Margaret Drabble Movies

First published in 1971, Margaret Drabble's novel The Waterfall was celebrated as "a strong modern conception of the concept of body and soul -- an exploration of the physicality that engulfs human life." The heroine is a highborn young woman who so fears her own sexuality that she enters into marriage with a working-class intellectual to whom sex is unimportant (or so he says). Even so, the girl becomes pregnant, whereupon her husband, unable to withstand his wife's remonstrations, walks out on her. Having cast off her carnal fears, the heroine launches a torrid affair with her cousin's husband, a reckless auto racer. The tragic consequences of this fling were ably dramatized in the four-part TV adaptation of The Waterfall, which aired in Britain in 1980. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Vanessa Redgrave stars in this film biography of the free-spirited modern interpretive dancer Isadora Duncan. Trained in classical dance, Duncan shattered the traditional conformities in her art and her personal life. The film begins at the end of her life as she recalls the past while dictating her memoirs to her male secretary. Her uninhibited sexuality and insistence on personal freedom and expression shocked more conservative and narrow-minded patrons and audiences. She brought in elements of classic Greek dance during the height of the jazz age and had children in and out of wedlock. Married to sewing-machine heir Paris Singer (Jason Robards) and the Russian poet Sergei Essenin (Ivan Tchenko), her life was a rollercoaster ride of success and tragic failures. Two of her children drowned when her chauffeur left the car unattended and the vehicle plunged into a river. Duncan lived by her own rules, often shunned by the very people who had so passionately embraced her pioneering efforts in dance, women's liberation and free thinking. Redgrave was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide