Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace) plays the title role in Thomas Hardy’s powerful story of a blameless woman tested by fate. “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” opening the new season of MASTERPIECE CLASSIC, airs Sunday, January 11, 2009, 8:00-10:00 p.m. on PBS-HD. This also marks the debut of new host Laura Linney.
Arterton is joined by Hans Matheson (“Dr. Zhivago”) as her cruel seducer, Alec, and Eddie Redmayne (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) as Angel, the idealistic and self-deceiving man she loves.
As “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” opens, Tess’ father (Ian Puleston-Davies) has just learned that his long-impoverished family in fact descends from ancient aristocrats called D’Urbervilles, from which their name has been corrupted to Durbeyfield.
The new status is all but useless, since no ancestral property remains. Yet the discovery has an ennobling effect on Tess, reinforcing her natural sense of honor and integrity.
Seeking employment with a wealthy widow (Anna Massey, “Oliver Twist”), whose family has unjustly taken the D’Urbervilles name, Tess falls prey to the woman’s dissolute son, Alec.
An unrepentant libertine, Alec wants to possess Tess, but she flees him, eventually finding work as a milkmaid at a farm. There, she encounters a young man she had met at a May Day dance years earlier during the waltz tune “Gentle Maiden.” He is Angel Clare, a well-educated clergyman’s son learning to be a farm manager. He and Tess fall in love.
Angel and Tess
“Tess of the D’Urbervilles” was acclaimed “a delight” by the London Guardian during its recent UK broadcast, and the Glasgow Herald called it “a lush joy for the massed ranks of swooning romantic melodrama devotees.”
See previews and find out more at pbs.org.
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