Actors - Shadowlands

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	Actors - Shadowlands

Shadowlands is a play, TV drama and film written by William Nicholson. The story is a fictionalized version of the relationship between the writer C. S. Lewis and his fan Joy Gresham. The title comes from Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, in which the world as we know it and other worlds like it are referred to as the 'shadowlands', because they are only a shadow of what is to come.

The work was first seen as a television play in 1985 starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. It was then performed as a play on the West End in 1990, starring Nigel Hawthorne as Lewis, who successfully took the role to Broadway, and Jane Lapotaire as Joy. It then became a 1993 film directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

Synopsis

The story follows Lewis as he meets an American fan, Joy Gresham, whom he befriends and eventually marries. The story also deals with his struggle with issues of personal pain and grief: Lewis preaches that one should endure suffering with patience, but finds that the simple answers he had preached no longer apply when Joy becomes afflicted with cancer and eventually dies.

Relationship to history

The film contains many factual inaccuracies:

Joy Gresham had two sons, David and Douglas, but only Douglas appears in the film.
C. S. Lewis could not drive, yet his drive to Hertfordshire is an important moment in the film.
The film covers events between 1952 and 1960 and shows Lewis teaching at Magdalen College, Oxford. However, this is a simplification of reality: in 1954, Lewis accepted a Professorship in Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge and thus discontinued his teaching at Oxford. He did so, however, on the condition that he would be able to return to his home in Oxford for vacations and long weekends during the school term.
Joy Gresham broke her leg when answering a telephone call from Kathleen Farrer in her home in Oxford. In the film she breaks her leg answering a call from C. S. Lewis in her house in London.
Joy Gresham was treated in hospital in Oxford, not in London.

Quotes

: "Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice; as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal."

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