Lovers of Jane Austen can argue until forever about which “Pride and Prejudice” screen adaptation is the best. But wherever you stand in this irresolvable dispute, you’re sure to remember the electrifying moment in the 1995 BBC mini-series when Mr. Darcy (a tousled Colin Firth) strides manfully across his grand estate in a billowy wet shirt, post-swim.
Alert readers will know that this scene, which allows us (and Lizzy Bennet, played by Jennifer Ehle) to observe that Mr. Darcy is not just rich but also smoking hot, does not appear in the novel. Austen wasn’t one for overt eroticism. But to Andrew Davies, who wrote the adaptation, it’s a logical extension of the text — a cinematic manifestation of the R-rated themes sizzling beneath Austen’s PG-rated prose.
“Usually the things people think I’ve invented, they’re kind of there in the novels,” he said in a recent interview. “Things like seductions and duels — she tends to refer to obliquely,” he said of Austen. “But I always think, ‘Let’s make a scene of them.’”
With a career spanning six decades, Davies, now 88, is British television’s most celebrated and prolific adapter of literary works. A small sampling: the original British “House of Cards” (1990); “Middlemarch” (1994); “Vanity Fair” (1998); “Doctor Zhivago” (2002); “Bleak House” (2005); “The Line of Beauty” (2006); “Little Dorrit” (2008); “War & Peace” (2016); “Les Misérables” (2018); and “A Suitable Boy” (2020).
Davies has a knack for knowing how to make even a beloved and complicated novel work onscreen. Sometimes it’s by adding things (a brief seduction scene in the opening moments of “Sense and Sensibility” hinting at Mr. Willoughby’s perfidy); other times, it’s by omitting them (the opening fog in “Bleak House,” which works so beautifully on the page but “kept blowing away” during filming, as Davies put it).
His reputation for teasing out a book’s sexual undercurrents led the newspaper The Independent to call him the “undisputed czar of sexed-up classics.”
Though he’s dallied with many authors, Davies keeps returning to Austen, whose semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of her birth — is being celebrated this year. In addition to “Pride and Prejudice,” Davies has adapted for television “Emma” (1996), “Northanger Abbey” (2007), “Sense and Sensibility” (2008) and “Sanditon” (2019), based on one of Austen’s unfinished novels. He also collaborated on the screenplays for the “Pride and Prejudice”-inspired “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) and its first sequel.
In 2011, he addressed the annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and last year he appeared on Austen Chat, the group’s podcast. “It would be difficult to overstate the influence my guest today has had on the international Jane Austen community,” the host, Breckyn Wood, said in welcoming him to the show.
Davies’s skill, Wood added in a phone interview, is to fully immerse himself in the books, so that even his extra-textual excursions — the duel between Mr. Willoughby and Colonel Brandon that he added to “Sense and Sensibility,” for instance — are justified. “It’s a perfectly valid interpretation of what was said in the text,” she said.
(For the record, she added, Davies’s “Pride and Prejudice“ mini-series “is considered pretty universally as the definitive Austen adaptation” — at least by Janeites.)
Davies read Austen’s novels straight through as a teenager in Wales, in an omnibus volume with tiny print. He loves them, he said, for their perfectly crafted plots and for their intelligence, humor and delicious dialogue, chunks of which he pilfers for his scripts on the grounds that it can’t be improved upon.
Though his extensive catalog also includes original radio plays, screenplays, novels and children’s books, adaptation is where he feels most comfortable. “I’m not brilliant at writing original plots,” he said. “I’m quite good at analyzing what’s wrong with someone else’s and working out how to put it right.”
He was sipping rosé — he once identified his hobbies as “tennis, food and alcohol” — and chatting in the back garden of his generously sized house in Kenilworth, a town near Coventry in the English Midlands.
He’s lived here since the early 1960s; his first house, pre-success, was much smaller. His wife, Diana Huntley, died in 2023, after 63 years of marriage and two children, and he’s still making the wrenching adjustment to life without her.
His cat, a friendly tortoiseshell named Jessie, has been a help, snuggling with him in bed. They watch TV together, though they have different tastes. “She prefers things like snooker,” Davies said.
He grew up in Rhiwbina, a suburb of Cardiff in Wales. His father was a schoolteacher; both his parents were avid readers. Oddly enough, given his professional history, they had no TV. His first glimpse of the medium, whose selections were severely limited back then, was at a neighbor’s house — “a rich girl called Jane something who had a television that was the size of a wardrobe,” he said.
Sloughing off his Welsh accent while a student at University College London, Davies followed his father into teaching, ending up as a lecturer at the University of Warwick. He wrote on the side, first submitting radio plays to the BBC that got rejected more often than not.
He remained undiscouraged. “I went through years and years of being discovered and dropped, discovered and dropped,” he said. “But I always thought I was very talented.”
His first TV series adaptation, “The Legend of King Arthur,” appeared on the BBC in 1979. But the real breakthrough came the following year with “To Serve Them All My Days,” a mini-series based on a novel by R.F. Delderfield about a Welsh miner’s son who, injured and shellshocked in World War I, finds new purpose as a history teacher.
Davies brought his own experience to bear. “I thought, his cast of characters is really good but he clearly doesn’t know much about teaching at all,” he said of Delderfield. “There are lots of scenes in classrooms, and I’m not going to reproduce them — I’m going to invent new ones.”
In the 2002 Spike Jonze movie “Adaptation,” a high-concept dramedy that explores (among other things) the process of adapting books for film, there’s constant tension between highbrow and lowbrow approaches to screenwriting, manifested via two brothers (both played by Nicolas Cage). The lowbrow brother enrolls in Robert McKee’s famous storytelling seminar, much to the disdain of his highbrow twin.
Davies certainly doesn’t consider himself lowbrow, but he took McKee’s seminar in the late 1980s, in London, and found it invaluable.
“He said a couple of things that stuck in my head,” Davies said — the importance of the “inciting incident,” for one, and the need to “never take the resolution out of the hands of the protagonist.” Also: “If there’s sex, put it right in the spine of the story.”
That informed his decision to conjure a kinky affair between the ruthless politician Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) and Mattie Storin (Susannah Harker), an idealistic journalist, in his adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s “House of Cards” for the BBC.
“What’s the spine of the story? Obviously, Urquhart’s path to power,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, does he have to have sex with this young girl because he’s a sleazy old bastard?’ Yes, yes, he does! And she can call him ‘Daddy’ when they’re doing it. So transgressive. Thank you, Robert McKee.”
Davies also brought a Jacobean sensibility to the production by having Urquhart directly address the camera, and is credited with giving him the catchphrase “You might think that; I couldn’t possibly comment.”
As his 90th year approaches, Davies is still working, and still thinking about Jane Austen. He’d love to do an adaptation of “Mansfield Park” that brings to the forefront the unpleasant reality that the Bertram family’s wealth is based on colonial slave labor.
And he’s noodling around with a spinoff of “Emma” told from the perspective of Jane Fairfax, an intriguing secondary character.
“It’s a semi-tragic story,” he added, a bit dreamily, as he spun out his plan to explore what he feels is the unspoken sympathy between Jane and Mr. Knightley (Emma’s future husband). “I think I’m going to have a bittersweet ending in which both Mr. Knightley and Jane recognize that they should have been together, but they’re not, because both of them have this fatal weakness for their imperfect lovers,” he said.
If you love a novel, you risk being disappointed when it appears on the screen. The people don’t look as you imagined; the scenes aren’t what you remembered; the emphases are different. That’s not the point, Davies said: He hasn’t destroyed what was already there and readers can still return to the original work.
“If you’re saying that everything has to be just like the book,” he said, “then what’s the point of an adaptation?”
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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