Production
The mini-series was produced by the British company Portman-Artemis, and was co-financed by the UK's Channel 4 and the U.S. OPT Organisation (a subsidiary of MCA Television). Producer Diane Baker (who also co-stars in the mini-series as Laura Spencer) first met Barbara Taylor-Bradford prior to the novel being published whilst Taylor-Bradford was working for a newspaper in New York and was interviewing Baker (who worked predominantly as an actress at that time) for an article about interior design. After the novel was published, Baker contacted Taylor-Bradford to obtain the television rights, remortgaging her house in order to do so.
The series was largely filmed in Yorkshire in the north of England, and locations include Brimham Rocks where Emma first meets Blackie on the moors; Richmond for most of the Armley, and the main shop-front of the Emma Harte Emporium.
Barbara Taylor-Bradford's sequel, Hold The Dream, was produced as an eponymous mini-series in 1986, again starring Deborah Kerr and Jenny Seagrove, though Seagrove now played the role of Paula. A second sequel, To Be The Best, was adapted in 1992 and starred Lindsay Wagner as Paula.
Read more about this topic: A Woman Of Substance (mini-series)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)