Kay Mellor. In Memoriam

Several media outlets (like The Guardian  (two articles), Daily Mail, Express, Mirror) report the death of the actress, scriptwriter, and director Kay Mellor (1951-2022).

Picture Source: Kay Mellor in her garden in 1997. Photograph: John Sherbourne/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

She was the screenwriter of Jane Eyre.1997.  Patricia Ingham in The Brontës (Authors in Context) explains why her work was so important:

Only two years later, in 1997 , LWT produced the first film adaptation of Charlotte’s novel to be scripted by a woman, Kay Mellor. She was approached by another woman, Sally Head, presumably because of her previously successful scripts for a TV series, Band of Gold, which consisted of episodes
, realistically and sympathetically represented, relating the life stories of a group of prostitutes. They included a teenager, Tracey, played by a young and relatively inexperienced actress, Samantha Morton, who was now cast as Jane Eyre in Mellor’s version. Significantly, Morton also provides a voice-over more conspicuous than in other adaptations which is able to reveal something of Jane’s own thoughts and feelings as well as linkingç events. The choice of Mellor as scriptwriter is evidently the result of a determination to make this a woman’s story and reclaim it for Jane by choosing a writer known for her contemporary approach to feminist issues. For by now Britain had experienced its first female prime minister; the Sex Discrimination Act was over twenty years old; and some women had gone far enough in their professions to argue for something more than basic rights, and to complain of the ‘glass ceiling’.

Mellor’s script fulfils much of what was expected of her. From the first, when Rochester rebukes Jane after falling from his horse, she is visibly resentful and defends herself from the charge of causing the accident. This resistance continues when he orders her later to sit in a particular place, for she is then prepared to tell him that, though he pays her to do his bidding, he must do so ‘with respect’. When he derides what he assumes is her Brocklehurst-style of evangelical religion, she answers that she dislikes the clergyman and adds ‘I have found my own faith’. Such a faith had long been suppressed in Jane Eyre films but is now shown as the motive for her insistence, after the attempted bigamy, that it would be wrong to become Rochester’s mistress. The restoration of Jane’s religion-based morality reintroduces the internal struggle that she undergoes in the novel and in this film there is no doubt of the powerful sexual attraction between her and Rochester, which is vividly evoked by their body language, especially in the night-time episodes after Bertha’s burning of Rochester’s bed and the attack on Mason.