The film Effie Gray depicts the famous love triangle between Victorian art critic John Ruskin, his teenage bride Euphemia Gray and Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, a confirmed user of Winsor & Newton paints. With an impressive cast including Dakota Fanning (Gray), Greg Wise (Ruskin) and Emma Thompson (Gray’s supporter Lady Eastlake), the film tracks a set of tangled relations more compelling than most Hollywood dramas.
Ahead of the film’s release, the artist Alexander Newley, who was responsible for recreating the works of both Ruskin and Millais, sat down with us to discuss his contributions to the production. And on a break between shows at London’s Royal Court Theatre, actor Tom Sturridge joined us to talk about preparing for the role of Millais, and the challenges involved in playing an artist.
Effie Gray: background
“I think what attracted writer Emma Thompson to the story is the unbelievable resolve this young woman Effie Gray showed in standing up to the Victorian establishment,” Newley says.
Ruskin married Effie while she was still a teenager, but their marriage was never consummated. Newley believes Ruskin may have had an over-developed aesthetic sensibility that made physical realities difficult.
The movie follows the life of the newlyweds, including a trip to Scotland accompanied by Ruskin’s young protégé, Millais. During this sojourn, Effie and Millais become close and eventually fall in love. Bravely going public and filing for an annulment of her marriage on the grounds of non-consummation, Effie eventually leaves Ruskin and goes on to have an extraordinary life, including raising eight children with Millais.
“Ruskin was a very well-known and respected man, and for this unknown girl to denounce him caused a huge scandal,” Newley explains.
Artist Alexander Newley
The actress Phyllida Law – Thompson’s mother – recommended Newley to the producers after the artist painted her portrait. His creative contributions are at the heart of the production.
An early sequence shows Ruskin drawing Effie at a time when his obsession with her has reached its height. Ruskin sketches furiously whilst Effie dances and the camera moves around the pair on a circular track in a darkened space. Newley was asked to make the drawings using Ruskin’s actual tools, and when the film cuts to Ruskin’s hands sketching, they don’t belong to Wise but to Newley, wearing frilly cuffs. One shot required charcoal to spray off the nib of his pencil. “Hollywood loves the idea of artists working in a fever of passion!” Newley says.
Throughout the movie, Millais is seen painting his famous portrait of Ruskin posing by a tumbling river. Newley made the painting in his New York studio and photographed each stage of its development. These still images are the ones seen in the film.
Producer Donald Rosenfeld was unable to find the original setting for Millais’ portrait, so decided to commission an artist rather than a prop maker to make his own version of the painting. His intention was to have something that would have a life after the movie and be an artwork in its own right. Attention to detail and accuracy was paramount – Rosenfeld approached Winsor & Newton for archived tubes and art materials to be copied and used in the production.
Newley created his painting true to the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites, rather than their techniques. He found the way Millais worked very difficult to adopt, as Millais would perfect one part of a painting before moving on. “His attention kind of crawled across the canvas in a way that is completely alien to me,” he says. Describing himself as an “all-over painter”, Newley likes to keep the whole work moving along at the same time, a lesson learnt from art after the Pre-Raphaelites, such as Post-Impressionism and American action painting.
Actor Tom Sturridge
“My knowledge of that period of art is incredibly juvenile,” says Sturridge, “so I stood for hours in Tate Britain looking at Millais’ Ophelia – ironically, a painting that haunts adolescent culture.”
Sturridge approaches new roles with the same question: “How do I realise this character?” When playing a character from history, and especially an artist, an actor has the unique resource of access to their creative expression. “Millais obviously spent a lot of time doing very small, detailed things,” he says. “To be that kind of person means you must have an extraordinary amount of patience.” This insight into his character’s personality makes sense to Sturridge in the context of the film, as Ruskin, by contrast, was not a patient man.
Given months to prepare a film about Millais, Sturridge would have taught himself to paint as closely in style to him as possible. As the role was cast relatively late and the focus is on Effie, he concentrated instead on making his movements and gestures appear natural: mixing paint on a palette, holding a brush, applying colour and so on. Newley helped with this and spent a lot of time showing him how to articulate the kind of detail seen in the flowers and foliage of Millais’ Ophelia. “Millais’ technique is very specific, the way he ‘gives’ paint to the canvas is so delicate,” Sturridge says.
Images Courtesy of Sovereign Films