The Remains of the Day (1993) on Netflix
In 1958, James Stevens, butler at Darlington Hall, takes a letter from Miss Kenton, the housekeeper he once worked beside. He borrows the Daimler and drives west to see her.
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- IMDb7.8/1094,199 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Darlington Hall, in postwar Britain, has been sold to Jack Lewis, a retired US Congressman. Its butler, Stevens, gets a letter from Miss Kenton, the housekeeper he once worked beside, who is now Mrs. Benn. He borrows the Daimler and drives to the West Country to see her. In the 1930s, Kenton arrives at the hall, and her warmer manner meets his strict decorum. His father, by then an under-butler, can no longer manage his duties, and Stevens will not admit it.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Remains of the Day (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Meryl Streep's then-agent Sam Cohn and the director sold her on the plum role of Miss Kenton, but Cohn, who was also Nichols's agent, never made clear that she was no longer a candidate; she learned only after reading about Emma Thompson's casting, and soon fired him for Bryan Lourd.
- Some of Pinter's script was used and he was paid for his work, but when his script was radically revised by the James Ivory-Ismail Merchant partnership he refused to allow his name to be listed in the credits, in keeping with his contract.
- A film adaptation of the novel was originally planned at Columbia, to be directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Harold Pinter, with a projected budget of $26 million.
- The character of Sir Geoffrey Wren is based loosely on Sir Oswald Mosley, a British fascist active in the 1930s, and Wren is depicted as a strict vegetarian, like Hitler.
- The original score, composed by Richard Robbins, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, but it lost to the music for Schindler's List.
