Watch Great Expectations. Read the Book.
As part of the Charles Dickens bicentennial, Masterpiece Classic will premiere Great Expectations as a two part, three-hour mini-series on PBS, Sundays, April 1 and 8, 2012 at 8p.m. (CST)
Special Chicago Screening
- Douglas Booth (Pip)
The Great Books Foundation is proud to promote the viewing, reading, and discussion of this great Dickens novel with a public screening and discussion of the book and movie.
Presented in partnership with WTTW Chicago, Chicago Public Library, and WGBH Boston, producer of Masterpiece Classic, the screening will be held on at 6 P.M. on March 22, 2012, in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library Center. The address is 400 S. State Street in Chicago.
About the Film
- Gillian Anderson (Miss Havisham)
An orphan boy meets an escaped convict, a crazed rich woman, and a bewitching girl, and grows up to have great expectations of wealth from a mysterious patron in Great Expectations, Charles Dickens’s remarkable tale of rags to riches to self-knowledge, starring Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, Bleak House), David Suchet, Ray Winstone, and Douglas Booth.
Anderson appears as one of Dickens’s most haunting creations: Miss Havisham, a bride- to-be who was jilted at the altar years before and has worn her fading wedding dress ever since, surrounded at home by the fossilized remains of the marriage feast and hell-bent on getting even with the male sex.
Newcomer Booth stars as Pip, the promising young man who is snared in Miss Havisham’s lair. On the way to becoming a gentleman, he falls in love with Miss Havisham’s beautiful adopted daughter, Estella, played by Vanessa Kirby (The Hour).
Great Expectations is directed by Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther) and written by Sarah Phelps (Oliver Twist), based on the novel by Charles Dickens. The producer is George Ormond. The executive producers are Anne Pivcevic for the BBC and Rebecca Eaton for MASTERPIECE on PBS.
Featured Partner: WGBH
Coproducer with the BBC of this new version of Great Expectations, WGBH is PBS’s single largest producer of content for television (prime-time and children’s programs) and the Web.
- Great Expectations is available at Amazon.com and at bookstores everywhere.
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Also of Interest
New! The Vital Ideas Series
- The four anthologies in the series—Sex, Work, Money, and Crime—are perfect for any book group or college classroom.