MANILA, Philippines - The Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange premieres tonight at 9 on HBO. The HBO Original Movie swept the 2009 Emmys with six wins and continued to win two Golden Globe awards this year.
In 1973, filmmakers Albert and David Maysles entered the strange world of “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, two charming eccentric relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, wife of John Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. Spending six weeks with the reclusive mother and daughter who chose to live in squalor and almost total isolation in a decaying, 28-room mansion in East Hampton, the Maysles captured their day-to-day life in its raw, uncensored, captivatingly honest moments for a documentary titled Grey Gardens. Little did anyone know that the 100-minute documentary would catapult the two women from virtual obscurity to cult status as their legacy grew in depth and stature over the years.
Thirty-five years later, using the documentary as a framework, director-writer Michael Sucsy’s original story for Grey Gardens offers a wry, behind-the-scenes look at the Beales and their unique mother-daughter bond. Told over the span of four decades, the film focuses on their glamorous and well-heeled lives long before the making of the documentary and on the circumstances behind their riches-to-rags story.
Barrymore won a Golden Globe award for her role as “Little Edie,” and Jessica Lange, an Emmy, for her portrayal of “Big Edie.” Malcolm Gets and Daniel Baldwin co-star, with Ken Howard and Jeanne Tripplehorn playing Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Produced by David Coatsworth, Grey Gardens is written and directed by Michael Sucsy and teleplay by Patricia Rozema and Sucsy. Lucy Barzun Donnelly, Rachael Horovitz and Sucsy are executive producers.
Lange used the documentary as a daily tool during filming to study the character of “Big Edie.” “What the filmmakers did with the original documentary in the portrait of these two women was so fascinating, so haunting in a way,” says Lange. “You fall in love with these two women who are so eccentric, so extraordinary and out of the realm of people that you know.”
Lange worked with dialect coach Howard Samuelsohn and studied the Grey Gardens DVD night and day to catch the cadence in “Big Edie’s” voice and her peculiar mannerisms, making it easier for her to slide into the character.
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