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Pursue these series after ‘Pursuit of Love’

English actress Emily Mortimer makes directorial debut

By Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
Published: July 30, 2021, 6:00am

English actress Emily Mortimer has been a screen staple since her film debut in “The Ghost and the Darkness” opposite Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas in 1996. She’s as at home in period pieces like “Elizabeth” as she is in contemporary films like “Lars and the Real Girl” (among many more).

Mortimer co-wrote the series “Doll & Em” with her co-star Dolly Wells, but the accomplished actress finally makes her directing debut with the three-episode miniseries “The Pursuit of Love,” which debuts Friday on Amazon Prime.

Adapted from Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel, “The Pursuit of Love” begins as a fizzy and delightful period piece, before exploring the darker sides of life during and after wartime. The story follows a pair of cousins, Linda and Fanny (Lily James and Emily Beecham), who are the best of friends, navigating their coming of age in England between the world wars. Linda is a beautiful, reckless rebel, while Fanny is the more cautious and careful type, but they rely on each other to get through life’s challenges, whether it’s Linda injecting a sense of fun and adventure or Fanny offering stability and comfort when Linda needs it most.

While Mortimer has a small part as Fanny’s absentee mother, and her friend and writing partner Wells plays Linda’s mother, the series is Mortimer’s loud and proud debut as an auteur behind the camera. She brings a lively sense of style, whimsy and modern flair to the project, and it’s an exciting announcement of her aesthetic and sensibility as a director.

Here are some related streaming suggestions to sample:

• Novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford had a life and family even more fascinating than her books, and in fact, “The Pursuit of Love” and its companion volume “Love in a Cold Climate” are semi-autobiographical, based on her aristocratic upbringing as one of the six Mitford sisters. The sisters were a part of the group of young Bohemians in 1920s London known as the “bright young things,” and they went on to have vastly different political and personal lives.

• “Love in a Cold Climate” was adapted into a BBC miniseries in 2001, starring Rosamund Pike; it is available to stream on BritBox. Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel “Vile Bodies” satirized the “bright young things” lifestyle and was made into a film starring Mortimer herself, directed by Stephen Fry. The 2003 film “Bright Young Things” is available to stream on HBO Max.

• Lily James, who stuns as the mercurial and fascinating Linda, also starred in the World War II-era romance “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” about British resistance to Nazi occupation in the Channel Islands during the war. It’s a charming, enchanting film set against the challenges of wartime, and it’s streaming on Netflix.

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