The New Yorker, February 8, 1999 P. 24
Talk story about the movie “Hilary and Jackie”... Three years ago, there was “Shine,” which dismayed some critics and the relatives of its leading character for its portrayal of a pianist driven mad by a tyrannical father and the burdens of genius. Now there is “Hilary and Jackie,” which shows the late English cellist Jacqueline du Pre in a distinctly unflattering light. The British-made movie presents its heroine as a deeply tormented, selfish young woman whose need for love was such that she manipulated her way into the bed of her sister’s husband. In Britain, where du Pre, who died from the effects of multiple sclerosis in 1987, at the age of forty-two, remains perhaps the most beloved postwar musical figure, the film’s opening has brought forth a chorus of complaint.... Her niece, Clare Finzi, claimed that the 1997 memoir on which the film is based—“A Genius in the Family,” by her mother, Hilary, and her uncle Piers—also distorted the truth. “I could barely live with the book,” she said. “But the movie is something else entirely. Now the distortions are out there, diminishing Jackie’s music.” ...A few days before the film’s London premiere, six of Jackie’s most noted musical collaborators—Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Julian Lloyd Webber, and William Pleeth—signed a joint letter to the London Times in which they said that the “selfish, spoilt, and manipulative” Jackie on the screen was not the woman they had known. ...The film’s director, Anand Tucker, has posted a response on the movie’s Web site, saying that his intentions were to “honor the spirit of Jackie.” But the film’s stoutest defender to date has been Jackie’s sister, Clare’s mother. “When you love someone, you love the whole of them,” Hilary du Pre said last week. “Those who are against the film want to look only at the pieces of Jackie’s life that they accept. I don’t think the film has taken any liberties at all. Jackie would have absolutely loved it.”
