Where the Heart Is is a 2000 American romantic drama film directed by Matt Williams and starring Natalie Portman, Stockard Channing, Ashley Judd, and Joan Cusack with supporting roles by James Frain, Dylan Bruno, Keith David, and Sally Field. The screenplay, written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, is based on the best-selling 1995 novel of the same name by Billie Letts. The film follows five years in the life of Novalee Nation, a pregnant 17-year-old who is abandoned by her boyfriend at a Walmart in a small Oklahoma town. She secretly moves into the store, where she eventually gives birth to her baby, which attracts media attention. With the help of friends, she makes a new life for herself in the town.
Fay Weldon was an English author, essayist and playwright.
The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) is a historical novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, loosely based on the life of 16th-century aristocrat Mary Boleyn of whom little is known. Inspired by Mary's life story, Gregory depicts the annulment of one of the most significant royal marriages in English history and conveys the urgency of the need for a male heir to the throne. Much of the history is highly distorted in her account.
Hammer House of Horror is a British horror anthology television series produced in Britain in 1980. Created by Hammer Films in association with Cinema Arts International and ITC Entertainment, it consists of 13 hour-long episodes, originally broadcast on ITV.
Ruth Ellis was a British nightclub hostess and convicted murderer who became the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom following the fatal shooting of her lover, David Blakely.
Assia Esther Wevill was a German-Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, via Italy, then later England, where she had an affair with the English poet Ted Hughes. While she was a successful advertising copywriter and a talented translator of poetry, she is mainly remembered in the context of her relationship with Sylvia Plath and Hughes.
The Palliser novels are six novels written in series by Anthony Trollope. They were more commonly known as the Parliamentary novels prior to their 1974 television dramatisation by the BBC broadcast as The Pallisers. Marketed as "polite literature" during their initial publication, the novels encompass several literary genres including: family saga, bildungsroman, picaresque, as well as satire and parody of Victorian life, and criticism of the British government's predilection for attracting corrupt and corruptible people to power.
Julie Therese Wallace is an English actress.
H. M. Pulham, Esq. is a 1941 American drama film directed by King Vidor and starring Hedy Lamarr, Robert Young, and Ruth Hussey. Based on the novel H. M. Pulham, Esq. by John P. Marquand, the film is about a middle-aged businessman who has lived a conservative life according to the routine conventions of society, but who still remembers the beautiful young woman who once brought him out of his shell. Vidor co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Elizabeth Hill Vidor. The film features an early uncredited appearance by Ava Gardner. In February 2020, the film was shown at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, as part of a retrospective dedicated to King Vidor's career.
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning short novel by Eudora Welty. It was first published as a long story in The New Yorker in March 1969 and was subsequently revised and published in book form in 1972. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. Judge McKelva fails to recover from this surgery, and as he dies slowly in the hospital, Laurel visits and reads to him from Dickens. Her father's second wife, Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge to his hometown, Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. There, Laurel is immersed in the good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and leaves for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories. Laurel encounters her mother's memory, her father's life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss as well as the many memories. She comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and she leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.
She-Devil is a 1989 American black comedy film directed by Susan Seidelman and written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns. It stars Meryl Streep, Roseanne Barr and Ed Begley Jr. A loose adaptation of the 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by British writer Fay Weldon, She-Devil tells the story of Ruth Patchett, a dumpy, overweight housewife, who exacts devilish revenge after her philandering husband leaves her and their children for glamorous, best-selling romance novelist Mary Fisher.
Puffball is a 1980 supernatural drama novel by English author Fay Weldon.
Goodbye Lover is a 1998 neo-noir comedy film about a murder plot surrounding an alcoholic advertising agency worker and his adulterous wife. The film was directed by Roland Joffé, and stars Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney, Don Johnson, Ellen DeGeneres and Mary-Louise Parker. The original script was written by Ron Peer; subsequent drafts were written by Robert Pucci, then Buck Henry.
This is a list of fictional stories in which illegitimacy features as an important plot element. Passing mentions are omitted from this article. Many of these stories explore the social pain and exclusion felt by illegitimate "natural children".
Helen FitzGerald is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. Her debut novel, Dead Lovely, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2007, and The Exit in 2015 by Faber & Faber. Viral was released in 2016.
The Cloning of Joanna May is a 1989 science fiction novel by Fay Weldon.
Daughter of Tintagel is a series of historical fantasy novels by British writer Fay Sampson. It tells the story of the life of Arthurian legend character Morgan le Fay, presented through an oral history narrative from her early childhood to her disappearance. It was originally published as five books between 1989 and 1992, followed by an omnibus edition in 1992. The series was re-published in 2005 as Morgan le Fay.
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil is a 1986 award-winning BBC drama serial adapted from Fay Weldon's 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. Fay Weldon's novel was later filmed as the 1989 US comedy film She Devil.
Margaret Jepson was an English writer and artist, also known by her married name Margaret Birkinshaw and by her pen name Pearl Bellairs. Her daughter, Fay Weldon, and father, Edgar Jepson, were both novelists.
