Tamara Drewe, then, is very much a Frears movie in its skilful fidelity to the delightful Posy Simmonds cartoon strip on which it is based and to the reflections on British life and character in the changing times that it dramatises. But in films as superficially different as My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons and Dirty Pretty Things, he's shown an interest in certain recurrent themes and situations, among them the taking of moral decisions in precarious situations, the secret manipulation of other people's lives and the ironic, usually unintended, consequences of our everyday actions. Unlike his overly fastidious cinematic mentors, he's been prepared to undertake as wide a range of subjects and genres as the great studio professionals of Hollywood's golden age, men like Michael Curtiz and Henry Hathaway. He then entered the cinema as an assistant to the leading directors of the British new wave, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, both dedicated to challenging the complacent, middle-class values they thought were stifling our cinema.įollowing the Royal Court's original ethos, Frears always appears to have seen himself as the servant of the scripts he's undertaken, finding an appropriate style for the work in hand.

Stephen Frears began his distinguished career working at George Devine's Royal Court, a theatre company devoted to new writing on contemporary themes.

Tamara drewe far from the madding crowd