Welcome to The Helen Mirren Archives, your premiere web resource on the British actress. Best known for her performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Prime Suspect" and her Oscar-winning role in "The Queen", Helen Mirren is one of the world's most eminent actors today. This unofficial fansite provides you with all latest news, photos and videos on her past and present projects.  Enjoy your stay.
Celebrating
10 years
on the web

Coming Through

Decemer 27, 1985 | ITV | 80 minutes
Directed by: Peter Barber-Fleming | Written by: Alan Plater
In 1912, D.H. Lawrence (Kenneth Branagh) and Frieda on Richthofen Weekley (Helen Mirren) met, fell in love and within weeks had eloped. In the process, Frieda abandoned her husband and three children. Their affair shocked society. "Coming Through" presents in two interwoven stories, attitudes towards the author, who is either revered as a sensetive moralist or attacked as a scandalous pornographer. In one story we see him during his lifetime in his hometown of Eastwood and in the second through the eyes of a modern couple, who research Lawrence's work and his affair with Frieda.
Cast: Kenneth Branagh (D.H. Lawrence), Helen Mirren (Frieda von Richtofen Weekley), Alison Steadman (Kate), Philip Martin Brown (David), Felicity Montagu (Jessie Chambers), Fiona Victory (Alice Dax), Norman Rodway (William Hopkin), Alison King (Sallie Hopkin), Lynn Farleigh (Lydia Lawrence), Malcolm Storry (Arthur Lawrence), Robin Paul Bassford (Young Lawrence), Benjamin Whitrow (Ernest Weekley), Sebastian Rose (Weekley Child), Liz May Brice (Elsa Weekley)

Production Notes

Kenneth Brannagh and Helen Mirren star in “Coming Through”, which tells the story of one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century and one of the major scandals. Frieda von Richthofen was born in 1879 in Metz. In 1899, she married a British philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley, with whom she had three children. They settled in Nottingham, where Ernest worked at the university. During her marriage to Weekley she started to translate pieces of German literature, mainly fairy tales, into English and took considerable pride in their publication in book form.

In 1912, she met D. H. Lawrence, at the time a former student of her husband. She soon fell in love with him and the pair eloped to Germany, leaving her children behind. During their stay, Lawrence was arrested for spying and, after the intervention of Frieda’s father, the couple walked south, over the Alps to Italy. Following her divorce from Weekley, Frieda and Lawrence married in 1914. They intended to return to the continent, but the outbreak of war kept them in England, where they endured official harassment and censorship. They also struggled with limited resources and D.H. Lawrence’s already frail health. Leaving post-war England at the earliest opportunity, they travelled widely, eventually settling at the Kiowa Ranch near Taos, New Mexico and, in Lawrence’s last years, at the Villa Mirenda, near Scandicci in Tuscany. After her husband’s death in Vence, France in 1930, she returned to Taos to live with her third husband, Angelo Ravagli. Frieda died in 1956.

Review ★★☆☆☆

The Lawrence/von Richthofen affair is often dubbed a scandal of the century. Watching “Coming Through”, you wonder why. The only scandalous thing is how badly underdeveloped its story is. Instead of following their lives and professional achievements, the film choses probably the most boring part – the weeks in which they first met. As their their story as a couple begins, the film ends. Even worse, “Coming Through” is interwoven with a second storyline of an equally boring modern-day couple researching the love affair through Lawrence’s books. It reminds of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” where the film-in-film story is used to show how society has changed. Here its clearly used to fill the running time because the love story is too short for a feature length film. It’s disappointing to see Brannagh and Mirren in such bland characters. They’re both solid performers here (Mirren sports a nice German accent), and I’m sure thy would have been fantastic if another time span of the characters was shown, but with a weak script and an uninteresting story, even Brannagh and Mirren can’t save “Coming Through”.

Coming Through is being listed under the following tags: , , ,