In Doyle 's collection
Description
Vic Fair prototype artwork for the highly-regarded 1981 movie, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN.
“Actors Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan and Charlotte Mitchell under Karel Reisz's superb, sensitive and fluid direction bring Harold Pinter and John Fowles screenplay to the screen in stunning fashion. Some of the scenes will live in the memory for a long time, so powerful are the visuals.
Set in 19th Century England it is the story of a chance meeting between Sarah (Meryl Streep), an eerily beautiful woman, and Charles (Jeremy Irons), a biologist about to be married; they have a brief but passionate affair but her deep sadness and past force her to leave him. The movie works on two chronological levels, switching seamlessly between the two parallel stories which mirror each other in many ways.
Visually, this film is stunningly beautiful and haunting in the way the story of Sarah, a Victorian outcast, unfolds to reveal her history.”
For his prototype artwork, displaying a high degree of finish (for what is effectively a prelim), British artist Vic Fair chose a simple but very effective design of the Meryl Streep character’s portrait enveloping a key moment from the movie. As good as the idea might have been, the design was rejected in favour of what appears to be a mostly photographic image for the resulting movie poster campaign (that still managed to retain much of Fair’s original concept).
“Actors Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Hilton McRae, Emily Morgan and Charlotte Mitchell under Karel Reisz's superb, sensitive and fluid direction bring Harold Pinter and John Fowles screenplay to the screen in stunning fashion. Some of the scenes will live in the memory for a long time, so powerful are the visuals.
Set in 19th Century England it is the story of a chance meeting between Sarah (Meryl Streep), an eerily beautiful woman, and Charles (Jeremy Irons), a biologist about to be married; they have a brief but passionate affair but her deep sadness and past force her to leave him. The movie works on two chronological levels, switching seamlessly between the two parallel stories which mirror each other in many ways.
Visually, this film is stunningly beautiful and haunting in the way the story of Sarah, a Victorian outcast, unfolds to reveal her history.”
For his prototype artwork, displaying a high degree of finish (for what is effectively a prelim), British artist Vic Fair chose a simple but very effective design of the Meryl Streep character’s portrait enveloping a key moment from the movie. As good as the idea might have been, the design was rejected in favour of what appears to be a mostly photographic image for the resulting movie poster campaign (that still managed to retain much of Fair’s original concept).
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About Vic Fair
Victor Fair was born in Chadwell Heath, Essex, on 18 March 1938. His father was an industrial designer for Ford who died when Victor was aged four. He left school aged 16 and got a job as a messenger boy for the Hector Hughes design agency and attended life drawing classes at St Martin's School of Art in the evening. After Hector Hughes he worked at the Dixons agency.
In the mid 1950s, Fair started his national service in the British Army when he served in Cyprus during the EOKA guerrilla campaign.
He could have avoided service, having previously suffered from tuberculosis and other medical conditions, but saw his enlistment as an opportunity to get away from a claustrophobic home life with his mother and sister where he was the man of the house following his father's death.[2] One of his jobs in the army was to search villages for weapons but he was more often to be found sketching the natives.
