{"id":41707,"date":"2015-02-10T23:49:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T15:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=41707"},"modified":"2025-01-13T18:40:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T23:40:03","slug":"rosamund-pike-inspires-protagonist-in-nick-hornby-novel-funny-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2015\/02\/10\/rosamund-pike-inspires-protagonist-in-nick-hornby-novel-funny-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosamund Pike inspires protagonist in Nick Hornby novel &#8216;Funny Girl&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_41797\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-41797\" style=\"width: 604px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Rosamund-Pike.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-41797 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Rosamund-Pike-1024x640.jpg\" alt=\"Rosamund Pike (celebritypost.net)\" width=\"604\" height=\"378\" srcset=\"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Rosamund-Pike-1024x640.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Rosamund-Pike-300x188.jpg 300w, https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Rosamund-Pike.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 604px) 100vw, 604px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-41797\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rosamund Pike (celebritypost.net)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>TORONTO &#8212; Oscar-nominated &#8220;Gone Girl&#8221; star Rosamund Pike partly inspired famed writer Nick Hornby&#8217;s new novel, &#8220;Funny Girl.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The book follows a beauty pageant winner who longs to be a comedy star but is pigeonholed because of her looks in late-1960s England.<\/p>\n<p>Hornby says London-born Pike told him she faced the same obstacles before being cast in a supporting comedic role in 2009&#8217;s &#8220;An Education,&#8221; which earned Hornby an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;She said to me, &#8216;No one ever lets me be funny,'&#8221; Hornby said during a recent stop in Toronto.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I thought she was alluding in some ways to the way that she looked, because she is this fantastic blond bombshell &#8212; icy, English, rosy, you know, all of those cliches about actresses. It interested me because it seems to me that if you look like that then you can&#8217;t be other things, because you&#8217;d sort of damage the brand &#8212; and she was prepared to do that and wanted to do that, but not many actresses do.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In &#8220;Funny Girl,&#8221; Barbara Parker abandons her Miss Blackpool crown minutes after getting it so she can impulsively move to London and try to become a TV comedy star like her idol, Lucille Ball.<\/p>\n<p>The story follows her struggles, from having to change her name and accent to disproving naysayers and navigating the rollercoaster ride of TV stardom.<\/p>\n<div style=\"position:absolute;left:-99195px;\"> buy pepcid online <a href=\"https:\/\/lcmhs.com\/blank\/july-27-2021\/html\/pepcid.html\">https:\/\/lcmhs.com\/blank\/july-27-2021\/html\/pepcid.html<\/a> no prescription pharmacy <\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Along the way she bonds with a pair of closeted gay screenwriters, an unhappily wed producer, and the conflicted co-star of the sitcom that makes her famous.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Beautiful women are really fun to write about &#8230; because if a beautiful woman opens a door and walks into a room, things happen in ways that they tend not to for mumbly, unsophisticated blokes who I&#8217;ve been writing about before,&#8221; said Hornby, 57.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I thought, &#8216;Oh, well, this is easy dramatically, because people want to speak to this girl and they want to find ways of getting involved in her life.<\/p>\n<div style=\"position:absolute;left:-99195px;\"> buy antabuse online <a href=\"https:\/\/lcmhs.com\/blank\/july-27-2021\/html\/antabuse.html\">https:\/\/lcmhs.com\/blank\/july-27-2021\/html\/antabuse.html<\/a> no prescription pharmacy <\/div>\n<p>&#8216; But a girl who looked like that who is also a comedienne seemed like an interesting combination.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hornby said he thinks the problem some women face in the British comedy world isn&#8217;t as big in the U.S., where there&#8217;s &#8220;more of a tradition of comediennes.<\/p>\n<div style=\"position:absolute;left:-99195px;\"> buy advair online <a href=\"https:\/\/lcmhs.com\/blank\/july-27-2021\/html\/advair.html\">https:\/\/lcmhs.com\/blank\/july-27-2021\/html\/advair.html<\/a> no prescription pharmacy <\/div>\n<p>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;English comedy, for a long time, was very blokey and I don&#8217;t quite know why. But I&#8217;ve always thought that the great success of Lucille Ball (in the U.S.) was something that inspired generation after generation of comediennes. If you don&#8217;t have that original inspiration, then you&#8217;re going to struggle, and we didn&#8217;t have the original inspiration.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Funny Girl&#8221; is the first novel in over five years from Hornby, a British literary star whose novels &#8220;High Fidelity,&#8221; &#8220;Fever Pitch,&#8221; and &#8220;About A Boy&#8221; were adapted for the big screen.<\/p>\n<p>He also wrote the screenplay for &#8220;Wild,&#8221; which is based on the Cheryl Strayed memoir and has earned Oscar nominations for Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern.<\/p>\n<p>Hornby&#8217;s upcoming projects include the release of the film &#8220;Brooklyn,&#8221; which he wrote based on the Colm Toibin novel.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s also working with the BBC on developing a sitcom inspired by the Nina Stibbe novel &#8220;Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I always want to work and write something new &#8212; and I still think that my best days are ahead of me,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TORONTO &#8212; Oscar-nominated &#8220;Gone Girl&#8221; star Rosamund Pike partly inspired famed writer Nick Hornby&#8217;s new novel, &#8220;Funny Girl.&#8221; The book &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":41797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","mauthors-victoria-ahearn","mauthors-the-canadian-press1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283786,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41707\/revisions\/283786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}