Helen Mirren Plays a Dying Patricia Highsmith in New Film
Helen Mirren plays the American crime novelist Patricia Highsmith in her final days in A Talent for Murder, a new film directed by Anton Corbijn.
The film is set in 1995. It is adapted from Joanna Murray-Smith's 2014 play Switzerland, which means a story first written for the stage has been reworked for the cinema. Corbijn, a photographer turned film director, takes the camera into the world of a writer whose name is now attached to a whole family of thrillers.
Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train, was given a second life when Alfred Hitchcock turned it into a film. Her 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley went on to become one of her most enduring books.
Her reach extended well beyond the crime shelf. The Price of Salt, later republished as Carol, sold a million copies under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. A pseudonym is a made-up name a writer uses instead of their own, and Highsmith used it for that book at a time when she did not want it linked to her work under her own name.
Her publishing story also involved one of the more unusual deals in the trade. Publisher Otto Penzler signed Highsmith to a six-book contract and started the Penzler Books imprint, a publisher's own label within a larger company, partly because she did not want to be known as a mystery writer. The arrangement shows how much control writers of the period could seek over how their work was presented to readers.
The Guardian has now published an exclusive feature, headlined "She was a monster: the real Patricia Highsmith by the people who knew her." The piece turns to people who knew her personally, and its title is the direct description those contributors are reflecting on. Readers who want to hear her from the people around her, rather than only from her novels, have a new place to start.
For anyone picking up Highsmith for the first time, the film and the feature offer two different doorways. One is a dramatised portrait of a writer near the end of her life. The other is a set of first-hand recollections from people who were there.
