45 Years

45 Years is a 2015 British romantic drama film directed and written by Andrew Haigh. The film is based on the short story In Another Country by David Constantine. The film was screened in the main competition section of the 65th Berlin International Film Festival.Charlotte Rampling won the Silver Bear for Best Actress and Tom Courtenay won the Silver Bear for Best Actor. At the 88th Academy Awards, Rampling received a nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

It was selected to be screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and also screened at the 2015 Telluride Festival. It was released in the United Kingdom on 28 August 2015. The film was released in the United States by Sundance Selects on 23 December 2015.

Plot

The film takes place across six days, marked by intertitles.

Five years after retirees Kate and Geoff Mercer had to cancel their 40th wedding anniversary because of his bypass surgery, the comfortably-off, childless, Norfolk couple are now planning to celebrate their 45th anniversary with dozens of friends at the Assembly House in Norwich.

Charlotte Rampling

Tessa Charlotte Rampling, OBE (born 5 February 1946) is an English actress, model, chanteuse, and fashion icon, known for her work in European arthouse films in three languages, English, French, and Italian.

Rampling is an icon of the Swinging Sixties. She began her career as a model and later became a fashion icon and muse. She was cast in the role of Meredith in the acclaimed 1966 film Georgy Girl starring Lynn Redgrave. She soon began making French and Italian arthouse films, most notably during this time in Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974). She went on to star in Zardoz (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), opposite Paul Newman in The Verdict (1982), Long Live Life (1984), Max, Mon Amour (1986), Angel Heart (1987) and The Wings of the Dove (1997). In 2002, she released an album of recordings in the style of cabaret titled As A Woman.

In the 2000s, she became the muse of French director François Ozon, appearing in his films Under the Sand (2000), Swimming Pool (2003) and Angel (2007). On television, she is known for her role as Evelyn Vogel in Dexter (2013). In 2012, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in the miniseries Restless. Other television roles include the 2015 dramas Broadchurch and London Spy. For her performance in the 2015 film 45 Years, she won the Berlin Film Festival Award for Best Actress, the European Film Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Tom Courtenay

Sir Thomas Daniel "Tom" Courtenay (/ˈkɔːrtni/; born 25 February 1937) is an English actor who came to prominence in the early 1960s with a succession of films, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Billy Liar (1963), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Since the mid-1960s, he has been known primarily for his work in the theatre, although he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for the film adaptation of The Dresser (1983), which he had performed on the West End and on Broadway. He received a knighthood in February 2001 for his service to cinema and theatre.

Early life

Courtenay was born in Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, the son of Annie Eliza (née Quest) and Thomas Henry Courtenay, a boat painter. He attended Kingston High School and studied drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.

Career

Courtenay made his stage debut in 1960 with the Old Vic theatre company at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, before taking over from Albert Finney in the title role of Billy Liar at the Cambridge Theatre in 1961. In 1963, he played that same title role in the film version, directed by John Schlesinger. He said of Albert Finney, "We both have the same problem, overcoming the flat harsh speech of the North."

Year

A year is the orbital period of the Earth moving in its orbit around the Sun. Due to the Earth's axial tilt, the course of a year sees the passing of the seasons, marked by changes in weather, the hours of daylight, and consequently vegetation and fertility. In temperate and subpolar regions, generally four seasons are recognized: spring, summer, autumn and winter. In seasonal tropical and subtropical regions, the wet (rainy or monsoon) season and the dry season are generally recognized.

A calendar year is an approximation of the Earth's orbital period in a given calendar. The Gregorian, or modern, calendar, presents the calendar year to be either a common year of 365 days or a leap year of 366 days, as does the Julian calendar; see below. The average year length across the complete leap cycle (400 years) of the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425 days. The ISO standard ISO 80000-3, Annex C, supports the symbol "a" (for Latin annus) to represent a year of either 365 or 366 days. In English, the abbreviations "y" and "yr" are used.

Andrew Haigh

Andrew Haigh (/heɪɡ/; born 7 March 1973) is an English film director, screenwriter and producer.

Early life

Haigh was born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England. His father worked as a salesman for a drinks company, and his mother was a housewife. After his parents separated, he attended a boarding school. He read History at Newcastle University.

Career

Haigh worked as an assistant editor on films such as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down before debuting as a writer/director with the short film Oil. In 2009 he directed his first feature-length film, Greek Pete, which debuted at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The film is set in London and centers on male prostitution, chronicling a year in the life of rent-boy Pete. Greek Pete won the Artistic Achievement Award at Outfest in 2009.

Haigh's second feature, the highly acclaimed romantic drama Weekend about a 48-hour relationship between two men (played by Tom Cullen and Chris New), premiered on 11 March 2011 at the SXSW Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Emerging Visions. The film played in many other festivals around the world, and went on to collect many more awards including the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding International Narrative Feature at L.A. Outfest and London Film Critics' Circle award for Breakthrough British Filmmaker.