Hettie Macdonald

Sunlight and bold colour give the Thamesmead estate in Beautiful Thing (1996) a warmth that matters to the romance. Two shy teenage neighbours are discovering an attraction, while the people around them have lives and troubles of their own. Macdonald allows the neighbours to be difficult without making the whole place seem hopeless. We were moved by the boys’ hesitant attraction because Macdonald lets them be funny without treating their feelings as something to laugh at. She is willing to be sentimental, and the film is better for it.

Macdonald directed the stage version at the Bush Theatre in 1993 before making Beautiful Thing her feature debut. Jonathan Harvey’s screenplay gives the surrounding neighbourhood room to be difficult, affectionate and preoccupied with something other than the boys. Linda Henry supplies the bite that keeps the tenderness from becoming too easy, though the supporting characters sometimes get the fuller writing. John Altman’s score helps keep the romance present when the comedy threatens to take over, while the Mamas & the Papas songs bring a more immediate warmth. The acting helps, but those boys still need fuller lives on the page.

British television became the main place to find her work from the late 1990s, and tenderness is not the whole story there. Doctor Who: “Blink” (2007) makes use of her feel for tension and atmosphere. The literary adaptations include Howards End (2017), scripted by Kenneth Lonergan, and six episodes of Normal People (2020), from Sally Rooney’s novel. Calling her a director of gentle romances would leave rather a lot of that work unexplained.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2023), an adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s novel, brought her back to theatrical features for only the second time. That long interval should not obscure how much directing she was doing elsewhere. Start with Beautiful Thing, without expecting its teenagers to get all the best writing.