“Effie,” which features 17-year-old Dakota Fanning in one of her first adult roles, tells the story of the disastrous marriage between 19th-century art critic John Ruskin and his young bride Effie Gray. It was a train wreck of a union, a collision of opposites that ended after Effie fell truly, madly, scandalously in love with wild-eyed young artist John Everett Millais.

“It’s the ultimate bad marriage,” said Emma Thompson, the Academy Award winning actress and writer behind “Effie”`s screenplay.

She said she was drawn to the story by its “archetypal quality.”

“It happens to be a costume drama, but you could be doing a story with this kind of complexity and oddness in any period,” Thompson said on the set of “Effie” at West Wycombe House, an exuberantly ornate 18th-century mansion in the Chiltern Hills northwest of London.

Full Article