Yorkshire's movie history (From The Northern Echo)

Yorkshire's movie history

12:06pm Monday 18th August 2008

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Many a great scene has been filmed in Yorkshire. Steve Pratt looks at a new book mapping out the county’s locations.

BRENDA Blethyn, in a tootight top, micro mini-skirt and four-inch heels, totters down a cobbled alley in Scarborough, screaming drunken abuse at Michael Caine.

Cate Blanchett, resplendent in royal robes, walks the 200ft red carpet stretching the length of York Minister’s nave to be crowned Queen Elizabeth I.

And in Harrogate, Vanessa Redgrave’s missing novelist dances in the Hydro Hotel ballroom with Dustin Hoffman’s American journalist.

Scenes from three movies, all Made In Yorkshire – the title of a book celebrating films that have put the county on the cinematic map.

Think Yorkshire movies and the chances are The Full Monty, about stripping Sheffield steelworkers, and Calendar Girls, about stripping Yorkshire WI members, will come to mind.

Neither are in this new book, apart from the listings in the final pages.

That’s because author Tony Earnshaw has opted to feature films with stories behind them and people to tell them.

He rejects official film stills in favour of 330 photographs taken on sets over 25 years by award-winning Yorkshire Post photographer Jim Moran.

The book isn’t short of star quality with an impressive list of names – Morgan Freeman, Michael Palin, Catherine Tate, Alan Bennett and Jenny Agutter among them – ready to remember their time in front of the camera in Yorkshire.

It’s a reminder of Yorkshire’s place in movie history. This is the county, after all, where movies were invented when Frenchman Louis Le Prince came to Leeds and “experimented in cinematography”. In October 1888, his relatives performed – wandering around the grounds of their house in Roundhay Park, Leeds – in the first ever sequence of moving pictures.

Later Le Prince filmed horses, people, trams and traffic on Leeds Bridge.

ONE of the earliest films shot in Yorkshire was Turn Of The Tide, made in 1935 and based on Yorkshire writer Leo Walmsley’s novel Three Fevers. Director Norman Walker shot for six weeks on location in Robin Hood’s Bay, doubling for Walmsley’s fictitious Bramblewick. Other scenes were shot in Whitby (renamed Burnharbour for the film), Staithes and Ramsdale Mill, Fylingdales.

Several years before he became Doctor Who, Christopher Ecclestone was the first actor to film on camera in York Minister, as the Duke of Norfolk in the historical drama Elizabeth.

This was the first feature film to obtain permission to film there. The minster doubled as Westminister Abbey, through technical wizardry and ingenious camera angles.

York Station was the scene for Albert Finney, as a hammy actor-manager, to yell “Stop that train” in the film of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser.

The scene, not in the stage play, was a last minute addition to give the picture a less stagey feel by opening out the action.

In his foreword to Made In Yorkshire, Harwood tells of his astonishment on arriving in Bradford, where much of the film was shot in the Alhambra Theatre. “I had always thought of Bradford as an industrial city, a phrase that conjures up images of dark satanic mills. I was astonished because I quickly discovered that Bradford is a decidedly handsome city with notable architecture, especially its proud cathedral and trustworthy, down-to-earth Wool Exchange, typically Yorkshire, a place without pretensions,”

he writes.

Agatha, filmed in Harrogate and York in 1977, went to the actual hotel where missing writer Agatha Christie was discovered. The Hydro Hotel, renamed The Old Swan Hotel, needed only a few cosmetic changes to take it back to the 1920s. The 300 extras in a dance sequence in the hotel ballroom were paid £8 a day. Among the musicians was 74-year-old Albert Whiteley who, 50 years previously, had been a banjo player in the Hydro Band at the very time the missing Agatha was discovered in Harrogate.

THE story of the hero in Lincoln Green received the Hollywood treatment in Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves and brought Kevin Costner to North Yorkshire rather than Sherwood Forest in the winter of 1990 for filming at Aysgarth Falls and Hardraw Force, near Hawes. Costner did the action stuff himself but used a body double for the scene in which Robin bathes naked in the icy waters.

I recall spending a cold night fullyclothed in Scarborough in 1988 on the set of A Chorus Of Disapproval, the Michael Winner-directed film of local theatre man Alan Ayckbourn’s play.

Jeremy Irons and Anthony Hopkins were among the starry cast filming on locations in the seaside town.

The playwright, letting someone film one of his plays for the first time, had only marginal involvment in the movie. He did make one unscheduled appearance on set when he accidentally drove into the middle of an exterior scene while en route to collect his cat from the cattery.

Later, Bridlington-born Mark Herman directed Little Voice on location in the town with Brenda Blethyn, Michael Caine and Ewan McGregor.

The latter waxed lyrical about the place. “I love Scarborough. It really is a great town,” he said. “There’s something really magical about these seaside towns when it’s off-season.

There’s plenty to keep you occupied during the day as well. I’m have a great time up here.”

The release of Brideshead Revisted, which like the TV series, used Castle Howard as a key location, will put Yorkshire firmly on the film location map once more. The house is a regular on the big screen. The south front facade was used as the setting for the Kremlin in The Spy With A Cold Nose and in 1965 the house welcomed Sophia Loren, Peter Ustinov and Paul Newman to shoot the comedy Lady L.

■ Made In Yorkshire by Tony Earnshaw (Guerilla Books, £25).

Tony Earnshaw will be discussing his book, followed by a screening of Elizabeth (15) at York City Screen on Wednesday. Bookings and information 0871-7042054 or visit www.picturehouses.co.uk

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