff. “Oh,” says Amanda, looking down. “That’s called a landing strip’ in London. Pubic topiary.”

Andrews had to fight hard to keep that line in, and there were a few more the ITV producers deemed too close to one bone or another and which were ruled through with the censor’s blue pencil. But it sets the tone for a production which, along with Andrew Davies’s erotic adaptation of the Sarah Water novel Affinity, proves that the broadcaster is serious when it says it wants to increase its appeal to younger viewers and up its game where high-profile drama is concerned.

It was Davies, of course, who scripted the BBC’s now legendary 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and he will be pleased to see there are plenty of Colin Firth jokes in Lose In Austen. There’s also a stellar cast which includes costume drama veterans Hugh Bonneville, Lindsay Duncan and Alex Kingston.

So Lose In Austen is rude, cheeky and funny – but does it treat its source material with enough fondness to ensure that only the sniffiest Austen fans will wrinkle their noses in distaste? Just about.

Watching it, however, you realise it’s going to be hard to take any future adaptations of the novel seriously. It’s as if this knowing, slightly mocking and entirely self-referential drama has finally burst the costume drama bubble. If it has, it’s not before time, says Rooper.

“These great big lavish costume dramas are our favourites because they get more money spent on them, they have great casts, lovely scripts and high production values,” she says. “But we’ve seen all that. We saw it years ago and now everything’s just another remake. What’s nice about this is that you’ve got characters you know and love but in completely different circumstances.”

Nevertheless she was as taken with Colin Firth as the rest of the nation’s women. “I think I was, yes, vicariously through my mother,” she laughs. “I think I was a bit young to quite get it but I pretended I did. But he is brilliant in it and I still watch it.” And how does Elliot Cowan, her own Darcy, compare? “Elliot’s a very, very handsome young man,” she grins.

Although familiar to those whose viewing tastes take them to the more peripheral television channels in search of hipper, edgier fare, Jemima Rooper is relatively unknown in the mainstream. That will change now, though by her own admission she is as far from the blonde, doe-eyed, ringlet-haired heroine of the traditional costume drama as it’s possible to be.

For a start there’s the Scorpio tattoo on the wrist, inked when she was 19. Then there’s the thick hair, which for Hex was hacked into a spiky lop-sided mullet. It’s a little less severe looking today, though equally unruly. Finally, there is the wide mouth, the cackle, the revelation that she is fond of clowning around and has always been a bit of a tomboy.

In the past her look and her character have made auditions difficult and finding good parts hard. “I just know that if I walk into an audition I won’t look right,” she says. “It’s not like I think I’m a hideous troll or anything, it’s just a question of not being the most beautiful. A lot of it is decided as you walk through the door. I’ve got a lot of very beautiful young friends who are doing very well and I know if I was a director and they walked through the door I’d be like Wow! Yeah!’.”

Given her propensity for landing parts with a heavy sapphic element to them, I’d have thought “wow” and “yeah” were words she heard a lot – it’s certainly true that her character in Hex had a slew of internet admirers for that very reason. But in a casting environment in which good female parts are hard to come by she has too often been relegated to the supporting roles.

She rubbed shoulders with Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank in Brian De Palma’s 2006 film The Black Dahlia and featured in the Golden Globe-nominated Britflick Kinky Boots, but Lost In Austen is the first time she has been given the opportunity to dominate a production. “Being the lead and being in every single scene is not something I’ve done before,” she admits.

But it’s also given Rooper the chance to display her talent for comedy to a mainstream audience. The script itself is witty enough – “Even the stage directions are funny,” she says – but it’s her pitch-perfect performance, equal parts bamboozlement, embarrassment and amusement, that gives Lose In Austen its crowd-pleasing oomph. “It’s weird,” she says, “because the couple of jobs I did when I was 16 were very serious dramas where I was playing heroin addicts and stuff like that. They were heavy issues and that’s what I assumed I was good at and could do.”

Now, though, she is not so sure. Comedy, it seems, may be her natural metier: indeed the time she spent in As If saw her character, Nicki, change from serious to quirky, partly through her own ministrations.

“That environment was an incredible one in which to make television because you could have a lot of input if you wanted it and there was a couple of us who did,” she explains. “So through ideas I had which were just stuff that came naturally, we all started getting a bit zany. Then they started writing for that and Nicki became a completely different character. She turned into a bit of a clown, which was also the sort of human being I was growing into.”

The team that wrote As If then went on to create Hex, a supernatural story set in a boarding school and dubbed “Buffy on a budget” by the critics. The character of Thelma was written specifically with Rooper in mind and, though Hex was cancelled after two series, it was screened in America. To this day, Rooper still gets fan mail from random cities across the continent.

“I once got a text message from a friend in New York saying I’ve just seen your face on a bus in Times Square,” Rooper laughs. “Because of the Britishness of it and because of the subject matter it just filled that little hole that Buffy fans wanted filling.”

Rooper is not the only member of the Hex cast to be hitting the big time this year. Her co-star Christina Cole is also in Lose In Austen – she plays the bitchy Caroline Bingley – while Zoe Tapper stars in Affinity. Meanwhile, Rooper’s close friends Gemma Arterton and Tamsin Egerton are also making waves. As well as playing Elizabeth Bennett in Lose In Austen and the lead in BBC1′s forthcoming dramatisation of the Thomas Hardy novel Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Arterton will soon be seen on the big screen in the new James Bond film Quantum Of Solace. Egerton, who starred in the recent St Trinians film, will appear in ITV1′s upcoming drama Octavia, based on a Jilly Cooper novel.

And what next for Rooper? She is off to Los Angeles, she says, but only on holiday. Before Hex started filming she did decamp to California to endure the rounds of auditions but grew tired of “being fed a lot of chit-chat all the time. It gets exhausting after a while. And I got embarrassed to say I was an actor because everybody is an actor, everyone’s got a script for you to read. It’s sounds like a cliché but it’s really true.”

No plans to move there full-time, then? “I couldn’t,” she says, “and if you want to make a career over there or you’re aiming to get work you have to be there the whole time. My agent and I kind of fell out over that because I was always running back home.”

It’s been a busy year to date and she is tied to the National Theatre until well into the autumn, by which time Lose In Austen will have either flopped or soared. My money’s on the latter. After that, she waits for the phone to ring, though there’s still one more chance to glimpse her on screen before the year ends. “I’ve got an episode of Poirot coming out soon,” she laughs. “And I’m not a lesbian this time, which is a nice change.”

Lose In Austen starts this Wednesday, 9pm, ITV1

Source: Sunday Herald

What drew you to the role of Elizabeth Bennet?

Pride and Prejudice is a classic and it’s a compliment to be asked to read for Elizabeth Bennet as she’s such a fantastic, witty and intelligent character. Also she’s ahead of her time and that’s the reason she fits into the modern world.

Do you think the Lizzie Bennet you play in Lost in Austen is true to Jane Austen’s character in Pride and Prejudice?

The characters in Lost in Austen are really affected by what happens when Lizzie and Amanda swap places. Obviously, if you are taken to another world you’re going to change, but their personalities are those that were created in Pride and Prejudice, so Elizabeth’s strength and forward thinking nature stands her in good stead.

How do you think Elizabeth feels when she finds the door to Amanda’s world?

She’s very curious and inquisitive, so at first it’s quite intriguing. When she initially finds the door she’s scared, but then she goes back a couple more times. She realises there’s not much going on for her in her time and she starts to see it as a new exciting world. Most people would be petrified to go somewhere completely alien, but she’s ready for the challenge. It’s a bold move for her to take that step. She’s ahead of her time and this is in her character.

What is it that motivates her to stay in the modern world?

Up until that point in the novel she’s living a very normal existence. She hasn’t met Darcy yet, she hasn’t met Bingley and she’s bored. She wants to explore and see and do new things. She does it without thinking to some extent, especially as regards leaving her family.

Do you think she’s worried about what’s happening in her life back in Longbourn?

I think, like Amanda, she can’t get back and doesn’t realise this straight away. Given the choice she’d go back and forth, but once the door shuts she’s stuck. She misses her family and doesn’t know what’s going on back there.

How does she feel about Amanda?

Amanda and Lizzie are very similar, as are Jemima and I. I think if Lizzie lost all of her manners and eloquence and had been brought up in the modern world she would have been much more like Amanda. When they meet they connect and they’re like two old friends.

Did you enjoy wearing the period costume? Was this your first experience of costume drama?

I did some theatre in which I got to wear Elizabethan dress which was amazing, but this was the first time I’ve done it in television. I’d never worn Regency dress before, it was really sweet, plus it’s flattering and there’s no restrictions in those clothes so it was lovely to be able to eat what I liked as no-one could tell.

Was there a favourite scene that you filmed?

When Amanda finds Elizabeth in the bathroom. Definitely. No matter how shocked our characters were, it was still hilarious to film and Jemima and I just couldn’t stop laughing.

How did you find the cast to work with?

I joined the shoot later than everyone else, so they already had all their shared experiences and jokes, but they were so lovely plus it was great to work with a cast that were mainly my own age. Everyone was up for a laugh and were really lovely and approachable. It was a really warm set.

What’s next for you after Lost in Austen?

I have a couple of films coming out, Three And Out and then a Guy Ritchie film called Rock ‘n Roller. I’m filming Quantum Of Solace which is the new James Bond film, Prince of Persia for Disney, I’m also playing Tess in Tess of the D’Urbevilles for BBC1.

Source: LastBroadcast.co.uk

According to sources, Tess of the D’Urbervilles will start Sunday, September 14. It will be released on DVD October 27.

By the way, we will probably wait for the DVD releases before adding screencaptures or videos on the site. None of us will be in the UK during the releases so to make things less complicated, I will bring you the high quality coverage once the DVDs are available.

By the way, RocknRolla will be released September 5 (UK), October 3 (USA, limited) and October 31 (wide).

I think it is fair to say that September 2008 will be the month of the Gemma.