Kate Winslet is Mary Anning.
Director Francis Lee (Land of God) was looking for a gift for her boyfriend, she wanted a fossil, an ancient stone that she liked so much. And the more he searched, the more he came across the name of Mary Anning. He started researching her and discovered the incredible story of a working class woman who she totally alone she took the first steps in the science of paleontology.
Disregarded at her time, in the 19th century, despite beginning to dig and discover impressive fossils with only 12 years, it has been in recent decades that this woman has received the honors due. Today she is called the mother of paleontology. In the Natural History Museum, London Some of the most impressive skeletons she found are on display, such as that of the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur or pterosaur. All beings whose origin is traced back to the Jurassic, more than 100 million years ago. And her family home in her town Lyme Regis it is now a museum dedicated to her figure and finds from her.
Portrait of Mary Anning.
Mary Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, a seaside town in the county of Dorset, England, an area that is now known as the Jurassic Coast because of the number of fossils that have been found and are still being found.
“Anning was a working class woman, born into a poor family in a very strict, patriarchal and very class-oriented society, she grew up to be an important paleontologist of her generation, but unrecognized for her gender and her class”, explains Francis Lee who as a “queer and working class director” felt very identified with all these ideas dominated by patriarchy and genre to launch into writing and directing his second film around it, Ammonite.
Mary Anning started digging on that cobbled shoreline as a child, intending to make some money to help her family. At the age of 12 she had already taken out the ichthyosaur, she discovered the complete skeleton of the plesiosaur when she was 24 years old and shortly after part of a pterodactyl. The rest of her life she continued to live and hunt for fossils at Lymes Regis where she died at the age of 47.
There is little more information about the life of this woman. Precisely because she was and because she belonged to a lower class, her contemporaries did not bother to document her life. And the only thing that she has transcended is that she worked with various women, assistants, collaborators, such as Charlotte Murchison or Francis Bell. Given this, and joining the discovery of the "passionate letters" between women in the nineteenth century, Francis Lee decided to create a personal life for Mary Anning, an emotional romance with charlotte murchison (although in reality she could be a combination of all the women she has come across), who on screen play Kate Winslet as Anning and Saoirse Ronan as Murchison and that has raised as much expectation as controversy.
An Oscar role.
Lee explains. “I wanted to use the story of Mary Anning to inspire this love story and to elevate it and give her a relationship with someone who seemed to me to be on her level,” he says. “And in this patriarchal society, I didn't feel like that relationship should be with a man, because women were the property of men. I wanted to elevate the idea of who Mary Anning was. It is well documented that she had friendships with many women and never had a relationship with a man, I took that and interpreted it like that”.
And even before the premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the filmmaker has had to defend his choice to fictionalize Mary Anning's life in this way. “After seeing queer history routinely “straight” across the culture, and given there is no evidence of any kind that this historical figure had a heterosexual relationship, Is it not allowed to see that person in another context? Particularly a woman whose work and life were subjected to the worst aspects of the patriarchy, class discrimination and gender imbalance.
The Lyme Regis Museum was the home of Mary Anning.
THE JURASSIC COAST
The film, in addition to vindicating the story of Mary Anning, will once again focus on this stretch of the English coast, more than 150 kilometers a UNESCO World Heritage Site for containing fossils up to 200 million years old. On its beaches decorated by cliffs, some with pebbles, others with sand, treasures can still be found and the public is encouraged to do so, both independently and in an organized way.
The ammonoids, either ammonites, that cephalopod mollusk that became extinct hundreds of millions of years ago, the first form we imagine when we think of fossils, is one of the most found around Lyme Regis, the town of Mary Anning, hence the name of the film.
Fossils found on the Jurassic Coast.