Mrs Dalloway

PLOT

On a beautiful morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway sets out from her large house in Westminster to choose the flowers for a party she is holding that evening. Her teenage daughter Elizabeth is unsympathetic, preferring the company of the evangelical Miss Kilman. A passionate old suitor, Peter Walsh, turns up and does not disguise the mess he has made of his career and his love life. For Clarissa this confirms her choice in preferring the unexciting but affectionate and dependable Richard Dalloway. At her party Sally turns up, who was her closest friend, so close they kissed on the lips, but is now wife of a self-made millionaire and mother of five.

Intercut with Clarissa's present and past is the story of another couple. Septimus was a decorated officer in the First World War but is now collapsing under the strain of delayed shell-shock, in which he is paralysed by horrible flashbacks and consumed with guilt over the death of his closest comrade. His wife Rezia tries to get him psychiatric help but the doctors she consults are little use: when one commits him to a mental hospital, he jumps from a window to his death. The doctor turns up late at Clarissa's party, apologising because he had to attend to a patient's suicide. Clarissa stands by a window and ponders what it would mean to jump.

CAST

Vanessa Redgrave – Mrs Clarissa Dalloway

Natascha McElhone – Young Clarissa

Michael Kitchen – Peter Walsh

Alan Cox – Young Peter

Sarah Badel – Lady Rosseter

Lena Headey – Young Sally

John Standing – Richard Dalloway

Robert Portal – Young Richard

Oliver Ford Davies – Hugh Whitbread

Hal Cruttenden – Young Hugh

Rupert Graves – Septimus Warren Smith

Amelia Bullmore – Rezia Warren Smith

Margaret Tyzack – Lady Bruton

Robert Hardy – Sir William Bradshaw

Richenda Carey – Lady Bradshaw

Katie Carr – Elizabeth Dalloway

Selina Cadell – Miss Kilman

Amanda Drew – Lucy

Phyllis Calvert – Aunt Helena

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Based on the 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf of the same name