Iris Murdoch's final days have been lovingly brought to the screen by Judi Dench and Richard Eyre. Kate Kellaway knows better than most how poignant the portrayal is...

Observer

Sunday January 13, 2002

When I first saw Judi Dench in Richard Eyre's film about Iris Murdoch I did a double-take. There was Iris. Based on John Bayley's memoirs, the film describes the last years of an uncommon marriage and Murdoch's decline into Alzheimer's. Bayley emerges as heroically inventive and optimistic in his love, even after Iris is lost to him. I felt moved by the film for all the obvious reasons but haunted for a reason of my own.

I met John Bayley and Iris Murdoch in north Oxford in September 1995. I did not know then that Iris was unwell. I was charmed by them and incredulous at their house which turned squalor into an art form. I was there to write an Observer 'Room of One's Own' feature, about their kitchen. I was impressed by Iris's indifference to our meeting, and when she got up from the congested table and wandered off into another room I wasn't suspicious but amused. I thought her admirably eccentric. She was like a sphinx: kindly but remote. Her mind was elsewhere, a good thing, I thought.

In retrospect, I see that she was in an erratic twilight just before darkness took over. Much of the amusement of that day now turns to poignancy. I remember how John Bayley, like a sweet shepherd (or sheepdog), rounded Iris up every time she strayed, and when she felt, as she sometimes seemed to, suspicious or panicky he would either pay her no heed as a tolerant parent might a mutinous child, or try to be soothing. (In an Omnibus about Murdoch to be screened on 23 January on BBC1, John Bayley, Warton Professor of English at Oxford, literary critic and novelist, modestly uses the single word 'soothing' to sum up what attracted Iris to him in the first place.)

Now I know that what I took to be Murdoch's hauteur was hesitation. Bayley tried to keep her talking. He summoned her back to the table with the words: 'Darling, come and say whether you like anything in the kitchen.' At the time, I supposed that it was merely her genius that needed this kindly custodian. Bayley reassures me that Iris loved society: 'Right up to the end, she loved meeting people.'

She described marriage gregariously as a 'long conversation'. But their love was more complicated than that: Bayley describes solitude, in his memoirs, as 'one of the truest pleasures of marriage'.

I happily described their kitchen: 'insouciantly itself, recklessly squalid... on every surface, there are bottles and containers, full and empty: French brandy, Bolls Curry Powder (hot), onion salt, bottles of red wine... there are newspapers on the floor, a beanstalk on the windowsill trying to get to the giant, a salad bowl on the floor in which two recumbent Balinese salad servers - a man and a woman - slumber. The room doubles as a wardrobe for Bayley's clothes... in a corner there's a mountain of his shoes.'

How many lost things were there? Looking back on it, it seems as though the house itself were suffering a kind of dementia. I described Iris and John wandering about the kitchen together in a preoccupied way, 'as if hunting for something lost'. Iris said: 'I like everything. I like the bottles and I like the plates.' Then, suddenly warming to the project in which we all seemed to be involved, she asked me: 'Would you like to see what is going on in the cupboards?' and opened them up. I asked what was going on and she replied: 'We really don't know.' Looking at the pretty blue-and-white-striped mugs, she noted, with pleasure: 'They are all together.' And then she admired a painting, a still life of white flowers: 'That's Barbara Dorf,' she said. 'She is stunning.' John introduced me to a picture of a healthy, rather wicked-looking worm which, he said, reminded Iris of him. What is he up to? I wondered. 'He may be creating the world,' Iris said. I asked her whether they could find everything? Did they have everything they needed? 'We have everything we need - and more,' she replied. Before I left, John took me to see Iris's study. I still remember how keen he was to do this. It might have been a museum piece by then; it must have been clear she would never work in it again.

The kitchen is almost a character in the film. For Iris, strange as it may sound, it became linked to her love for John. Bayley wrote recently that he was 'profoundly moved' when he found a last entry from her journal from late 1995. 'She wrote of "overwhelming love for Puss [her name for me], for the pictures in the kitchen and the plates on the dresser".' He reflected: 'Hers was a strange and touching love, for me as for the things in the home and the kitchen, and it seemed to grow at once stronger and more helpless as Iris [her own words] "wailed into the dark".'

When the article appeared, a distraught representative from Chatto, her publishers, rang to reproach me for writing it. Had I not realised that Iris was not at all well ? The word Alzheimer's was not mentioned. John Bayley observes now that her publishers, like so many of her friends, felt 'very possessive about her'.

The film is like a trick of memory. It was uncanny to feel as if I had been behind a camera myself seven years ago, without knowing what I was seeing. I could hardly believe the film was not shot in the house I remembered. Bayley, too, was impressed by the illusion and surprised by the 'lack of bother' he felt watching the film. He admires it but feels comfortably removed from it. He praises Eyre for his 'very great tact'.

Eyre explained to me, in so far as it was possible, the technical side of the illusion. He and the set designer, Gemma Jackson, visited John at home with his new wife, Audi, the friend Iris once took to be 'an angel' - in some confused annunciation. Audi ordered them to: 'Imagine the most untidy place you have ever seen in your life and then multiply it by five.' From that came 'a studio set in Pinewood that took four or five weeks to construct'. Eyre agrees that 'the feel is very close, although we slightly changed the geography'. John tells me he was happy to donate some of his 'old books' to Gemma. Deposits of his books are seen in the film, but all the other effects are inauthentic.

The result is an illusionist feat. I was amazed watching footage on Omnibus to see that Kate Winslet really does look a little like the young Iris. Bayley himself seems to have missed her beauty as a young woman, stubbornly describing her as 'homely and kindly, not in any conventional sense pretty or attractive', although he concedes he always found her face 'mysterious'. Bayley disliked the dress that Iris wore on one of their first dates so much that he almost fell out of love with her. It was 'a flame-coloured brocade' that would be worn only by a 'silly girl who had not the taste to choose her clothes carefully'.

Ruth Myers, the costume designer, implies, correctly I am sure, that Bayley's own taste may not have been entirely reliable, that he would probably have preferred to see Iris in an 'old Aertex blouse'. She decided that the young Iris must wear the 'dress of the moment' and Winslet dazzles and flares in scarlet organza-over-taffeta.

Dench looks, towards the end, more like an old waif. 'Everyone remembers Iris in blue,' Myers recalls. She combed 'local Oxfam shops' for old baggy cardigans and pale blue pinnies which gave her the look I remember of a cleaning lady disinclined to clean.

Lisa Westcott, the hair and make-up designer, contributed to the witchcraft. It helped that there was a natural likeness between Dench and Murdoch but Westcott gave me a revelatory tutorial. Judi Dench wore three wigs. The first was ' a short bob, always greasy and with bed hair. Not so much white hair here. Then, I add tiny wefts to lengthen the hair a bit.' The second was 'a bit more white, slightly finer, longer than wig one. This will do for a few scenes before I add extensions for a little more length and whiteness.' With the third wig 'the fringe is growing all the time and getting in her eyes. This is the wig she'll have when she goes to the nursing home. With bed hair, you get lots of separations; I want to see some scalp. My own device is the wide plastic parting. Now I am losing Judi's hairline, blanking her out, putting Iris Murdoch there.'

Her account of the wigs is unsettling, their gradual disintegration a metaphor for what was going on beneath the hair line. In the scene where Dench is driven off to the nursing home, Westcott popped in opaque contact lenses: 'Very milky as if her spirit had left her. I wanted there to be no glitter, no life. This was hard as Judi's eyes are so alive.'

Bayley has many bouquets to bestow on Eyre and his team but most of all, he wants to see in print his admiration for Vale House in the Botley Road, Oxford, run by 'the marvellous Tricia O'Leary'. The small nursing home where Iris dies in the film was not built in Pinewood. It is 'the real thing'.

The film's most poetic scene never happened at all, although John Bayley assured me: 'I believe it might have.' Iris Murdoch/Judi Dench sits on the beach at Southwold and arranges blank pages torn from a notebook on to the shingle; soon, an audience of paper surrounds her. She secures each page with a stone. It is at once a substitute for writing and a precise metaphor about trying to secure memory. But then, in a moment of furious defeat, she gathers up the stones and we watch the blank pages lifted away by the wind, above the sea.

Iris is an extraordinary reminder of how little 'the real thing' matters: art can be more like life than life itself.

November 25, 2006              IRIS Main Page          DJD Site Map