I know very well that it’s makeup, artful lighting, an improved hairstyle, and Amanda Root’s great talent that does it – but it’s subtle enough and so beautifully done that it looks completely natural, a woman winning her life back.

She begins to brighten, and straighten, and to change my metaphor begins to resemble a flower that has finally been watered after sitting parched on a table for a while. Even if things had not mended between them, this might have changed her life anyway, his return: closure, I suppose, or simply proving to her that since she could survive the very worst thing that could happen to her, things must take a turn for the better now.

She always makes me think of a bird: great huge dark eyes, soft and gentle and a mix of timid and brave. But Amanda Root wins by a mile, and it was only a six furlong race.Īmanda Root started her film as a dowdy, pale, dampened little wren of a thing. Anyway.) She was all right she did not disgrace the role. (What was the style for fingernails in this period? Anne’s were very short. She has a nice enough voice, a hairstyle which she must have done something dreadful to deserve, and to be honest some rather stark moles on her neck which were rather distracting when she was shown from behind for the first time. She was – and perhaps this was intentional, and the makeup and hair and costume – not too attractive I’ll come back to that, in terms of comparison. I don’t remember her from anything else, which in the world of BBC drama is a little surprise nearly everyone always looks familiar (like half the rest of this cast). Who on earth could ever fill Ciarán Hinds’s boots? My main concerns were fidelity to the story and casting of Anne and Captain Wentworth – especially Wentworth. I didn’t hate it, which surprised me given how much the Ciarán Hinds/Amanda Root film means to me I obviously didn’t love it, either, either time. I read a blogged review, comparing it to the 1995 film, and decided to watch it again. The most recent version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was out last year, I believe, on PBS (a year earlier in the UK?) I watched it, I know I did, and promptly forgot about it.

Amanda root persuasion