Latest news with #DaphneduMaurier
Metro
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Enya seen for the first time in 8 years after reclusive life in Victorian castle
Enya has been spotted for the first time in years. The Only Time hitmaker, 64, is rarely seen out and about, having floated onto the world's stage in the 1980s with her ethereal, unique sound on hits including Orinoco Flow and Evening Falls. Since, she's clocked up four Grammy Awards, countless nominations and an Oscars shortlist for her soundtrack classic May It Be, from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The vocalist, famed for her haunting choir-like melodies, is the second most successful Irish artist of all time after U2, having sold over 80million albums, and she's got a reported £98m fortune. Fans have been wondering where Enya is, as her last music drop was ten years ago in her 2015 eighth studio album, Dark Sky Island. She's also not been seen publicly since the Grammys in 2017, so this was a reassuring moment for fans, as she looked the picture of health, dressed up for a wedding at Drumhalla House in Donegal on May 16. The Only Time hitmaker wore a gorgeous black and white lacey dress, with a shimmering necklace and short haircut as she posed with fellow attendees. The Irish singer's reclusive lifestyle has been documented over the years, as she reportedly spends much time in her 19th century castle, located just south of Dublin, by the sea. Having bought Manderley Castle – named after the house in her favourite book, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca – in 1997 for €3.8m (£2.5m), Enya is thought to enjoy the sprawling space with, at one time, up to a dozen cats. In a 2015 interview while talking about her new music, Enya touched on her love life. 'I am single, yes,' she told The Independent. 'But as the song suggests, there have been… relationships. It's quite hard to have someone accept that – well, not that they are second to the music, but that I do need a certain amount of space for it. 'And even though the person will understand that at the beginning, there is something like jealousy towards the music after a while.' There was a seven-year gap between her last two albums, and Enya said at the time that she needed the pause. Alongside her Irish bolthole, Enya bought a house in the south of France and travelled in this time, visiting family. The rest of her days, the publication report, are spent in Manderley Castle, not far from Bono's place. During her time there Enya has fortified the castle walls sky-high, having experienced a number of disturbing run-ins with stalkers, which she told the outlet has 'been traumatic'. Enya was born Eithne Ní Bhraonáin in Ireland in 1961, one of nine children. As a teenager Enya enjoyed a brief time with her family's band Clannad, before going it alone and collaborating with producer Nicky Ryan and his poet wife Roma Ryan, who she continued to work with all the way to her latest album. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you.
Indian Express
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…': 5 romantic thrillers for fans of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' Few opening lines in literature are as haunting—or as instantly transporting—as the first sentence of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's 1938 masterpiece of gothic suspense. With its brooding atmosphere, psychological tension, and a romance shadowed by secrets, Rebecca continues to hold readers in a thrall. Even Hollywood keeps returning to her stories (Rebecca, The Birds, My Cousin Rachel). If you love Rebecca's intoxicating blend of romance, mystery, and gothic dread, here are five modern novels that will keep you up all night. 1. The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides A psychological thriller with a haunting love story at its core, The Silent Patient follows Alicia Berenson, a woman who shoots her husband and then refuses to speak. Theo Faber, a forensic psychologist, becomes obsessed with uncovering her motives—but the truth is far more twisted than he could imagine. With its gothic undertones and shocking revelations, this is a perfect read for Rebecca fans who crave obsession and deception. 2. The Wife Between Us – Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen A clever, twisty tale of marriage, jealousy, and revenge, this novel plays with perception in the best way. Is the ex-wife bitter and unstable, or is there something far more sinister lurking beneath the surface of her replacement's picture-perfect life? The shifting narratives and psychological tension make this a gripping companion to Rebecca's themes of jealousy and hidden pasts. 3. Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia For those who adored Rebecca's eerie atmosphere, Mexican Gothic delivers a chilling tale of a woman drawn into a decaying mansion's dark secrets. When Noemí Taboada is sent to check on her ailing cousin, she uncovers a family curse, a seductive yet dangerous husband, and a house that seems alive with malice. Gothic romance meets psychological horror in this intoxicating read. 4. The Death of Mrs Westaway – Ruth Ware A modern gothic mystery dripping with suspense, this novel follows Hal, a struggling tarot reader who receives a mysterious inheritance letter—but the deceased woman may not actually be her grandmother. As Hal infiltrates the eerie Westaway estate, she's drawn into a web of lies, betrayals, and long-buried family secrets. The brooding setting and unreliable characters make this a must-read for Rebecca devotees. 5. The Last Mrs Parrish – Liv Constantine A seductive, cunning thriller about ambition and revenge, this book follows Amber Patterson as she infiltrates the glamorous life of Daphne Parrish—only to discover that perfection comes at a price. With its themes of obsession, manipulation, and the dark side of desire, it's a deliciously wicked read that echoes Rebecca's exploration of jealousy and deception. Honorable Mention: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (if you somehow haven't read it yet!) Which of these will you read first? Let us know in the comments.
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
It's time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock's greatest hits
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' It's often cited as one of literature's greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca conjures its narrator's voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel. In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain's highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier's name but not much more, it's a fine time to get better acquainted. Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. 'I'm actually surprised that more of her work hasn't been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There's something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.' Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier's tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer. For all their strengths, Hitchcock's films don't capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier's prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 'It's a story about how reality can't keep up with a fantasy. It's powerful and it's dark and it's beautiful and it's intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody's whispering into your ear.' MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. 'She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.' The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that 'it was so ahead of its time. It's bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.' Sarks says that du Maurier's ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. '(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It's poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.' Then there's the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: 'At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.' Du Maurier's life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the 'male energy' that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown. She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she'd been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper. Loading Du Maurier's elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier's delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie. 'The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,' says Heller-Nicholas. 'Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.' The Birds is one of du Maurier's most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock's sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow. Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier's short story while pondering the possibility of 'adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?' He recalled that Hitchcock's adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with. He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: 'Du Maurier's a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It's weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she's a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She's probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.' Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier's tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn't attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost. Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can't even explain is something people of all eras can understand: 'The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.' Lutton and Fox's adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members' ears. The director says his aim is 'to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that's about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can't control, is assaulting you.' He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that 'there are no birds in the theatre. It's sound and it's light and it's a performer. It's the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.' As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier's shadows will keep offering up their secrets.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
It's time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock's greatest hits
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' It's often cited as one of literature's greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca conjures its narrator's voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel. In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain's highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier's name but not much more, it's a fine time to get better acquainted. Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. 'I'm actually surprised that more of her work hasn't been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There's something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.' Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier's tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer. For all their strengths, Hitchcock's films don't capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier's prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 'It's a story about how reality can't keep up with a fantasy. It's powerful and it's dark and it's beautiful and it's intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody's whispering into your ear.' MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. 'She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.' The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that 'it was so ahead of its time. It's bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.' Sarks says that du Maurier's ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. '(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It's poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.' Then there's the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: 'At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.' Du Maurier's life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the 'male energy' that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown. She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she'd been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper. Loading Du Maurier's elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier's delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie. 'The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,' says Heller-Nicholas. 'Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.' The Birds is one of du Maurier's most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock's sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow. Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier's short story while pondering the possibility of 'adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?' He recalled that Hitchcock's adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with. He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: 'Du Maurier's a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It's weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she's a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She's probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.' Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier's tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn't attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost. Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can't even explain is something people of all eras can understand: 'The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.' Lutton and Fox's adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members' ears. The director says his aim is 'to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that's about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can't control, is assaulting you.' He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that 'there are no birds in the theatre. It's sound and it's light and it's a performer. It's the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.' As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier's shadows will keep offering up their secrets.
Economist
08-05-2025
- General
- Economist
The Church of England is dying out and selling up
Push open the heavy door and step inside. The sound as it slams behind you will feel loud, almost rude, in the old, cold silence. For St Torney's Church in Cornwall is very old indeed. The Normans built it. The Tudors enlarged it. The Victorians meddled with it. Daphne du Maurier immortalised it in 'Jamaica Inn'. It has outlasted the Reformation and the civil war.
