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This website is a movie review on a movie about Virginia Woolf called `Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf`. This article talks a little bit about the plot of the movie and also the actors that performed in the movie. I found this very interesting, especially since we watched the movie `The Hours` in class.

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On June 22, 1966, The Hollywood Reporter appraised the directorial debut of Mike Nichols, giving high marks to every aspect of the drama. The review, originally titled "'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Is a Motion Picture Masterpiece," is below:
The screen has never held a more shattering and indelible drama than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee's stage play was a masterpiece. The makers of this film have created from it a motion picture masterpiece. It will be nominated for every category it fits in next year's Academy Awards, and it deserves to win them all. It will tote up an equally impressive score at the boxoffice. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an instant film classic, and Warner Bros. deserves the highest credit for making it a movie without compromise.

Virginia Woolf is a drama that encompasses the whole relationship of man and woman; love and hate, tenderness and cruelty, sad and funny. Ernest Lehman, who produced the picture, also wrote the screenplay. Although it is a true screenplay, he has wisely preserved almost all the Albee language, using his own gifts at making it viable as film. A screenplay is not all dialogue, a hard fact to remember, but this is Lehman's most potent contribution.

Virginia Woolf is not a play that is hard to bring to life; it bursts with vitality. It is a hard play to kill, as a reviewer who has seen it in six or eight productions, from Broadway to Long Beach, can testify. Film is something else. And the greatest credit for the implacable engagement that the film creates for its audience must go to the director, Mike Nichols. Nichols makes a stunning film bow with Virginia Woolf.

To clear away one subtlety immediately, Virginia Woolf refers, of course, to the late English writer. The meaning is peripheral. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a mixture of pop art and pedantry of the sort indulged in by scholastic types. Such types, in essence, are the hero and heroine of our film. Their names are George and Martha, and they are played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Martha is the daughter of a college president. George is a history teacher in father's college. He is a failure, as Martha reminds him; "bogged down in the history department," she says, calling him, with some oblique affection, "Old Swampy."

Their marriage, too, is a magnificent wreck, a hulk that drifts like the flying Dutchman, a menace to navigation and travelers on the uncertain seas. On the fateful night when the action of the movie occurs, it crosses the path of another young couple. They are called Nick and Honey, and are played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis. The action of the story is almost continuous, or seems so, beginning early in the morning after a faculty party and lasting until the cold dawn, with icy fingertips, climbs again over the rim of the day, and with chill blue light restores reality.

During the night, George and Martha have exchanged badinage of a particularly lethal nature. "There isn't an abomination award you have won," says George to Martha at one point. "You're going bald," she says to him cheerlessly at another point. "So are you," he replies. That is a mild example of their fencing and probably unfair to quote out of context. There has been no more brilliant and scathing dialogue in any American play. Just "blood under the bridge," Burton remarks of one incident, accurately, summing up the married life he has endured and fostered.

Albee divided his play into three acts, giving each act a title, respectively: Fun and Games, Walpurgisnacht and The Exorcism. Lehman and Nichols have retained the rhythm, and in a delicate way, the separation of the moods. George and Martha begin the late night - and early morning - with one of their customary rows, fairly good-natured, only occasionally drawing blood. The temper changes when Martha breaks one of the rules that they have tacitly established for their combat. With the visiting couple, Nick and Honey, present, she introduces mention of a son. A real son to Martha and George? The point is moot until Albee and Lehman spin out their story. "Truth and illusion," one character or another remarks. Which is which?

Having broken the rules for their private game, George and Martha then begin a bare-knuckled, knee-and-groin duologue that breaks them both before the night is out. That is what the play is, a long, long night of conflict between two people locked in a not quite hopeless embrace. They have been through the thick and thin of a tumultuous marriage, and it has been very thick and very thin at times. To take a word from Albee, the plot is almost unbelievably "convoluted." Meanings beneath meanings are repeatedly exposed as one layer after another is peeled away. But a complete understanding to all this is not necessary. It is there, put there by a writer, director and actors of extraordinary acumen and ability. But the surface is enough and will be fascinating.

Much has been made of the directness of speech and the situations in Virginia Woolf. It is vulgar, profane and obscene. But to a purpose. And, in truth, probably less blasphemous in its portrait of life than the cotton candy versions. Children may not attend Virginia Woolf unless accompanied by parents. One cannot escape the thought: will Peter Pan better prepare them for life?

Elizabeth Taylor reaches the fullest of her powers as Martha. The actress' beauty and the richness of her personal life have repeatedly obscured the fact that she can be, when she cares to be, an actress of extraordinary power. She is purposely blowzy and flabby in this role. Her clothes and makeup deliberately make a ruin of the great beauty. Her voice is as coarse as her speech. A drinker of awesome capacity, Martha has debased herself in every physical way, and Miss Taylor must suggest this. Only at the end, as the camera focuses on her face and then on her hand, locked with her husband's, does some of the eternal girl and eternal optimist, forever disillusioned, leak out. Miss Taylor is a prime reason the film seems so very seldom a drama, and almost always a violation of privacy, captured with hidden cameras and microphones.

Richard Burton as George, must underplay to Miss Taylor's vehemence. Although she can strike and wound, he is the master of the situation, recoiling, reassessing, and prepared to return to battle with fresh armies. Martha speaks in what seems direct, violent language. George indulges constantly in circumlocutions. In the final climactic scene, as Miss Taylor tells about their son, Burton in the background in tones the Dies Irae, the mass for the dead. It is a rending performance. Again it is not necessary to know all these subtleties to be impressed by their use. Burton has continuous grasp of the character and the story. It is he who is ringmaster, in a sense, but one whose primacy over the arena is repeatedly threatened. Burton's eyes, such as the scene where Segal inadvertently reveals his weakness, illumine the screen and the story with as much fervor as another actor's shouts.

Segal demonstrates a talent that until now, on the screen, at any rate, was only latent. Miss Dennis, as his wife, makes a smashing screen bow. Segal plays one of the men of the future, as Burton puts it, one of those scientists who is going to "rearrange all the chromosomes" to produce a perfect race. Segal must be glib, assured, and then be snapped and broken, and retain some of his cockiness (in one meaning or another), but be different. Segal invests the role with all of these variations. Miss Dennis, as the daughter of a man of God (who spent God's money and kept his own) is poignant and funny. She is the waif of the world, and achieves sympathy, but she is also one of the bores of the world, and she gets this quality, too.

Lehman's screenplay deletes one blunt word of the original and changes another. The latter change, where Burton addresses Miss Dennis, is a curious one, but it cannot be gone into here. One important moment where Miss Taylor describes Segal's performance as a lover, seemed to slip by the preview audience. It was muffled, perhaps purposely, although it lost a laugh. These are not adverse criticisms. They are comments on the whole.

Haskell Wexler did the photography, in the black and white it called for. Fortunately, no one felt the overwhelming need to create a new style. Wexler has made his camera the handmaiden of the story and its wide and diverse meanings. It moves like a wily but congenial Inquisitor, displaying, revealing, highlighting. Alex North's music generally allows the words to make their own cacophony and symphony. His score introduces the story and provides some connective links, and does so with ingenuity and meaning. Sam O'Steen's editing catches it all, the fury and the quiet. It catches the pace and never releases it. M.A. Merrick's sound, with all the moving cameras and brilliant, difficult lines, is always crystalline.

Richard Sylbert's production design creates a home for George and Martha as demented and cluttered as their minds. Set decoration by George James Hopkins is appropriate down to the glassware favored in the George and Martha household: old jelly glasses. Irene Sharaff's costumes help tell the story, including Miss Dennis' fur jacket, one of those garments composed of small skins that look as if the wearer had trapped the animals himself. Gordan Bau's makeup and Sydney Guilaroff's hair style for Miss Taylor both deserve a nod for helping deface Miss Taylor without being obvious or grotesque.

Bernard Shaw in his days as a drama critic, once remarked something to the effect that most shows reduced the critic to mere advertiser for entertainments of dubious value. But, occasionally, he said, there was a presentation that gave the critic the satisfaction of being the servant to a high art. That is the effect produced by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - James Powers

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'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?': THR's 1966 Review

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On June 22, 1966, The Hollywood Reporter appraised the directorial debut of Mike Nichols, giving high marks to every aspect of the drama. The review, originally titled "'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Is a Motion Picture Masterpiece," is below: The screen has never held a more shattering and indelible drama than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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I chose this website because i thought it was very interesting that there was a Virginia Woolf Society. The society has its own journal known as  the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. This society also has special events aroung Woolf's birthday which i found interesting.

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The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

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Home Message from the Society - Constitution - Officers The Virginia Woolf Bulletin Society Publications Resources Membership Events Useful Links

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This blog is all about Virginia Woolf, the autor of the common reading text A Room of One's Own. This website includes blogs and information about her books, her family, and even includes her death.

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This website is a resource for Virginia Woolf fans all over the world. Here you can explore the life and legacy of Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941) was a British writer born and raised in London, England. She was one of the most famous writers of the modernist era and wrote many best-selling books such as Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One's Own and To The Lighthouse.

The goal of the Virginia Woolf Blog is to celebrate Woolf's life and work and give readers a clearer understanding of what she was really like. Using passages from Woolf's diaries, letters and various biographies, the blog aims to show readers the real Virginia Woolf, not the tragic figure many people see her as.

The following are some notable aspects of Virginia Woolf's life:

Virginia Woolf wrote many books including 10 novels and a number of nonfiction books. Many of these books became and remain best-sellers and have cemented Woolf's reputation as one of the great writers of the 20 th century. Woolf's novels were written with the stream-of-consciousness literary technique which focuses more on the character's inner thoughts than on the plot.

Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 and her last novel, Between the Acts, was published posthumously a few months after her death in 1941.

The Bloomsbury Group was a group of artists and writers from the Bloomsbury District in London during the early 20 th century. Virginia Woolf was one of the most notable members of this group. The other members included Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Desmond McCarthy.

The group was famous for being one of the first literary groups that openly supported gay rights, women in the arts, pacifism, uninhibited sexuality and many other social and political issues.

Virginia Woolf came from an artistic and well-connected family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable author, editor, historian and outdoorsman who was close friends with author William Thackeray and philospher George Henry Lewes. Her mother Julia Jackson was the niece of notable 19 th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Woolf's godfather was the American writer James Russell Lowell. Woolf's siblings, nieces and nephews were all accomplished artists and writers as well.

Virginia Woolf (whose maiden name was Stephen) met Leonard Woolf around 1900. Leonard Woolf was a college friend of Virginia's older brother Thoby. Virginia and Leonard didn't begin dating until 1911 and then married in 1912. They remained married until her death in 1941.

Vita Sackville-West was a poet, aristocrat and Woolf's lover. It is speculated that Woolf had previous relationships with women but Sackville-West is the only women she acknowledged having a romantic relationship with. Sackville-West served as the inspiration behind Woolf's novel Orlando.

Virginia Woolf is believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder and attempted suicide a number of times throughout her life. She underwent many different types of treatments and managed her condition well enough to live a very productive life. In the spring of 1941, while suffering from another bought of depression she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her house.

Thank you for visiting!

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This website is a resource for Virginia Woolf fans all over the world. Here you can explore the life and legacy of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941) was a British writer born and raised in London, England.

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"Although she refuses to write his life, Woolf finds that Boswell's journals, like Burney's diaries, refresh and revive her across her days."
Becoming Virginia Woolf : Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read
By Barbara Lounsberry

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"Here we are in the middle of divine country, literary associations, cream for every meal, but cold as Christmas and steady rain." Page 2
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Edited by Nigel Nicolson 1976

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I think that Le Moyne chose the book A Room of Ones Own for many reasons. I think that the book was difficult, which helps students really push themselves to be able to read and fully understand it. Also i think that the novel has many lessons that can be related to life.

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The one thing I liked about the book was that Virginia Was writing about feminism. I liked the perspective from the imaginary

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I found the book very boring and it was difficult for me to focus on reading it. I was constantly confused by what was happening during the book but after some book discussion, i was able to understand a little bit more about the plot.

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I found the book A Room of One's Own, very difficult to understand. The language that Virginia Woolf uses is definitely very different than the language used today which makes it difficult to read without stopping frequently to look up words.