Alan Titchmarshs favourite film is unmissable 2001 | UK News

Alan Titchmarsh declared his love of Gosford Park in the Lady magazine, explaining he beloved “anything with good costumes, old cars and stately homes”. It’s been virtually 25 years since it first hit cinemas, that means he first encountered it in his early 50s – but it hasn’t misplaced any of its resonance since.

The film was initially supposed as a spin-off of Downton Abbey – but it rapidly grew to become clear to producers that it was value a lot more than that. They developed a standalone manor home homicide thriller at a rambling nation property, which had been impressed by the books of crime-writing legend Agatha Christie. It begins with a lavish feast during a taking pictures weekend, which was filmed at a neo-Palladian stately home in Hertfordshire, plus Syon House, a listed building in west London which is the Duke of Northumberland’s formal residence.

Gwyneth Paltrow had labored there a few years earlier when she performed a main girl from nineteenth century England in the 1996 film Emma.

Gosford Park, on the opposite hand, which included the likes of Helen Mirren and Ryan Philippe among its forged, options a gory homicide plot, with a thriller man stabbing Sir William (performed by BAFTA-winning Irish actor Michael Gambon) in the chest with a carving knife.

The plot thickens when William’s sinister historical past of seducing feminine staff and then forcing them to give up the infants he fathered for adoption or risk shedding their jobs is uncovered.

Two feuding manufacturing unit staff who had youngsters by Sir William are revealed too: one caved in to calls for to have her baby adopted, while the opposite refused to be manipulated and was made redundant.

Tragically, the latter’s baby died in infancy, while the previous’s was pressured into an orphanage.

However, he then made his vengeful return to homicide his father while he was sleeping in his armchair – or was he?

A jaw-dropping plot twist reveals that his mum, who still labored for the hated Sir William, had found his plans and poisoned him before he bought there; that approach, his only crime can be stabbing a useless physique.

Titchmarsh was intrigued by the period magnificence and the aesthetics, as nicely as a glimpse into the existence of the Nineteen Thirties elite, with the plot going down around 15 years before he was born.

His different enormous on-screen curiosity, on the opposite hand, is “embarrassing” for him – as the gardening skilled admitted he cannot stop binge-watching America’s Next Top Model.