Secrets & Lies is a 1996 British film directed by Mike Leigh and starring Brenda Blethyn, who won the award for Best Actress at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. The film won numerous other awards and received several Academy Award nominations.
The film tells the story of Hortense Cumberbatch, a successful black optometrist, who is adopted. After the death of her adoptive mother, she chooses to trace her family history and discovers that her birth m...
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Secrets & Lies is a 1996 British film directed by Mike Leigh and starring Brenda Blethyn, who won the award for Best Actress at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. The film won numerous other awards and received several Academy Award nominations.
The film tells the story of Hortense Cumberbatch, a successful black optometrist, who is adopted. After the death of her adoptive mother, she chooses to trace her family history and discovers that her birth mother, Cynthia Purley, is a working-class white woman. She meets her and later meets Cynthia's brother, Maurice Purley, a photographer, and his wife Monica, and Cynthia's daughter Roxanne.
Although Leigh is credited with writing the screenplay, most of the performances were improvised: Leigh told each of the actors about their roles, and let them create their own lines.
Secrets and Lies was partly filmed in Whitehouse Way, Southgate, London.
The emotional scene in the bar, in which Cynthia realises that she is indeed Hortense's mother, was...
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