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"I felt like we were overdue," said Carey Mulligan, explaining her eagerness to play the lead character in "Suffragette." "This massive moment of our civil rights history has gone unmarked."
The movie, in theaters now, tells the story of the fight for women's right to vote in Britain in 1912-13, an initiative that evolved from peaceful marches to acts of civil disobedience and ultimately, a tragic and galvanizing death. Emily Wilding Davison, an activist jailed numerous times, died after she stepped in front of King George V's horse at a derby event in 1913. Tends of thousands of people, including fellow suffragettes with the Women's Social and Political Union, lined the streets of London on the day of her funeral.
“It’s such an untold story,” Mulligan said. “We’ve come an awfully long way.”
She plays Maud, a reluctant activist who drifts into the movement but comes to embrace it, at great personal peril.
“We do owe an awful lot to these women,” she said. “It was a long struggle.”
The filming process, by contrast, felt like an honor.
“It was a very enthusiastic group of people,” she said. “There was a buzz on set most days.”
Credit: Jennifer Brett
Credit: Jennifer Brett
Directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Abi Morgan, it also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Natalie Pressand and Meryl Streep, whose character appears only in one key scene yet is pivotal to the narrative.
“It was an amazing group of women,” Mulligan said during a recent interview. “The men involved were brilliant, too.”
The fictionalized account, based on actual events surrounding the women's suffrage movement, seemed like a "vital moment" to bring to the big screen, Gavron said. It feels timely, against a backdrop of Jennifer Lawrence's viral essay about the gender pay gap in Hollywood, Hillary Clinton's bid to become the first female U.S. president and the women of Saudi Arabia - a key U.S. ally in the Middle East - finally being granted the right to vote this year.
“There are so many ways it echoes what goes on in the world today,” said Gavron during an interview while she was in Georgia recently. “Suffragette” was the opening to the recent 2015 Savannah Film Festival. “It’s really important for people to remember how we achieved these rights.”
