Eileen

“What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” a theater critic for the Daily Telegraph lamented after the London premiere of “Hedda Gabler” in 1891. Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen’s fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.

But writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman,” “The Marvels”) and her star Tessa Thompson understand Hedda down to the pretty poison in her molecules. Their rollicking redo, set from dusk to hangover at a drunken bacchanal, is vibrant and viciously alive. With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Thompson’s Hedda is a clever, status-conscious snot raised to believe that her sole purpose is to be a rich man’s wife. With no hobbies or career and no interest in motherhood, her only creative outlets are squandering money and machinating the success of her milquetoast husband, middlebrow academic George (Tom Bateman), who has such a flimsy hold on his bride that his last name might as well be attached to hers with Scotch tape. (It’s Tesman and it’s pointedly rarely used.) Hedda doesn’t love George. In fact, she seems to think he’s a whiny little worm. But she’s dead-set on securing him a promotion to afford her expensive tastes.

If Hedda had been born a man, she’d be leading armies into battle like her late father, General Gabler, who spawned her out of wedlock. Instead, she takes out her aggression on civilians. Using her charm offensive, Hedda goads naive spouses to cheat, recovering alcoholics to drink and depressives to wander off into the darkness with a revolver. Some of her havoc is calculated, most of it is out of pique that others are living braver, more fulfilling lives. All of it feels like a cat tipping over water glasses just to see them shatter. Like the nasty seductress of “Dangerous Liaisons,” she’s a warning that frustrated women aren’t merely a hazard to themselves — they’re a menace to the society that made them.

Inspired by her antihero, DaCosta manipulates Ibsen to suit her own goals. She’s updated the play’s setting to 1950s England, a similar-in-spirit era in which well-bred women were kept domesticated. (I can’t wait for someone to do a version among the tradwives of Utah.) From there, DaCosta has smartly tightened the narrative, which used to have a key scene at an off-stage bachelor party to which Hedda was pointedly not invited. “What a pity the fair lady can’t be there, invisible,” Ibsen’s Hedda grumbled at being left home while the men got to carouse.

In DaCosta’s version, the whole drama unfolds during a martini and cocaine-fueled rager at Hedda’s mansion, a party she’s throwing to impress George’s potential new boss, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), who she hears has a bohemian streak. At her own happening on her own turf, Hedda couldn’t be more visibly in command. She rallies the guests to hurl her former classmate, Thea (Imogen Poots), a wretchedly earnest drip, into a nearby lake and gets the whole room grooving to a dance band’s cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet,” the swinging hit that the Icelandic pop singer Björk would popularize a half-century later. It’s a great song pick with manic crescendos — You blow a fuse, zing boom! The devil cuts loose, zing boom! — that capture Hedda’s feverish mood shifts.

We know this evening will go wrong from the film’s opening shot of Hedda facing down two policemen who keep interrupting her explanation of the last 24 hours. “Where should I start?” she says with smothered exasperation. As we cut back to watch the night unfold, a shot of Hedda surveying the crowd from an upstairs landing feels like she’s looking at a game board — Clue, perhaps? — with a weapon stashed in every room. Which threat is most pressing? The pistols she keeps in a leather box, the precarious crystal chandelier or the lake’s deep waters outside?

Thompson is marvelous in the role. Even the way she chomps a cherry off a cocktail toothpick has menace. I first saw her as the lead in “Romeo and Juliet” at a 99-seat theater in Pasadena when she was barely 20 years old (there’s so much talent in our small stage scene), so it’s a nice reminder that the funny and soulful actor of the “Thor” and “Creed” franchises is also a hell of a good classical performer and a worthy star on her own.

She wears Hedda’s lovely mask with confidence — red lips, lush cheekbones, cool demeanor — and periodically allows it to slip. Editor Jacob Schulsinger often allows Hedda a tiny hesitation before she charges ahead ruining people’s lives, long enough to know that she’s considering the consequences. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, I just do things all of a sudden on a whim,” she admits to the nosy Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), revealing a sliver of weakness. She’s almost (nearly) asking for help. Yet, the judge just wants to maneuver her into bed. How tedious.

DaCosta boldly layers race and sexuality on top of Ibsen’s tale. She’s gender-swapped Hedda’s ex-lover, Eilert, into a lesbian named Eileen (a swaggering Nina Hoss), a brilliant, openly norm-defying author who is George’s job-seeking competition (and the only person Hedda enjoys kissing). If earlier incarnations of Hedda didn’t dare defy social rules when she was white and straight, being Black and queer adds so much additional peril that the script barely needs to say out loud. The new tension is there in just a few whispers, as when Hedda overhears a guest murmur that their hostess is “duskier than I thought she would be.” Hedda doesn’t acknowledge the slight. That would mean admitting vulnerability. She simply starts destroying the speaker in the very next scene.

What’s wiser? Eileen’s determination to face down the boys and be accepted for her full self or Hedda sneaking around and steering everyone’s fates behind the scenes? They can’t team up — they’re doomed to tear each other to shreds. And as much glee as we get watching Hedda’s rampage, it aches to see these two formidable women reduce each other to hysterics (to use the medical diagnosis of the day).

From our 21st century perspective, they both have a right to be mad and they both might be mentally ill. DaCosta doesn’t offer a verdict, but she plunges us so deeply into Hedda’s headspace that we can hear how certain things set her off. Insults hit her with a knife-like hiss of air; fresh schemes get her charging around to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s tumultuous, percussive score.

Costume designer Lindsay Pugh has done incredible work outfitting the film’s central female roles. Hedda wears bullet-like strands of pearls that choke her neck and a jade-colored gown that seems to molder into a festering, jealous shade of green. When her rival, Poot’s Thea, arrives underdressed, Hedda forces her into a hideous frock with fussy bows and an ungainly skirt. Poots, her nose raw and red, her character kicked when she’s down, gamely looks a fright, trusting that moral fiber will expose Hedda’s ugly insecurities.

But Pugh’s stroke of genius is putting Eileen not in some sort of mannish suit but in a bombshell dress that highlights her curves like a primal goddess. It’s pure feminine power — just like the film itself — and when Eileen struts into a room of her all-male colleagues, that dress exposes how fast the tenor can shift from awe to jeers and how little wiggle room she or any woman has for error.

Actor Eileen Fulton, known for her long-running role as Lisa Grimaldi on the CBS soap opera “As the World Turns,” has died at 91.

Fulton died July 14 in Asheville, N.C., after a period of declining health, according to an obituary posted by Groce Funeral Home in North Carolina.

She would become one of the longest-serving soap opera actors, playing Lisa with only a few interruptions from 1960 until the show’s end in 2010. Fulton played the character as a villain, telling The Times in 1990 that Lisa was initially “a conniving, screaming witch” who “lied and wanted everything her way,” a characterization that led fans to scorn her. Throughout the course of the show, Lisa was married eight times.

But over time, Lisa evolved and “matured and learned from her mistakes.” Fulton said she began to receive “love letters” from fans who admired the character’s spunk.

Fulton was inducted into the Soap Opera Hall of Fame in 1998 and received a Daytime Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

Fulton was born Margaret Elizabeth McLarty on Sept. 13, 1933 in Asheville. The daughter of a Methodist minister and a public school teacher, she graduated from Greensboro College in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in music and performed in an outdoor drama in North Carolina before moving to New York to pursue a career in acting, according to her obituary.

She later adopted the stage name Eileen Fulton, and in 1960, she was cast in the drama “Girl of the Night.”

In addition to her soap opera career, Fulton had a cabaret act for years in New York and Los Angeles.

She retired in 2019 and moved to Black Mountain, N.C. She is survived by her brother, Charles Furman McLarty, a niece and other family members.

Eileen Grimshaw will soon be departing Coronation Street, and now the character is at the centre of a death storyline on the ITV soap after her sister Julie Carp died

There was a worrying twist on Coronation Street on Wednesday night ahead of a looming exit on the ITV soap.

Eileen Grimshaw faced distressing accusations days on from the death of her sister Julie Carp. Julie, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, passed away during a trip to the lake with her sister.

After leaving messages and appearing to say her goodbyes, she asked Eileen to go to the refreshment van. But when Eileen returned she realised Julie had died.

On Wednesday night things took a turn when Eileen found herself being accused of helping Julie to end her own life. Brian Packham had made the accusation to the police and soon other residents were wondering what happened.

Suspicions were raised after Julie’s nephew Todd Grimshaw first questioned why Julie seemed to know she was going to die that day, with the videos she recorded and the fact she seemed to be saying goodbye to people. Then on Wednesday we saw Brian and Mary Taylor head to Julie and Eileen’s house.

The pair decided they would return Julie’s wheelchair and any unused painkillers to the hospital. But when they went to the house they made an alarming discovery.

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He noted it as being “strange”, before confiding in others later on that Julie’s medication was all gone. He suggested there should be plenty left, and that Eileen’s own painkillers were in her bag too, while this was empty.

He said: “Julie should have had enough medication to last her a week at least. Where did it all go? Unless she took it, all of it.” As Brian was asked if he was implying Julie had taken an overdose to end her life, he said this was exactly what he thought.

He then questioned whether Eileen knew about it and maybe even helped Julie, telling the others that she had been with her sister and they were insistent no one else joined them at the lake. Soon enough Brian reported Eileen and his discovery to the police.

PC Craig Tinker then asked to speak with Eileen down at the police station leaving her mortified, and leaving her neighbours gossiping. She was questioned by DS Lisa Swain, who asked her if Julie had shared her possible intentions to end her own life.

She also asked whether Eileen had assisted her sister with her plan, whether she was directly involved or not. A tearful Eileen was horrified over the questioning, and the suggestion that she may be charged with murder.

Eileen revealed that Julie had asked her to go and get her a cup of tea, and when she returned Julie was dead. She repeated there was no indication from Julie about what might happen.

She told Lisa: “If you’re implying I helped her do it, that I’d seriously leave her on her own to die, that I wouldn’t be by her side holding hand, telling her how much she was loved.” It’s then that Lisa warned her she could face 14 years in prison if she helped Julie or gave her her painkillers knowing her intentions.

Eileen protested: “I did not kill my sister.” Back home, she told her partner George Shuttleworth: “I can’t believe she didn’t think of the consequences, she has involved me, why couldn’t she just leave another tape explaining.

“Now I’m going to get charged for her murder, for killing my own flesh and blood.” Viewers will no doubt be fearing it will lead to a heartbreaking exit for Eileen, as actress Sue Cleaver has already filmed her final scenes.

Speaking about her departure earlier this year, Sue commented: “I’ve had 25 privileged years of working on Coronation Street. The door is still firmly open but as I reached my 60th year I decided it was time to embrace change, look for new adventures and live fearlessly.”

Coronation Street airs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8pm on ITV1 and ITV X. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .