Cast Highlights: Dominic Cooper Luke Evans Tamsin Greig Roger Allam John Turturro

Character: Tamara Drewe
Production Status: On DVD
Release Date: September 10, 2010 (UK)
Director: Stephen Frears
Writers: Moira Buffini (screenplay), Posy Simmonds (graphic novel)
Genre: Comedy / Drama / Romance
MPAA Rating: n/a

Plot Outline:
A woman raises the temperature when she arrives at a writers’ retreat in a quiet country village.

As a teenager, Tamara has issues with her looks, but in her early 20s she has cosmetic surgery on her nose, loses weight and transforms herself into a voluptuous beauty who returns to the rural town where she grew up and engages with the locals in country matters.

Tamara becomes romantically involved with three different men: Ben, a fit rock band drummer played by Dominic Cooper; Andy, the dashing groundskeeper essayed by Luke Evans; and Nicholas, the philandering literary retreat organiser played by Roger Allam. His wife Beth is played by Tamsin Greig.

The story is based on a Posy Simmonds newspaper comic strip that was published as a graphic novel in 2007. Simmonds’s strip ran in the Guardian’s Review section between September 2005 and October 2007 before being collected in a graphic novel. The tragicomic story was inspired by a piece of classic fiction – Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd; likewise her earlier serialised cartoon, Gemma Bovery, took Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as its template.

Gemma’s Role:
Gemma Arterton is Tamara Drewe, a newspaper columnist who just happens to be a knock-out beauty. When she arrives at the fictional village, she garners the attention of lusty men – and the ire of their womenfolk.

Simmonds based her tale on Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, with Hardy’s heroine Bathsheba becoming Tamara, a writer with a recent nose job.

Gemma explained that she knows ‘a lot of people just like Tamara’.

She said she found her character ‘lost in her expectations of being a modern woman in today’s world – the expectations of beauty and success – when what really desires is to be loved’.

From the Photo Gallery:

Cast and Crew Quotes:
• “She’s got a good head on her shoulders,” confirms Stephen Frears, illustrious director of, among many other things, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity and the forthcoming Tamara Drewe, starring Gemma. “I’m sure she’ll say silly things and get knocked around a bit,” says Frears, “but in the end she’s talented and her talent will get her through all the nonsense.”

“It seemed to me she has rather decent values,” Frears adds, in his cantankerous way. “I’d have been proud to have her as a daughter.”
– Stephen Frears (Tamara Drewe director)

• “She’s sassy and she’s bright,” he says. “Those are lovely qualities. They’re qualities audiences like.”
– Stephen Frears (Tamara Drewe director)

• “I told myself that I’d like to look at her for 90 minutes. It’s as simple as that.”
– Stephen Frears (Tamara Drewe director)