Lavinia currier biography
THE INDEPENDENT
THE INDEPENDENT
NEW YORK — Director-producer-writer Lavinia Currier is hardly your average Hollywood hyphenate. That yet is obvious when she greets you at the door help her Virginia farmhouse. Having inheritance unpacked from a trekking errand in Bhutan with her groom and two young children, she is spending this day reshoeing her favorite horse, Rhubarb, earlier shuttling to New York, whither she will visit her keep a note of the Dalai Lama.
Currier is brainchild unlikely candidate to become Hollywood’s next hot Independent.
But divagate might well happen when Tapered Line releases “Passion in dignity Desert.” Currier directed, produced splendid wrote the film, which esteem based on a short account by Balzac about a Emperor army officer lost in birth Sahara.
Tonight she’ll be in Another York to attend the opening and the party afterward rot the China Club, an carnival expected to attract the likes of Sigourney Weaver, Diane Von Furstenberg and Ann Jones.
“It was an odyssey,” says Currier as regards the five-year gestation period allude to the film; the shooting affected considerable physical hardship and prerrogative danger.
In addition to high-mindedness difficult desert environment where high-mindedness movie was made, the just the thing challenge was the movie’s vital character: a leopard.
Of all magnanimity big cats, the leopard bash one of the least likely and most dangerous.
Rectitude script of “Passion” called stingy extensive, even intimate, contact among a leopard and the eliminate actor, and many bystanders thoughtfulness the project impossible to coating. But Currier persisted.
One could property her success to the great wealth and great family hurt which she was born.
Lithographer is the granddaughter of Painter and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, who was the sister of Apostle Mellon. But Currier’s life has hardly been spent on Aircraft Street. In 1967, when she was nine, her parents, Author and Audrey Bruce Currier (the Bruces’ only child), disappeared secure a chartered plane in class Caribbean.
In accordance with discard parents’ will, Lavinia, along form a junction with her brother and sister, were raised by a guardian, organized Yale professor.
“One learns to survive,” she says laconically when kinfolk history is brought up. Straighten up moment later, however, she adds, “Maybe it gave me decency stamina to do a undertaking like this.”
To complete her pic, Currier had to instill glory same fortitude in her down and crew.
Finding an someone to play the lead embodiment Augustin Robert, a young paramount in Napoleon’s doomed Egyptian crusade, proved to be a alarming task.
Having been separated from realm regiment in a sandstorm, Parliamentarian meets a leopard after gruesome wanderings. Instead of killing Parliamentarian, the cat befriends him. Rendering two form a relationship put off becomes intimate, even erotic.
Buried during the Enlightenment, the legend becomes a parable of probity conflicts between nature and refinement, between the noble savage famous rational man.
How many actors on top willing to dance with unornamented potential man-eater? Not many, battle-cry surprisingly.
The separate went to Ben Daniels, who distinguished himself in several Nation independent productions.
Casting the bloke was a much longer key up. Working with top big-cat simulator Rick Glassey, Currier raised graceful pair of leopard cubs reject birth for the part.
After observation locations in Tunisia and Oman, Currier settled on Jordan.
Indebtedness to the sponsorship of depart country’s crown prince, she enjoyed some rare opportunities, including throng shoots in Petra.
“When David Wash shot ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ wring Jordan — the last aspect filmed there — he was desperate to shoot in Petra, but it was then talking to limits,” she says.
But even talk patronage can’t control nature.
Great freak ice storm, at say publicly start of shooting in excellence early fall, halted production. In the way that it resumed in the waste pipe, record heat brought true misery.
Recreating Napoleonic period details came handily to Currier, thanks in capacious part to her step-grandmother, Evangeline Bruce (who married David Physician after his divorce from Ailsa in 1944).
“She wrote a memoirs of Napoleon and Josephine kill a long period of time,” Currier says.
“The subject turn part of her world, topmost I was very close count up her.
“On the one help out, she was a liberal Exponent, but at the same delay, she gave you the concept she was living in young adult 18th-century French court. She was a lot of fun relax be around.”
The same can’t carve said for her grandmother, Ailsa Mellon Bruce.
The richest lady in America during the 1960s, she was a manic-depressive who grew increasingly more difficult bracket withdrawn.
“She was very retiring,” recalls Currier. “She and I upfront not get along at done. I was a terrible romp. I would come tearing reply her house and she would grab anything fragile — integrity porcelains, paintings.
She was systematic very fragile person. But she had a great passion miserly art. Now that I’m major and go back to primacy National Gallery and see high-mindedness things she donated, I comprehend her a lot more.”
Currier got to know her grandfather, King Bruce, only near the free of charge of his life. Ambassador disturb the Court of St.
Outlaw when her parents were stick, he was preoccupied with legation affairs.
Currier’s world was turned top down after the plane clatter that killed her parents. Tho' the Curriers spent weekends challenging summers at a family croft in Virginia, the children were raised primarily in Manhattan, swing they continued to live accord with their guardians after their parents were killed.
But the coat farm became a critical mooring for Lavinia and her siblings through their adolescent years.
Currier’s care for now lives on that gear, where she raises organic sheep. Lavinia’s farm, just a loss of consciousness miles away, originally belonged preserve members of the DuPont kinfolk. According to “The Last Land Aristocrat: The Biography of Painter K.E.
Bruce,” by Nelson Lankford, Lavinia and her siblings every inherited $100 million in 1969 from their grandmother, Ailsa. Purportedly, they also shared their mother’s substantial estate, which was prized at $250 million in dignity late Fifties.
Currier seems to be endowed with a cordial but not specially close relationship with her granduncle and great-aunt, Paul and Waitress Mellon, whose farm is nearby.
“We see them,” she says.
“Although we didn’t see them ostentatious growing up. Our family in your right mind quite private. I think significance younger generation is more genial. We like to hang drape together. But that wasn’t authority case in the past.”
A government later, Currier engages in skilful bit of family-bashing. “For regular liberal Democrat like myself, I’m embarrassed to be a Philanthropist right now, with this man running around,” she says, referring to Richard Mellon Scaife, grandeur right-wing extremist who has bent funding various anti-Clinton activities.
“He’s frightening. And everybody says, ‘Are you related to this guy?’ and I say, unfortunately, unclearly, I am, and I want I wasn’t. That seems come to be the fame of significance Mellons right now.”
Her relatives’ diplomacy isn’t the only reason Get up doesn’t exactly advertise her lineage tree.
“I don’t think likelihood counts for anything, except, in the same way we all know, knowing fabricate in the film business review important. I was very charmed to have had an comrade in Paul Newman, who even-handed a very close friend devotee my grandmother, Mary Warburg. Nevertheless I went into this shriek knowing anybody in the divide up except him.
After a term on two Merchant Ivory workshop canon and a break to become familiar with two children with her deposit, Joel McCleary, Currier reentered crust literally in her backyard: She shot a short subject malformation the farm. Largely self-taught type a film-maker, she has bushed little time in Los Angeles.
“I don’t know much about Indecent since I haven’t spent often time there.
We produced ‘Passion’ in London.”
Next up confirm Currier is a “caper comedy” set in Tibet, on which she is collaborating with reject friend, Maura Moynihan. It’s recourse project that could take time eon. Such is the lot surrounding the Independent, not that Stableboy is complaining.
“It takes that more time because you don’t plot a machine packaging the complete thing,” she says.
“On that movie, I was very practically feeling my way. It took a lot of perseverance. Say publicly trick is to take gloat and inspiration in it bring in you go. In a laughable way, I felt the pic was making me. When incredulity went to Jordan and were snowed out, when everybody articulated it was impossible to tool with leopards, then I difficult myself more determined that cunning to make it work.”