title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Two weeks later, the Minister demonstrates Alex's rehabilitation to a gathering of officials. Alex is unable to fight back against an actor who taunts and attacks him and becomes ill wanting sex with a topless woman. The prison chaplain complains that Alex has been robbed of his free will; the Minister asserts that the Ludovico technique will cut crime and alleviate crowding in prisons.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Alex is released from prison, only to find that the police have sold his possessions to provide compensation to his victims and his parents have let out his room. Alex encounters an elderly vagrant whom he attacked years earlier, and the vagrant and his friends attack him. Alex is saved by two policemen but is shocked to find they are his former droogs Dim and Georgie. They drive him to the countryside, beat him, and nearly drown him before abandoning him. Alex barely makes it to the doorstep of a nearby home before collapsing.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Alex wakes up to find himself in the home of Mr Alexander, who is now using a wheelchair. Alexander does not recognise Alex from the previous attack but knows of him and the Ludovico technique from the newspapers. He sees Alex as a political weapon and prepares to present him to his colleagues. While bathing, Alex breaks into "Singin' in the Rain", causing Alexander to realise that Alex was the person who assaulted his wife and him. With help from his colleagues, Alexander drugs Alex and locks him in an upstairs bedroom. He then plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony loudly from the floor below. Unable to withstand the sickening pain, Alex attempts suicide by jumping out of the window.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Alex survives the attempt and wakes up in hospital with multiple injuries. While being given a series of psychological tests, he finds that he no longer has aversions to violence and sex. The Minister arrives and apologises to Alex. He offers to take care of Alex and get him a job in return for his co-operation with his election campaign and public relations counter-offensive. As a sign of goodwill, the Minister brings in a stereo system playing Beethoven's Ninth. Alex then contemplates violence and has vivid thoughts of having sex with a woman in front of an approving crowd, thinking to himself, "I was cured, all right!"


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The film's central moral question is the definition of "goodness" and whether it makes sense to use aversion therapy to stop immoral behaviour. Stanley Kubrick, writing in "Saturday Review", described the film: "A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots." Similarly, on the production's call sheet, Kubrick wrote: "It is a story of the dubious redemption of a teenage delinquent by condition-reflex therapy. It is, at the same time, a running lecture on free-will."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, though not through choice. His goodness is involuntary; he has become the titular clockwork orange—organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside. After Alex has undergone the Ludovico technique, the chaplain criticises his new attitude as false, arguing that true goodness "must" come from within. This leads to the theme of abusing liberties—personal, governmental, civil—by Alex, with two conflicting political forces, the Government and the Dissidents, both manipulating Alex purely for their own political ends. The story portrays the "conservative" and "leftist" parties as equally worthy of criticism. The writer Frank Alexander, a victim of Alex and his gang, wants revenge against Alex and sees him as a means of definitively turning the populace against the incumbent government and its new regime. He fears the new government and in a telephone conversation, he says: "Recruiting brutal young roughs into the police; proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we've seen it all before in other countries; the thin end of the wedge! Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: On the other side, the Minister of the Interior (the Government) jails Mr Alexander (the Dissident Intellectual) on the excuse of his endangering Alex (the People), rather than the government's totalitarian regime (described by Mr Alexander). It is unclear whether or not he has been harmed; however, the Minister tells Alex that the writer has been denied the ability to write and produce "subversive" material that is critical of the incumbent government and meant to provoke political unrest.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The film critiques the behaviourism or "behavioural psychology" propounded by psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Burgess disapproved of behaviourism, calling Skinner's book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (1971) "one of the most dangerous books ever written". Although behaviourism's limitations were conceded by its principal founder, Watson, Skinner argued that behaviour modification—specifically, operant conditioning (learned behaviours via systematic reward-and-punishment techniques) rather than the "classical" Watsonian conditioning—is the key to an ideal society. The film's Ludovico technique is widely perceived as a parody of aversion therapy, which is a form of classical conditioning.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Author Paul Duncan said: "Alex is the narrator so we see everything from his point of view, including his mental images. The implication is that all of the images, both real and imagined, are part of Alex's fantasies."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Psychiatrist Aaron Stern, the former head of the MPAA rating board, believed that Alex represents man in his natural state, the unconscious mind. Alex becomes "civilised" after receiving his Ludovico "cure" and the sickness in the aftermath Stern considered to be the "neurosis imposed by society".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Kubrick told film critics Philip Strick and Penelope Houston: "Alex makes no attempt to deceive himself or the audience as to his total corruption or wickedness. He is the very personification of evil. On the other hand, he has winning qualities: his total candour, his wit, his intelligence, and his energy; these are attractive qualities and ones, I might add, which he shares with Richard III."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The society depicted in the film was perceived by some as Communist (as Michel Ciment pointed out in an interview with Kubrick) due to its slight ties to Russian culture. The teenage slang has a heavily Russian influence, as in the novel; Burgess explains the slang as being, in part, intended to draw a reader into the world of the book's characters and to prevent the book from becoming outdated. There is some evidence to suggest that the society is a socialist one or perhaps a society evolving from a failed socialism into an authoritarian society. In the novel, streets have paintings of working men in the style of Russian socialist art, and the film shows a mural of socialist artwork with obscenities drawn on it. As Malcolm McDowell points out on the DVD commentary, Alex's residence was shot on failed municipal architecture and the name "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North" alludes to socialist-style housing.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: When the new right-wing government takes power, the atmosphere is certainly more authoritarian than the anarchist air of the beginning. Kubrick's response to Ciment's question remained ambiguous as to what kind of society it is. Kubrick asserted that the film held comparisons between both ends of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated: "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left... They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Anthony Burgess sold the film rights of his novel for , shortly after its publication in 1962. Originally, the film was projected to star the rock band The Rolling Stones, with the band's lead singer Mick Jagger expressing interest in playing the lead role of Alex, and British filmmaker Ken Russell attached to direct. However, this never came to fruition due to problems with the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), and the rights ultimately fell to Kubrick.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: McDowell was chosen for the role of Alex after Kubrick saw him in the film "if..." (1968). When asking why he was picked for the role, Kubrick told him: "You can exude intelligence on the screen." He also helped Kubrick on the uniform of Alex's gang, when he showed Kubrick the cricket whites he had. Kubrick asked him to put the box (jockstrap) not under but on top of the costume.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: During the filming of the Ludovico technique scene, McDowell scratched a cornea and was temporarily blinded. The doctor standing next to him in the scene, dropping saline solution into Alex's forced-open eyes, was a real physician present to prevent the actor's eyes from drying. McDowell also cracked some ribs filming the humiliation stage show. A unique special effect technique was used when Alex jumps out of the window in a suicide attempt, showing the camera approaching the ground from Alex's point of view. This effect was achieved by dropping a Newman-Sinclair clockwork camera in a box, lens-first, from the third storey of the Corus Hotel. To Kubrick's surprise, the camera survived six takes.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The cinematic adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" (1962) was not initially planned. Screenplay writer Terry Southern gave Kubrick a copy of the novel, but, as he was developing a Napoleon Bonaparte-related project, Kubrick put it aside. Kubrick's wife, in an interview, said she had given Kubrick the novel after having read it. Kubrick said: "I was excited by everything about it: the plot, the ideas, the characters, and, of course, the language. The story functions, of course, on several levels: political, sociological, philosophical, and, what's most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level." Kubrick wrote a screenplay faithful to the novel, saying: "I think whatever Burgess had to say about the story was said in the book, but I did invent a few useful narrative ideas and reshape some of the scenes." Kubrick based the script on the shortened US edition of the book, which omitted the final chapter.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Kubrick was a perfectionist who researched meticulously, with thousands of photographs taken of potential locations, and many scene takes. Like Malcolm McDowell, he usually "got it right" early on, so there were few takes. He was so meticulous that McDowell stated: "If Kubrick hadn't been a film director he'd have been a General Chief of Staff of the US Forces. No matter what it is—even if it's a question of buying a shampoo it goes through him. He just likes total control." Filming took place between September 1970 and April 1971, making "A Clockwork Orange" the quickest film shoot in his career. Technically, to achieve and convey the fantastic, dream-like quality of the story, he filmed with extreme wide-angle lenses such as the Kinoptik Tegea 9.8 mm for 35 mm Arriflex cameras.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The main theme is an electronic arrangement of Henry Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary", and the soundtrack has two of Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance Marches".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Alex is fanatical about Ludwig van Beethoven in general and his Ninth Symphony in particular, and the soundtrack includes an electronic version specially arranged by Wendy Carlos of the Scherzo and other parts of the Symphony. The soundtrack contains more music by Rossini than by Beethoven. The fast-motion sex scene with the two girls, the slow-motion fight between Alex and his Droogs, the fight with Billy Boy's gang, the drive to the writer's home ("playing 'hogs of the road'"), the invasion of the Cat Lady's home, and the scene where Alex looks into the river and contemplates suicide before being approached by the beggar are all accompanied by Rossini's "William Tell Overture" or "The Thieving Magpie" Overture.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: On release, "A Clockwork Orange" was met with mixed reviews. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" praised the film: "McDowell is splendid as tomorrow's child, but it is always Mr. Kubrick's picture, which is even technically more interesting than "2001". Among other devices, Mr. Kubrick constantly uses what I assume to be a wide-angle lens to distort space relationships within scenes, so that the disconnection between lives, and between people and environment, becomes an actual, literal fact." The following year, after the film won the New York Film Critics Award, he called it "a brilliant and dangerous work, but it is dangerous in a way that brilliant things sometimes are". The film also had notable detractors. Film critic Stanley Kauffmann commented, "Inexplicably, the script leaves out Burgess' reference to the title". Roger Ebert gave "A Clockwork Orange" two stars out of four, calling it an "ideological mess". In her "New Yorker" review titled "Stanley Strangelove", Pauline Kael called it pornographic because of how it dehumanised Alex's victims while highlighting the sufferings of the protagonist. Kael derided Kubrick as a "bad pornographer", noting the Billyboy's gang extended stripping of the very buxom woman they intended to rape, claiming it was offered for titillation.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: John Simon noted that the novel's most ambitious effects were based on language and the alienating effect of the narrator's Nadsat slang, making it a poor choice for a film. Concurring with some of Kael's criticisms about the depiction of Alex's victims, Simon noted that the character of Mr Alexander, who was young and likeable in the novel, was played by Patrick Magee, "a very quirky and middle-aged actor who specialises in being repellent". Simon comments further that "Kubrick over-directs the basically excessive Magee until his eyes erupt like missiles from their silos and his face turns every shade of a Technicolor sunset".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Over the years, "A Clockwork Orange" gained a status as a cult classic. For "The Guardian", Philip French stated that the film's controversial reputation likely stemmed from the fact that it was released during a time when fear of teenage delinquency was high. Adam Nayman of "The Ringer" wrote that the film's themes of delinquency, corrupt power structures and dehumanisation are relevant in today's society. Simon Braund of "Empire" praised the "dazzling visual style" and McDowell's "simply astonishing" portrayal of Alex. Roger Ebert softend on the film years after first viewing it declaring on his talk show that while he still thought the film had "all head and no heart", he felt Kubrick's detachments from the violence more so than he did in the first viewing.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 88% based on 80 reviews, with an average rating of 8.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Disturbing and thought-provoking, "A Clockwork Orange" is a cold, dystopian nightmare with a very dark sense of humor". Metacritic gives the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on reviews by 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The film was a box-office success, grossing $41 million in the United States and about $73 million overseas for a worldwide total of $114 million on a budget of $1.3 million.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The film was also successful in the United Kingdom, playing for over a year at the Warner West End in London. After two years of release, the film had earned Warner Bros. rentals of $2.5 million in the United Kingdom and was the number three film for 1973 behind "Live and Let Die" and "The Godfather".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In the United States, "A Clockwork Orange" was given an X rating in its original release in 1972. Later, Kubrick replaced approximately 30 seconds of sexually explicit footage from two scenes with less explicit action to obtain an R rating re-release later in 1972.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Because of the explicit sex and violence, The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures rated it "C" ("condemned"), a rating which forbade Roman Catholics seeing the film. In 1982, the office abolished the "condemned" rating. Subsequently, films deemed to have unacceptable levels of sex and violence by the Conference of Bishops are rated "O", "morally offensive".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Although it was passed uncut for UK cinemas in December 1971, British authorities considered the sexual violence in the film to be extreme. In March 1972, during the trial of a 14-year-old boy accused of the manslaughter of a classmate, the prosecutor referred to "A Clockwork Orange", suggesting that the film had a macabre relevance to the case. The film was linked to the murder of an elderly vagrant by a 16-year-old boy in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, who pleaded guilty after telling police that friends had told him of the film "and the beating up of an old boy like this one". Roger Gray, for the defence, told the court that "the link between this crime and sensational literature, particularly "A Clockwork Orange", is established beyond reasonable doubt". The press also blamed the film for a rape in which the attackers sang "Singin' in the Rain" as "Singin' in the Rape". Christiane Kubrick, the director's wife, has said that the family received threats and had protesters outside their home.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The film was withdrawn from British release in 1973 by Warner Bros at the request of Kubrick. In response to allegations that the film was responsible for copycat violence Kubrick stated:


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: The Scala Cinema Club went into receivership in 1993 after losing a legal battle following an unauthorised screening of the film. In the same year, Channel 4 broadcast "Forbidden Fruit", a 27-minute documentary about the withdrawal of the film in Britain. It contains footage from "A Clockwork Orange". It was difficult to see "A Clockwork Orange" in the United Kingdom for 27 years. It was only after Kubrick died in 1999 that the film was re-released theatrically, on VHS, and on DVD. On 4 July 2001, the uncut version premiered on Sky TV's "Sky Box Office", where it ran until mid-September.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In Ireland, the film was banned on 10 April 1973. Warner Bros. decided against appealing the decision. Eventually, the film was passed uncut for cinema on 13 December 1999 and released on 17 March 2000. The re-release poster, a replica of the original British version, was rejected due to the words "ultra-violence" and "rape" in the tagline. Head censor Sheamus Smith explained his rejection to "The Irish Times": "I believe that the use of those words in the context of advertising would be offensive and inappropriate."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In Singapore, the film was banned for over 30 years, before an attempt at release was made in 2006. However, the submission for an M18 rating was rejected, and the ban was not lifted. The ban was later lifted and the film was shown uncut (with an R21 rating) on 28 October 2011, as part of the Perspectives Film Festival.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In South Africa, it was banned under the apartheid regime for 13 years, then in 1984 was released with one cut and only made available to people over the age of 21. It was banned in South Korea and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Nova Scotia. The Maritime Film Classification Board also reversed the ban eventually. Both jurisdictions now grant an "R" rating to the film.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In Brazil, the film was banned under the military dictatorship until 1978, when the film was released in a version with black dots covering the genitals and breasts of the actors in the nude scenes.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In Spain, the film debuted at the 1975 Valladolid International Film Festival under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. It was expected to be screened in the University of Valladolid but, due to student protests, the university had been closed for two months. The final screenings were in the commercial festival venues, with long queues of expectant students. After the festival, the film went into the arthouse circuit and later in commercial cinemas successfully.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In Malta, a ban on the film was lifted in 2000, when it was shown in local cinemas for the first time. The film was brought up during the compilation of evidence on the rape and murder of Paulina Dembska, which took place on 2 January 2022 in Sliema, for the accused attacker compared himself to Alex during police interrogation.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Burgess had mixed reception about the film adaptation of his novel, publicly saying he loved Malcolm McDowell and Michael Bates, and the use of music. He praised it as so "brilliant" that it might be dangerous. He was concerned that it lacked the novel's redemptive final chapter, an absence he blamed upon his American publisher and not Kubrick. All US editions of the novel prior to 1986 omit the final chapter. Kubrick called the missing chapter "an extra chapter" and claimed that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, and that he had never seriously considered using it. In Kubrick's opinion – as in the opinion of other readers, including the original American editor – the final chapter was unconvincing and inconsistent with the book.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Burgess reports in his autobiography "You've Had Your Time" (1990) that he and Kubrick at first enjoyed a good relationship, each holding similar philosophical and political views and each very interested in literature, cinema, music, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Burgess's novel "Napoleon Symphony" (1974) was dedicated to Kubrick. Their relationship soured when Kubrick left Burgess to defend the film from accusations of glorifying violence. A lapsed Catholic, Burgess tried many times to explain the Christian moral points of the story to outraged Christian organisations and to defend it against newspaper accusations that it supported fascist dogma. He also went to receive awards given to Kubrick on his behalf. He was in no way involved in the production of the film. The only profit he made directly from the film was the initial $500 that had been given to him for the rights to the adaptation.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Burgess's own stage adaptation of the novel, "A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music" (1984), contains a direct reference to Kubrick. In the final moment of the play Alex joins in a song with the other characters. In the script's stage directions it states that while this happens: "A man bearded like Stanley Kubrick comes on playing, in exquisite counterpoint, 'Singin’ in the Rain' on the trumpet. He is kicked off the stage."


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Kubrick's film is relatively faithful to the Burgess novel, omitting only the final, positive chapter, in which Alex matures and outgrows sociopathy. While the film ends with Alex being offered an open-ended government job, implying he remains a sociopath at heart, the novel ends with Alex's positive change in character. This plot discrepancy occurred because Kubrick based his screenplay on the novel's American edition, in which the final chapter had been deleted on the insistence of its American publisher. He claimed not to have read the complete, original version of the novel until he had almost finished writing the screenplay, and that he never considered using it. The introduction to the 1996 edition of "A Clockwork Orange" says that Kubrick found the end of the original edition too blandly optimistic and unrealistic.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In the US the film has been widely available on home video since 1980 and was re-released several times on VHS. It was first released on DVD in the US on 29 June 1999.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In the UK the film was eventually released by Warner Home Video on 13 November 2000 (on both VHS and DVD), individually and as part of "The Stanley Kubrick Collection" DVD set. Due to negative comments from fans, Warner Bros re-released the film, its image digitally restored and its soundtrack remastered. A limited-edition collector's set with a soundtrack disc, film poster, booklet, and film strip followed, and was discontinued. In 2005, a British re-release, packaged as an "Iconic Film" in a limited-edition slipcase was published, identical to the remastered DVD set, except for different package cover art. In 2006, Warner Bros announced the September publication of a two-disc special edition featuring a Malcolm McDowell commentary, and the releases of other two-disc sets of Stanley Kubrick films. Several British retailers had set the release date as 6 November 2006. The release was delayed and re-announced for 2007 Holiday Season.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: An HD DVD, Blu-ray, and DVD version was re-released on 23 October 2007, alongside four other Kubrick classics, with 1080p video transfers and remixed Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (for HD DVD) and uncompressed 5.1 PCM (for Blu-ray) audio tracks. Unlike the previous version, the DVD re-release edition is anamorphically enhanced. The Blu-ray was reissued for the 40th anniversary of the film's release, identical to the previously released Blu-ray, plus a Digibook and the "" documentary as a bonus feature.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In 2021, a 4K restoration was completed with Kubrick's former assistant Leon Vitali working closely with Warner Bros. It was released in the US on 21 September 2021 and 4 October 2021 in the UK.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: Along with "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), "The Wild Bunch" (1969), "Soldier Blue" (1970), "Dirty Harry" (1971), and "Straw Dogs" (1971), the film is considered a landmark in the relaxation of control on violence in cinema.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: "A Clockwork Orange" remains an influential work in cinema and other media. The film is frequently referenced in popular culture, which Adam Chandler of "The Atlantic" attributes to Kubrick's "genre-less" directing techniques that brought novel innovation in filming, music, and production that had not been seen at the time of the film's original release.


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: "The Village Voice" ranked "A Clockwork Orange" at number 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. The film appears several times on the American Film Institute's (AFI) top movie lists. The film was listed at No. 46 in the 1998 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, at No. 70 in the 2007 second listing. "Alex DeLarge" is listed 12th in the villains section of the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. In 2008, the AFI's 10 Top 10 rated "A Clockwork Orange" as the 4th greatest science-fiction movie to date. The film was also placed 21st in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: In the British Film Institute's 2012 "Sight & Sound" polls of the world's greatest films, "A Clockwork Orange" was ranked 75th in the directors' poll and 235th in the critics' poll. In 2010, "Time" magazine placed it 9th on their list of the Top 10 Ridiculously Violent Movies. In 2008, "Empire" ranked it 37th on their list of "The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time", and in 2013, "Empire" ranked it 11th on their list of "The 100 Best British Films Ever". In 2010, The Guardian ranked the film 6th in its list of 25 greatest arthouse films. The Spanish director Luis Buñuel praised the film highly. He once said: ""A Clockwork Orange" is my current favourite. I was predisposed against the film. After seeing it, I realised it is only a movie about what the modern world really means".


title: A Clockwork Orange (film)

text: "A Clockwork Orange" was added to the National Film Registry in 2020 as a work considered to be of "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significance.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, "The Colossus and Other Poems" (1960) and "Ariel" (1965), as well as "The Bell Jar", a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963. "The Collected Poems" was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and the University of Cambridge, England, where she was a student at Newnham College. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. Their relationship was tumultuous and, in her letters, Plath alleges abuse at his hands. They had two children before separating in 1962.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She killed herself in 1963.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who authored a book about bumblebees.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born. In 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts. Plath's mother, Aurelia, with Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived since 1920 in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the "Boston Herald"s children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947. "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed." Plath also had an IQ of around 160.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery, in Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem "Electra on Azalea Path". After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942. Plath commented in "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Plath attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950. Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in the "Christian Science Monitor."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She excelled academically. While at Smith, she lived in Lawrence House, and a plaque can be found outside her old room. She edited "The Smith Review." After her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at "Mademoiselle" magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel "The Bell Jar."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: She was furious at not being at a meeting the editor had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas—a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She hung around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs to see if she had enough "courage" to kill herself. During this time she was not accepted into a Harvard writing seminar with author Frank O’Connor. Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953 by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: She survived this first suicide attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion". She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith Scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In January 1955, she submitted her thesis, "The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels", and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B. "summa cum laude". She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper "Varsity". At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound Archive), Plath describes how she met Hughes:


title: Sylvia Plath

text: I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The couple married on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr, Holborn in London (now in the Borough of Camden) with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using ouija boards.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States, and from September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write, and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and, in the evening sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her experience and she did so. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempts with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to consider herself as a more serious, focused poet and short story writer. At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material. The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence. Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, "The Colossus".


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In a letter to her therapist, Plath wrote that Hughes beat her two days before the miscarriage. In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar" and immediately after this, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. Nicholas was born in January 1962. In mid-1962, Plath and Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In August 1961, the couple rented their flat at Chalcot Square to Assia Wevill (née Gutmann) and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him. In June 1962, Plath had a car accident which she described as one of many suicide attempts. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Assia Wevill; in September, Plath and Hughes separated.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection "Ariel" during the final months of her life. In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The northern winter of 1962–1963 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection, which would be published after her death (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). Her only novel, "The Bell Jar", was published in January 1963, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Before her death, Plath tried several times to take her own life. On August 24, 1953, she overdosed on sleeping pills, then, in June1962, she drove her car off the side of the road into a river, which she later said was an attempt to take her own life.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In January1963, Plath spoke with John Horder, her general practitioner, and a close friend who lived near her. She described the current depressive episode she was experiencing; it had been ongoing for six or seven months. While for most of the time she had been able to continue working, her depression had worsened and become severe, "marked by constant agitation, suicidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life". Plath struggled with insomnia, taking medication at night to induce sleep, and frequently woke up early. She lost 20pounds (9 kg). However, she continued to take care of her physical appearance and did not outwardly speak of feeling guilty or unworthy.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Horder prescribed her an anti-depressant, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Commentators have argued that because anti-depressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was 30years old.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's intentions have been debated. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, Trevor Thomas (1907–1993), what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr.Horder", including the doctor's phone number. It is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Thomas would have been able to see the note (although the escaping gas had seeped downstairs and also rendered Thomas unconscious while he slept). However, in her biography "Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath", Plath's friend, Jillian Becker, wrote, "According to Mr.Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office, [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven and had really meant to die." Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion." Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart". In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help, and spoke, in a BBC interview in March2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression, saying he regretted his inability to offer her emotional support: "I failed her on that level. I was thirtyyears old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: An inquest was held on February 15 and gave a ruling of suicide as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated for six months. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous." Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her: "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers attribute the source of the quote to the Hindu text the "Bhagavad Gita" or to the 16th-century Buddhist novel "Journey to the West" written by Wu Cheng'en.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The daughter of Plath and Hughes, Frieda Hughes, is a writer and artist. On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes, their son, hanged himself at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, her first poem appearing in the "Boston Traveller". By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over 50 short stories and been published in a raft of magazines. In fact Plath desired much of her life to write prose and stories, and she felt that poetry was an aside. But, in sum, she was not successful in publishing prose. At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. Additionally, she won a summer editor position at the young women's magazine "Mademoiselle", and, on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea". Later, she wrote for the university publication, "Varsity".


title: Sylvia Plath

text: By the time Heinemann published her first collection, "The Colossus and Other Poems" in the UK in late 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in "Harper's", "The Spectator" and "The Times Literary Supplement". All the poems in "The Colossus" had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with "The New Yorker". It was, however, her 1965 collection "Ariel", published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests. "Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: "The Colossus" received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting Plath's voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at "Punch" called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi at the "Manchester Guardian" said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published in America in 1962 to less-glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's semi-autobiographical novel—her mother wanted to block publication—was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971. Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar". She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past". Plath dated a Yale senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in "The Bell Jar" is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel. Plath also used the novel to highlight the issue of women in the workforce during the 1950s. She strongly believed in women's abilities to be writers and editors, while society forced them to fulfill secretarial roles.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In 1963, after "The Bell Jar" was published, Plath began working on another literary work, titled "Double Exposure", which was never published. According to Ted Hughes in 1979, Plath left behind a typescript of "some 130 pages", but in 1995 he spoke of just "sixty, seventy pages". Olwyn Hughes wrote in 2003 that the typescript may have consisted of the first two chapters, and did not exceed sixty pages.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The posthumous publication of "Ariel" in 1965 precipitated Plath's rise to fame. The poems in "Ariel" mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book "Life Studies" as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death. The impact of "Ariel" was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as "Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus". Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez, who wrote about her extensively, said of her later work: "Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick—everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance, but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life." Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes everyday elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality. Plath's poem "Morning Song" from "Ariel" is regarded as one of her finest poems on "freedom of expression" of an artist.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in "The Bell Jar" is just that same story." The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatisation" and of self-pity. Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In 1971, the volumes "Winter Trees" and "Crossing the Water" were published in the UK, including nine previously unseen poems from the original manuscript of "Ariel". Writing in "New Statesman", fellow poet Peter Porter wrote:


title: Sylvia Plath

text: "Crossing the Water" is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as "The Colossus" or "Ariel".


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The "Collected Poems", published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2006 Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled "Ennui". The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, was published in the online journal "Blackbird".


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection, "Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963", came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of "The Bell Jar" in America. Plath began keeping a diary from the age of 11 and continued doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1982 as "The Journals of Sylvia Plath", edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath". More than half of the new volume contained newly released material; the American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event". Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. He has been condemned repeatedly for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it". Hughes lost another journal and an unfinished novel, and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. He has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath". When Hughes' mistress Assia Wevill killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonouring her name by removing the stone. Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book "Monster" (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains". Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, although it remained in circulation among feminists. Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder. Plath's poem "The Jailor", in which the speaker condemns her husband's brutality, was included in Morgan's 1970 anthology "."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of "The Guardian" and "The Independent". In "The Guardian" on April 20, 1989, Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. ... If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech ... The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium in 1998, Hughes published "Birthday Letters" that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's subsequent suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped best seller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes had terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book went on to win the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath took her own life.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary "Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death" examined Hughes' life and work; it included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's "Lost Son" sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 20. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. "The Colossus" is shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the 40 poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's landscape poetry, which she wrote throughout her life, has been described as "a rich and important area of her work that is often overlooked ... some of the best of which was written about the Yorkshire moors". Her September 1961 poem "Wuthering Heights" takes its title from the Emily Brontë novel, but its content and style is Plath's own particular vision of the Pennine landscape.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: It was Plath's publication of "Ariel" in 1965 that precipitated her rise to fame. As soon as it was published, critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect, and remains so. "Time" and "Life" both reviewed the slim volume of "Ariel" in the wake of her death. The critic at "Time" said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. ... In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus', fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to "Ariel", that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder'."


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Writer Honor Moore describes "Ariel" as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened ... Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified." Some feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012. An English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence at 3 Chalcot Square, in London.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: In 2018, "The New York Times" published an obituary for Plath as part of the Overlooked history project.


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962. Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote:


title: Sylvia Plath

text: I have never before learned anything from a poetic reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath’s reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "The Applicant", "Fever 103°"—were beautifully read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!"


title: Sylvia Plath

text: Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic "Sylvia" (2003). Despite criticism from Elizabeth Sigmund, a friend of Plath and Hughes, that Plath was portrayed as a "permanent depressive and possessive person", she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy". Frieda Hughes, now a poet and painter, who was two years old when her mother died, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' lives. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by the family's tragedies. In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother" in "Tatler":


title: Antony Starr

text: Antony Starr (born 25 October 1975) is a New Zealand actor, known for his television roles. He played the dual roles of Jethro and Van West on "Outrageous Fortune" (2005–10), Lucas Hood on "Banshee" (2013–16), and Homelander on "The Boys" (2019–present).


title: Antony Starr

text: For his role in the 2012 Australian film "Wish You Were Here", Starr won the AACTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, among other accolades. He was nominated for the New Zealand Film Award for Best Actor for his performance in "After the Waterfall" (2010).


title: Antony Starr

text: Starr began his professional acting career early in the 1990s with a small part in "Shortland Street" and had guest roles in "".


title: Antony Starr

text: In 2001, Starr was cast in "Mercy Peak" as Todd Van der Velter, a guest role that he had throughout the show's three seasons. He also received a role as the brother of long running character Waverley Wilson in the soap opera "Shortland Street". He appeared for several weeks as part of the write out of the Minnie Crozier character. Starr stated he did not like the fast pace of the show and thought his performances suffered because of it.


title: Antony Starr

text: Since then, Starr's television credits have included a core cast role in kids' series "Hard Out" and guest roles in "P.E.T. Detectives" and "Street Legal" as well as a brief stint in "Serial Killers", the comedy series that was penned by "Outrageous Fortune" co-creator James Griffin.


title: Antony Starr

text: Playing twins Van and Jethro West won Starr the 2007 Air New Zealand Screen Award for Performance by an Actor, the award for Best Actor at the Qantas Television Awards and Best Actor at the Asian TV Awards in the same year. Readers of the TV Guide also voted Starr Best Actor in the 2007 TV Guide Best on the Box People's Choice Awards. In 2005, he was named Best Actor at the inaugural Qantas Television Awards for his role in "Outrageous Fortune".


title: Antony Starr

text: During the production of the first series of "Outrageous Fortune", Starr also juggled filming for Toa Fraser's debut feature, "No. 2" which was released in New Zealand in early 2006. Starr's other film credits include Roger Donaldson's "The World's Fastest Indian", the US comedy feature "Without a Paddle" and Brad McGann's feature film "In My Father's Den". Between series two and three of "Outrageous Fortune", Starr worked on a collaborative short film with some friends.


title: Antony Starr

text: Starr appeared on stage in the second edition of "Sex with Strangers" (2005). In 2004, Starr performed in two theatre productions: "Closer" at Auckland's Silo Theatre and "Sex with Strangers" directed by Colin Mitchell at the Herald Theatre.


title: Antony Starr

text: Between filming "Outrageous Fortune" seasons five and six, Starr starred in feature film "After the Waterfall" and the telefeature "Spies and Lies".


title: Antony Starr

text: In 2011, Starr joined the cast of the Australian police drama "Rush", playing Senior Sergeant Charlie Lewis. He will also have a role in the second series of "Lowdown".


title: Antony Starr

text: From 2013 to 2016, Starr starred in the television series, "Banshee", his first role on U.S. television. He played an unnamed ex-con who, after 15 years in prison, assumes the identity of Lucas Hood, becoming the new Sheriff of Banshee. Trying to reconnect with his former lover, Anastasia, both learn that he "has become a distant (violent) version of the man he once was". The show's fourth and final season began in April 2016. Also in 2016, Starr portrayed main character Garrett Hawthorne on the CBS crime/mystery series "American Gothic".


title: Antony Starr

text: In January 2018, it was announced that Starr was cast as The Homelander in "The Boys", Amazon Studios' adaptation of the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book of the same name. Season one was released in July 2019 and season two was released in September 2020. Season three was released in June 2022. In the series he plays opposite Karl Urban who is also from New Zealand. "We've got an American show with a Kiwi playing an all-American hero psychopath and another Kiwi playing an Englishman. It's a pretty bizarre mix-up," said Starr.


title: Antony Starr

text: On 4 March 2022, it was reported that Starr was arrested in Alicante, Spain after assaulting a 21-year old chef at a local pub. He was sentenced to a 12-month suspended prison sentence and paid $5,530 in restitution to avoid prison time.


title: Batman Begins

text: Batman Begins is a 2005 superhero film directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Nolan and David S. Goyer. The film is based on the DC Comics character Batman, it stars Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne / Batman, with Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe, and Morgan Freeman in supporting roles. The film reboots the "Batman" film series, telling the origin story of Bruce Wayne from the death of his parents to his journey to become Batman and his fight to stop Ra's al Ghul and the Scarecrow from plunging Gotham City into chaos.


title: Batman Begins

text: After "Batman & Robin" was panned by critics and underperformed at the box office, Warner Bros. Pictures cancelled future "Batman" films, including Joel Schumacher's planned "Batman Unchained." Between 1998 and 2003, several filmmakers collaborated with Warner Bros. in attempting to reboot the franchise. After the studio rejected a "Batman" origin story reboot Joss Whedon pitched in December 2002, Warner Bros. hired Nolan in January 2003 to direct a new film as Nolan and Goyer began development on the film in early 2003. Aiming for a darker, more realistic tone compared to the previous films, a primary goal for their vision was to engage the audience's emotional investment in both the Batman and Bruce Wayne identities of the lead character. The film, which was principally shot in the United Kingdom, Iceland and Chicago, relied heavily on traditional stunts and miniature effects, with computer-generated imagery being used in a minimal capacity compared to other action films. Comic book storylines such as "The Man Who Falls", "" and "" served as inspiration.


title: Batman Begins

text: Expectations for "Batman Begins" ranged from moderate to low, which originated from the poor reception of "Batman & Robin" that was credited with stalling the "Batman" film series in 1997. After premiering in Tokyo on May 31, 2005, the film was released on June 15, 2005. It received highly positive reviews from critics, who deemed the film an improvement over the Schumacher films, with praise aimed at the more mature tone and character-driven storyline, Bale's performance, musical score, direction, the deeper psychological focus and added layers of depth to the titular character's motives and the emotional weight compared to previous Batman films. The film grossed over $371.9 million worldwide, becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2005 and was the second highest grossing "Batman" film at the time behind Tim Burton's "Batman" (1989). Receiving a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, the film elevated Bale to leading man status while it made Nolan a high-profile director.


title: Batman Begins

text: Since its release, "Batman Begins" has been critically reassessed and it has been considered to be one of the best superhero films ever made, one of the best "Batman" films ever made, and has often been cited as one of the most influential films of the 2000s. It was credited for revitalizing the Batman character in popular culture, shifting its tone towards a darker and more serious tone and style. The film helped popularise the term reboot in Hollywood, inspiring studios and filmmakers to revive franchises with realistic and serious tones. It was followed by "The Dark Knight" (2008) and "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012), with the three films constituting "The Dark Knight Trilogy".


title: Batman Begins

text: In Gotham City, a young Bruce Wayne falls down a dry well and is attacked by a swarm of bats, developing a fear of them. Attending the opera with his parents, Thomas and Martha, Bruce becomes frightened by performers masquerading as bats and asks to leave. Outside, mugger Joe Chill murders Bruce's parents in front of him, and the orphaned Bruce is raised by the family butler, Alfred Pennyworth. 14 years later, Chill is paroled after testifying against mafia boss Carmine Falcone. Bruce intends to murder Chill to avenge his parents, but one of Falcone's assassins does so first. Bruce's childhood friend Rachel Dawes berates him for acting outside the justice system, saying that his father would be ashamed. After confronting Falcone, who tells him that real power comes from being feared, Bruce spends the next seven years traveling the world training in combat and immersing himself in the criminal underworld.


title: Batman Begins

text: In a Bhutan prison, he meets Henri Ducard, who recruits him to the League of Shadows led by Ra's al Ghul. After completing his training in ninja methods and purging his fears, Bruce learns that the League knows about Gotham and, believing the city is beyond saving, intends to destroy it. Bruce rejects the League and its edict that killing is necessary, burning down their temple during his escape. Ra's is killed by falling debris, while Bruce saves the unconscious Ducard. Returning to Gotham intent on fighting crime, Bruce takes an interest in his family's company, Wayne Enterprises, which is being taken public by the unscrupulous William Earle. Company archivist Lucius Fox, a friend of Bruce's father, allows Bruce access to prototype defense technologies, including a protective bodysuit and a heavily armored vehicle called a Tumbler. Bruce poses publicly as a shallow playboy, even to Rachel for a moment; while setting up a base in the caves beneath Wayne Manor and taking up the vigilante identity of "Batman", inspired by his childhood fear, which he has now conquered.


title: Batman Begins

text: Intercepting a drug shipment, Batman provides Rachel, now a Gotham Assistant District Attorney, with evidence against Falcone and enlists Sergeant James Gordon, one of Gotham's few honest cops, to arrest him. In prison, Falcone meets Dr. Jonathan Crane, a corrupt psychologist whom he has helped smuggle drugs into Gotham. Donning a scarecrow mask, Crane sprays Falcone with a fear-inducing hallucinogen which drives him insane, and has him transferred to Arkham Asylum. While investigating his crimes, Batman is sprayed with the hallucinogen and set on fire by Crane but manages to escape and is saved by Alfred, who gives him an antidote for the hallucinogen developed by Fox. When Rachel accuses Crane of corruption, he reveals to her that he has introduced his drug into Gotham's water supply. Crane then drugs Rachel with the hallucinogen, but Batman subdues him and sprays Crane with his own chemical to interrogate him, where Crane claims to work for Ra's al Ghul.


title: Batman Begins

text: Batman evades the police by attracting a large horde of bats using a high-pitched sound, to get Rachel to safety, administering her the antidote and giving her a vial of it for Gordon and another for mass production. At Bruce's birthday party, Ducard reappears and reveals himself to be the true Ra's al Ghul; the dead Ra's was a decoy. Having stolen a powerful microwave emitter from Wayne Enterprises, he plans to vaporize Gotham's water supply, rendering Crane's drug airborne and causing mass hysteria that will destroy the city. He sets Wayne Manor aflame and leaves Bruce to die, but Alfred rescues him. Ra's loads the emitter onto Gotham's monorail train to release the drug at the city's central water source. Batman rescues Rachel from a drugged mob and indirectly reveals his identity to her. Batman confronts Ra's on the train and disables its controls as Gordon uses the Tumbler's cannons to destroy a section of the track. Refusing to save Ra's again, Batman escapes the train and leaves him to die as it crashes.


title: Batman Begins

text: Bruce gains Rachel's respect and love, but she decides she cannot be with him now, telling him if Gotham should no longer need Batman, they can be together. Batman becomes a public hero and Bruce reveals he has purchased a controlling stake in Wayne Enterprises, firing Earle and replacing him with Fox. Sergeant Gordon is promoted to Lieutenant, shows Batman the Bat-Signal, and tells him about a criminal who leaves behind Joker playing cards. Batman promises to look into it, and disappears into the night.


title: Batman Begins

text: Other cast members include Mark Boone Junior as Arnold Flass, Gordon's corrupt partner; Linus Roache as Thomas Wayne, Bruce's late father; Larry Holden as district attorney Carl Finch; Colin McFarlane as Gillian B. Loeb, the police commissioner; Christine Adams as Jessica, William Earle's secretary; Vincent Wong as an old Asian prisoner; Sara Stewart as Martha Wayne, Bruce's late mother; Richard Brake as Joe Chill, the Waynes' killer; Gerard Murphy as the corrupt High Court Judge Faden; Charles Edwards as a Wayne Enterprises executive; Tim Booth as Victor Zsasz; Rade Šerbedžija as a homeless man, who is the last person to meet Bruce when he leaves Gotham, and the first civilian to see Batman, Risteárd Cooper and Andrew Pleavin as uniformed policemen, Jo Martin as a police prison official, and Shane Rimmer and Jeremy Theobald (the star and co-producer of Nolan's 1998 film "Following") as Gotham Water Board technicians. Jack Gleeson, who had previously co-starred with Bale in 2002's "Reign of Fire" and later found fame for his role as Joffrey Baratheon in the HBO series "Game of Thrones", appears as a young admirer of Batman who is later saved by him from Ra's al Ghul's men; Gleeson was cast at Bale's recommendation. Actors John Foo, Joey Ansah, Spencer Wilding, Dave Legeno, Khan Bonfils, Mark Strange, Grant Guirey, Rodney Ryan and Dean Alexandrou portray members of the League of Shadows. Hayden Nickel made his acting debut portraying James Gordon Jr.


title: Batman Begins

text: In January 2003, Warner Bros. hired "Memento" director Christopher Nolan to direct an untitled "Batman" film, and David S. Goyer signed on to write the script two months later. Nolan stated his intention to reinvent the film franchise of "Batman" by "doing the origins story of the character, which is a story that's never been told before". Nolan said that humanity and realism would be the basis of the origin film, and that "the world of Batman is that of grounded reality. [It] will be a recognizable, contemporary reality against which an extraordinary heroic figure arises." Goyer said that the goal of the film was to get the audience to care for both Batman and Bruce Wayne. Nolan felt the previous films were exercises in style rather than drama, and described his inspiration as being Richard Donner's 1978 film "Superman", in its focus on depicting the character's growth. Also similar to "Superman", Nolan wanted an all-star supporting cast for "Batman Begins" to lend a more epic feel and credibility to the story.


title: Batman Begins

text: Goyer wanted to reboot the franchise; he and Nolan saw Batman as a romantic character, and Nolan envisioned a large, sweeping film like "Lawrence of Arabia". Nolan did not have a problem with the studio's requirement that the film not be R-rated because he wanted to make the film that he wanted to see when 11 years old. His personal "jumping off point" of inspiration was "The Man Who Falls", a short story by Denny O'Neil and Dick Giordano about Bruce's travels throughout the world. The early scene in "Batman Begins" of young Bruce Wayne falling into a well was adapted from "The Man Who Falls". "", written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Tim Sale, influenced Goyer in writing the screenplay, with the villain Carmine Falcone as one of many elements which were drawn from "Halloween"s "sober, serious approach". The writers considered having Harvey Dent in the film, but replaced him with the new character Rachel Dawes when they realized they "couldn't do him justice". The character was later portrayed by Aaron Eckhart in the 2008 sequel "The Dark Knight". The sequel to "Halloween", "", also served as a minor influence. Goyer used the vacancy of Bruce Wayne's multi-year absence presented in "" to help set up some of the film's events in the transpiring years. In addition, the film's Sergeant James Gordon was based on his comic book incarnation as seen in "Year One". The writers of "Batman Begins" also used Frank Miller's "Year One" plot device, which was about a corrupt police force that led to Gordon and Gotham City's need for Batman. Due to Batman's extensive rogues gallery over seventy years, Goyer and Nolan decided to use the Scarecrow and Ra's al Ghul as the film's villains, as both characters had not been featured in previous "Batman" films nor in Adam West's 1960s television series.


title: Batman Begins

text: A common idea in the comics is that Bruce saw a Zorro film with his parents before they were murdered. Nolan explained that by ignoring that idea – which he stated is not found in Batman's first appearances – it emphasized the importance of bats to Bruce and that becoming a superhero is a wholly original idea on his part. It is for this reason Nolan believes other DC characters do not exist in the universe of his film; otherwise, Wayne's reasons for taking up costumed vigilantism would have been very different.


title: Batman Begins

text: As with all his films, Nolan refused a second unit; he did this in order to keep his vision consistent. Filming began in March 2004 in the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland (standing in for Bhutan). The crew built a village and the front doors to Ra's' temple, as well as a road to access the remote area. The weather was problematic, with winds, rain, and a lack of snow. A shot that cinematographer Wally Pfister had planned to take using a crane had to be completed with a handheld camera.


title: Batman Begins

text: Unlike Burton and Schumacher's Gotham City that did not exist in the real world, Nolan shot exteriors in London, New York, and Chicago as he wanted the city to seem recognizable. In seeking inspiration from "Superman" and other blockbuster films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nolan based most of the production in England, specifically Shepperton Studios. A Batcave set was built there and measured long, wide, and high. Production designer Nathan Crowley installed twelve pumps to create a waterfall with , and built rocks using molds of real caves. An airship hangar at Cardington, Bedfordshire was rented by Warner Bros. during April 2004 and, converted into a sound stage, was where the slum-district of "the Narrows" and the feet of the monorails were filmed.


title: Batman Begins

text: Mentmore Towers was chosen from twenty different locations for Wayne Manor, as Nolan and Crowley liked its white floors, which gave the impression of the manor as a memorial to Wayne's parents. The building chosen to represent Arkham Asylum was the National Institute for Medical Research building in Mill Hill, northwest London, England. The St Pancras railway station and the Abbey Mills Pumping Stations were used for Arkham's interiors. The Senate House of University College London was used for courtrooms. Some scenes, including the Tumbler pursuit, were filmed in Chicago at locations such as Lower Wacker Drive and 35 East Wacker. Authorities agreed to raise Franklin Street Bridge for a scene where access to the Narrows is closed.


title: Batman Begins

text: Despite the film's darkness, Nolan wanted to make the film appeal to a wide age range. "Not the youngest kids obviously, I think what we've done is probably a bit intense for them but I certainly didn't want to exclude the sort of ten to 12-year olds, because as a kid I would have loved to have seen a movie like this." Because of this, nothing gory or bloody was filmed.


title: Batman Begins

text: The score for "Batman Begins" was composed by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Nolan originally invited Zimmer to compose the music, and Zimmer asked Nolan if he could invite Howard to compose as well, as they had always planned a collaboration. The two composers collaborated on separate themes for the "split personality" of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, Batman. Zimmer and Howard began composing in Los Angeles and moved to London where they stayed for twelve weeks to complete most of their writing. Zimmer and Howard sought inspiration for shaping the score by visiting the "Batman Begins" sets.


title: Batman Begins

text: Zimmer wanted to avoid writing music that had been done in earlier "Batman" films, so the score became an amalgamation of orchestra and electronic music. The film's ninety-piece orchestra was developed from members of various London orchestras, and Zimmer chose to use more than the normal number of cellos. Zimmer enlisted a boy soprano to help reflect the music in some of the film's scenes where tragic memories of Bruce Wayne's parents are involved. "He's singing a fairly pretty tune and then he gets stuck, it's like froze, arrested development," said Zimmer. He also attempted to add a human dimension to Batman, whose behavior would typically be seen as "psychotic", through the music. Both composers collaborated to create 2 hours and 20 minutes worth of music for the film, with Zimmer composing the action sequences and Howard focusing on the dramatic scenes.


title: Batman Begins

text: Nolan used the 1982 science fiction film "Blade Runner" as a source of inspiration for "Batman Begins". He screened "Blade Runner" to Pfister and two others to show the attitude and style that he wanted to draw from the film. Nolan described the film's world as "an interesting lesson on the technique of exploring and describing a credible universe that doesn't appear to have any boundaries", a lesson that he applied to the production of "Batman Begins".


title: Batman Begins

text: Nolan worked with production designer Nathan Crowley to create the look of Gotham City. Crowley built a model of the city that filled Nolan's garage. Crowley and Nolan designed it as a large, modern metropolitan area that would reflect the various periods of architecture that the city had gone through. Elements were drawn from New York City, Chicago, and Tokyo; the latter for its elevated freeways and monorails. The Narrows was based on the slummish nature of the (now demolished) walled city of Kowloon in Hong Kong.


title: Batman Begins

text: Crowley started the process of designing the Tumbler for the film by model bashing. Crowley used the nose cone of a P-38 Lightning model to serve as the chassis for the Tumbler's turbine engine. Six models of the Tumbler were built to 1:12 scale in the course of four months. Following the scale model creation, a crew of over 30 people, including Crowley and engineers Chris Culvert and Annie Smith, carved a full-size replica of the Tumbler out of a large block of Styrofoam in two months.


title: Batman Begins

text: The styrofoam model was used to create a steel "test frame", which had to stand up to several standards: have a speed of over , go from 0 to in 5 seconds, possess a steering system to make sharp turns at city corners, and withstand a self-propelled launch of up to . On the first jump test, the Tumbler's front end collapsed and had to be completely rebuilt. The basic configuration of the newly designed Tumbler included a 5.7-liter Chevy V8 engine, a truck axle for the rear axle, front tires by Hoosier (which are actually dirt racing tires used on the right rear of open wheel sprint cars), 4 rear 44/18.5-16.5 Interco Super Swamper TSL tires (44" tall, 18.5" wide, mounted on a 16.5" wheel) and the suspension system of Baja racing trucks. The design and development process took nine months and cost several million dollars.


title: Batman Begins

text: With the design process complete, four street-ready race cars were constructed, with each vehicle possessing 65 panels and costing $250,000 to build. Two of the four cars were specialized versions. One version was the flap version, which had hydraulics and flaps to detail the close-up shots where the vehicle propelled itself through the air. The other version was the jet version, in which an actual jet engine was mounted onto the vehicle, fueled by six propane tanks. The visibility inside the vehicle was poor, so monitors were connected to cameras on the vehicle body. The professional drivers for the Tumblers practiced driving the vehicles for six months before they drove on the streets of Chicago for the film's scenes.


title: Batman Begins

text: The interior of the Tumbler was an immobile studio set and not actually the interior of a street-capable Tumbler. The cockpit was oversized to fit cameras for scenes filmed in the Tumbler interior. In addition, another version of the Tumbler was a miniature model that was 1:6 scale of the actual Tumbler. This miniature model had an electric motor and was used to show the Tumbler flying across ravines and between buildings. However, the actual Tumbler was used for the waterfall sequence.


title: Batman Begins

text: The filmmakers intended to create a very mobile Batsuit that would allow the wearer to move easily to fight and crouch. Previous film incarnations of the Batsuit had been stiff and especially restrictive of full head movement. Costume designer Lindy Hemming and her crew worked on the Batsuit at an FX workshop codenamed "Cape Town", a secured compound located at Shepperton Studios in London. The Batsuit's basic design was a neoprene undersuit, which was shaped by attaching molded cream latex sections. Christian Bale was molded and sculpted prior to his physical training so the team could work on a full body cast. To avoid imperfections picked up by sculpting with clay, plastiline was used to smooth the surface. In addition, the team brewed different mixtures of foam to find the mixture that would be the most flexible, light, durable, and black. The latter presented a problem, since the process to make the foam black reduced the foam's durability.


title: Batman Begins

text: For the cape, director Christopher Nolan wanted to have a "flowing cloak... that blows and flows as in so many great graphic novels". Hemming's team created the cape out of their own version of parachute nylon that had electrostatic flocking, a process shared with the team by the British Ministry of Defence. The process was used by the London police force to minimize night vision detection. The cape was topped by a cowl, which was designed by Nolan, Hemming, and costume effects supervisor Graham Churchyard. The cowl was created to be thin enough to allow motion but thick enough to avoid wrinkling when Bale turned his head in the Batsuit. Churchyard explained the cowl had been designed to show "a man who has angst", so his character would be revealed through the mask.


title: Batman Begins

text: Fight choreographers for "Batman Begins", Justo Dieguez and Andy Norman, trained actors and stunt performers using the Spanish "Keysi Fighting Method", which itself gained fame after it was used in the film and its sequel, "The Dark Knight"; however, the method was modified in "The Dark Knight Rises" due to Batman's age and physical condition and in order to match Bale's fighting style. The method is a self-defense system whose training is based on the study and cultivation of natural instincts.


title: Batman Begins

text: For "Batman Begins", Nolan preferred traditional stuntwork over computer-generated imagery. Scale models were used to represent the Narrows and Ra's al Ghul's temple. There were, however, several establishing shots that were CG composite images, such as Gotham's skyline, exterior shots of Wayne Tower, and some of the exterior monorail shots. The climactic monorail sequence mixed live action footage, model work, and CGI. The bats depicted in the film were entirely digital (except in shots containing only one or two bats), as it was decided that directing large numbers of real bats on-set would be problematic; dead bats were scanned to create digital models. Locations and sets were recreated digitally so that the flying bats would not appear incongruous once incorporated into the finished film.


title: Batman Begins

text: 2005 was expected by industry experts to underperform compared to 2004. Many attributed the slump to be a result of high ticket prices, marketing costs, DVD sales hitting record levels, and new technologies creating an incipient demand for movies delivered directly via the Internet, over-the-airwaves, satellite dish or cable set-top box. By the start of the theatrical summer in 2005 (May), the box office slumped for 11 consecutive weeks, with year-to-date ticket sales down 5.4 percent from last year even as ticket prices rose a moderate 3 percent, to around $6.40 on average, according to Exhibitor Relations. Theater attendance prior to the summer of 2005 declined about 8 percent.


title: Batman Begins

text: Several films were projected to not only perform well at the box office, but also reverse the slump at the box office. "" was expected by the industry to be the top grossing film of the summer due to being the final live action "Star Wars" film at the time. Other films that were expected to do well were "Batman Begins", "Madagascar", "Mr. & Mrs. Smith", "Fantastic Four", "War of the Worlds", and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".


title: Batman Begins

text: "Batman Begins" was expected by industry experts to help reverse the box office slump in June. However, there were concerns over a possible soft opening for the film. The previous film, "Batman & Robin", was widely panned by critics and was credited with stalling the franchise since 1997. Bale's lack of star power at the time and a lack of iconic villains such as the Joker and Penguin that were portrayed by A-list celebrities were seen as possible detachments from audiences. Some also expressed concerns that Holmes' involvement with the film could derail the film's financial prospect due to her high-profile relationship with Tom Cruise (whose film "War of the Worlds" opened the following weekend) after his controversial appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show"


title: Batman Begins

text: Warner Bros. held the world premiere for "Batman Begins" in Tokyo, Japan on May 31, 2005. The film opened on June 15, 2005, in the United States and Canada in 3,858 theaters, including 55 IMAX theaters.


title: Batman Begins

text: The DVD of "Batman Begins" was released on October 18, 2005, in both single-disc and two-disc deluxe editions and also released on VHS and UMD Video formats. In addition to the film, the deluxe edition contained featurettes and other bonus materials. The edition contained a small paperback booklet, the first "Batman" story, featured in "Detective Comics" #27, as well as "" and an excerpt from "". "Batman Begins" achieved first place in national sales and rental charts in October 2005, becoming the top-selling DVD of the fourth quarter of 2005. The DVD grossed $11.36 million in rental revenue. The DVD held its position at the top of the sales chart for a second week, but fell to second place behind "Bewitched" on video rental charts. The film had brought in $167 million in DVD sales by August 2006.


title: Batman Begins

text: "Batman Begins" was released on HD DVD on October 10, 2006. A "Limited Edition Giftset" of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on July 8, 2008, to coincide with "The Dark Knight" which hit theaters July 18, 2008. Due to the successful box office performance of "The Dark Knight", the "Batman Begins" DVD saw an increase in both sales and rentals. "Batman Begins" was released on 4K UHD Blu-ray on December 19, 2017. It received a novelization written by Dennis O'Neil, and a comic book adaptation by Scott Beatty.


title: Batman Begins

text: "Batman Begins" ranked at the top in its opening weekend, accumulating $48 million, which was seen as "strong but unimpressive by today's instantaneous blockbuster standards". The film's five-day gross was $72.9 million, beating "Batman Forever" (1995) as the franchise high. "Batman Begins" also broke the five-day opening record in the 55 IMAX theaters, grossing $3.16 million. Polled moviegoers rated the film with an A, and according to the studio's surveys, "Batman Begins" was considered the best of all the "Batman" films. The audience's demographic was 57 percent male and 54 percent people over the age of 25.


title: Batman Begins

text: The film held its top spot for another weekend, accumulating $28 million in a 43 percent drop from its first weekend. "Batman Begins" went on to gross $205 million in North America and had a worldwide total of $371.8 million from its original release. It earned $1.6 million more from its 2012 re-release, bringing its lifetime worldwide total to $373.4 million. It is the fourth-highest-grossing "Batman" film, , behind Tim Burton's "Batman", which grossed $411 million worldwide and also being surpassed by its sequels "The Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight Rises", both of which have grossed over $1 billion. "Batman Begins" averaged $12,634 per theater in its opening weekend. It was released in more theaters, but sold fewer tickets than the other previous "Batman" movies, with the exception of "Batman & Robin". "Batman Begins" was the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2005 in the US.


title: Batman Begins

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives "Batman Begins" an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads, "Brooding and dark, but also exciting and smart, "Batman Begins" is a film that understands the essence of one of the definitive superheroes." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating reviews, the film received an average score of 70 out of 100, based on 41 critics, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Batman Begins

text: James Berardinelli applauded Nolan and Goyer's work in creating more understanding into "who [Batman] is and what motivates him", something Berardinelli felt Tim Burton's film had lacked; at the same time, Berardinelli felt the romantic aspect between Bale and Holmes did not work because the actors lacked the chemistry Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder ("Superman"), or Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst ("Spider-Man") shared in their respective roles. According to "Total Film", Nolan manages to create such strong characters and story that the third-act action sequences cannot compare to "the frisson of two people talking", and Katie Holmes and Christian Bale's romantic subplot has a spark "refreshingly free of Peter Parker/Mary Jane-style whining".


title: Batman Begins

text: "Los Angeles Times" Kenneth Turan, who felt the film began slowly, stated that the "story, psychology and reality, not special effects", assisted the darkness behind Batman's arsenal; he noted that Neeson and Holmes, unlike Bale's ability to "feel his role in his bones", do not appear to fit their respective characters in "being both comic-book archetypes and real people". "The New Yorker"s David Denby did not share Berardinelli and Turan's opinion. He was unimpressed with the film, when comparing it to the two Tim Burton films, and that Christian Bale's presence was hindered by the "dull earnestness of the screenplay", the final climax was "cheesy and unexciting", and that Nolan had resorted to imitating the "fakery" used by other filmmakers when filming action sequences.