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Dec 24, 1985 · So to many here, the Danish baroness' reverie of her 17 years in East Africa, her servants, her fine table with its crystal and Limoges, seem irrelevant, patronizing and even racist.
- Overview
- Production notes and credits
- Cast
- Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)
Out of Africa, American-British film, released in 1985, that was based on events in the life of Karen Blixen-Finecke, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen. It starred Meryl Streep and Robert Redford and was known for its beautiful cinematography. The movie won seven Academy Awards, including that for best picture.
The events of the movie take place between 1913 and 1931. It begins in Denmark, where Karen (played by Streep) proposes a marriage of convenience to her friend (and cousin) Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Planning to run a dairy farm in Africa, they travel to British East Africa and subsequently marry. The couple later goes to the farm, which is near Nairobi, and Bror informs her that he has decided to operate a coffee farm. More interested in hunting, he largely leaves Karen to manage the venture on her own. As she explores the area, she comes face-to-face with a lioness, but the big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Redford) and his friend Berkeley (Michael Kitchen) arrive in time to save her. Later, on the farm, she attends to the medical needs of the Kikuyu people who live in the area.
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World War I breaks out, and Bror is sent to the front. When an army messenger tells Karen that she is to send supplies to the front, she decides to bring the items herself. She encounters Denys and Berkeley on her journey, and Denys gives her a compass. She braves many hazards but succeeds in getting the supply train to the front, where she reunites with Bror. Upon her return to the farm, however, Karen discovers that she has contracted syphilis from the philandering Bror. After receiving treatment in Denmark, Karen returns to the farm and ends her relationship with Bror. During this time she also builds a school for the Kikuyu. One day Denys takes her on a safari, during which they begin a romance, and he eventually moves into Karen’s home. All is not idyllic, however, as Berkeley dies from a form of malaria, and Karen struggles to keep the coffee farm financially afloat. Denys’s inability to fully commit to Karen leads her to break off the relationship. Shortly thereafter, her barn burns down, and Karen decides to return to Denmark. She sells off her possessions and begs the colonial authority to allow the Kikuyu workers to continue to live on the farm. She and Denys have a final dinner together, but Denys later crashes his biplane and is killed. Before leaving for home, Karen gives Denys’s compass to her foreman, Farah (Malick Bowens).
Most of Out of Africa was shot on location in Kenya, near the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. Orson Welles, David Lean, and Nicolas Roeg considered turning Dinesen’s book Out of Africa (1937) into a film before director Sydney Pollack succeeded, using a screenplay by Karl Luedtke that drew on more recent biographies of both Dinesen and Finch Hatton as well as on Dinesen’s writings.
•Studios: Mirage Enterprises and Universal Pictures
•Director: Sydney Pollack
•Writer: Karl Luedtke (screenplay)
•Music: John Barry
•Meryl Streep (Karen Blixen)
•Klaus Maria Brandauer (Bror Blixen)
•Robert Redford (Denys Finch Hatton)
•Michael Kitchen (Berkeley)
•Picture*
•Lead actress (Meryl Streep)
•Supporting actor (Klaus Maria Brandauer)
•Art direction*
•Cinematography*
•Costume design
- Pat Bauer
Apr 24, 2018 · The daughter of Wilhelm Dinesen, an army officer, and Ingeborg Westenholz, who came from a family of wealthy bourgeois merchants, she had a relatively comfortable and relaxed home life. However, that changed when she was ten years old. Her father had a child outside of wedlock with his maid and then committed suicide.
Out of Africa (1985) is based on the 1937 book by Danish writer Isak Dinesen. The film tells the autobiographical tale of Baroness Karen Blixen (Dinesen’s true name), portrayed by Streep, and her time spent on a coffee plantation in East Africa in the early twentieth century.
[Out Of Africa] A well-heeled Danish lady (Meryl Streep) goes to an English colony in Africa and buys 1000 acres. Her beau dies and to avoid loneliness she proposes marriage to his gentleman (Klaus Maria Brandauer) but rascally brother whom she got along well with as a friend.
Out of Africa is a 1985 American epic romantic drama film directed and produced by Sydney Pollack, and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
Kempson took a break for the next few years, to give birth to her three children: Vanessa, Corin and Lynn, but by the mid '40s, she came back to pursue her career in both stage and screen.
