Darling (1965 film)

Darling is a 1965 British black-and-white drama directed by John Schlesinger, starring Julie Christie as Diana Scott, a fashion model who climbs the Swinging London social ladder through a series of liaisons and finds the success empty. The screenplay is by Frederic Raphael, the producer is Joseph Janni, and the principal cast includes Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey alongside Christie.^{1 • 2} The film won three Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Christie, and became one of the defining screen portraits of mid-1960s London.³

Production

Writing. Frederic Raphael, a British screenwriter and novelist born in Chicago and raised in England, was brought into the project by Schlesinger and Janni after his film Nothing but the Best (1964) caught their attention; the two men had made A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar in the north of England and wanted something London-centered.⁶ Raphael found the title by chance and said it concentrated what the film was about: a woman who had, all her life, been "a darling".⁶ He wrote a draft in a rented cottage in the South of France, and named Fellini's La dolce vita (1960) as the film's model insofar as there was one, its form of vignettes of contemporary society shaping Darling's satirical treatment of a changing England.⁶ According to a Turner Classic Movies account, Schlesinger and Raphael had several major disagreements over the eighteen months it took to produce a satisfactory screenplay.⁹

Casting. American stars were approached first: Paul Newman for what became Bogarde's role and Shirley MacLaine for the title role. Raphael credited Dirk Bogarde for taking the part after Newman and others had refused. Julie Christie, who had played a small but impactful role in Schlesinger's Billy Liar, was "very obviously a star" once cast.⁶ In his autobiography Snakes and Ladders, Bogarde recalled the making of the film as happy, though the production ran out of money halfway through and no one really believed in it except the people involved.⁹

Locations and design. The film was set and shot on location in London, Paris, and Rome.¹⁰ Its London locations include Miles's lavish flat at 40 and 41 Wimpole Street in Marylebone, and the film shoots in Hampstead as well; the BFI notes that although the jet-setting story is globe-trotting at times, its most interesting locations are in London.¹¹ Costume designer Julie Harris created Diana Scott's wardrobe, work that won her an Academy Award and made her a genuine fashion influencer; one writer noted that "a wave of Darling fashions swept America when the film was released there".¹² A shooting script heavily annotated by Schlesinger survives in his archive, dated September 1964.¹³

Release and reception

The film premiered at the Plaza Theatre, Piccadilly Circus, London, on 16 September 1965.¹³ The Numbers records a limited United States release on 3 August 1965 by Embassy Pictures and a UK release on 16 September 1965,¹⁴ while Rotten Tomatoes lists an original US theatrical date of 18 July 1965.⁴ BFI lists the running time as 127 minutes;¹ Rialto Pictures and the BBFC list 128.^{2 • 8}

Awards. At the 38th Academy Awards, honoring films of 1965, Christie won Best Actress over Julie Andrews, Samantha Eggar, Elizabeth Hartman, and Simone Signoret; Raphael won for screenplay; Julie Harris won for costume design; and the film was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.^{3 • 15} The New York Film Critics Circle named it Best Film of 1965, with awards also to Schlesinger and Christie, and the National Board of Review named it one of the top ten films of the year.³ Schlesinger's archive holds a telegram informing him of the New York critics' awards in January 1966, and a letter confirming the film was shown at the Moscow Film Festival.¹³

Critical standing. Contemporary and later reviews have been divided. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a slashing social satire loaded with lacerating wit; Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that the film's chief distinction is Christie, "extraordinary, petulant, sullen, and very beautiful"; Time Out called it excruciatingly embarrassing at the time and pretentious in retrospect.¹⁶ The film holds a Metascore of 62 and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer of 74 percent from 23 reviews.^{16 • 4} The BFI interview with Raphael notes that the film's reputation has suffered somewhat since its release, while still offering formal freshness, strong performances, and the bite of Raphael's dialogue, and that among its contemporary champions is Sofia Coppola, whose work shows its influence.⁶ A 2025 review in The Times called it a feminist picaresque about the moral emptiness accompanying a London It girl's rise, as relevant as Barbie or Promising Young Woman.⁴

Place in Swinging London cinema

Darling is regarded as a key document of the moment London's Swinging Sixties hit their peak, and as one of the definitive Swinging London films alongside Blow-Up and Alfie.^{1 • 16} The BFI describes it as disapproving yet glamorous: its heroine seduces her way to a fortune while the film swoons over the plush international lifestyles it appears to criticize, an unresolved ambiguity that also makes its storytelling problematic in retrospect.¹ Its portrayal of elastic morals, homosexuality, and a Parisian sex party marked a watershed in the acceptance of permissive subject matter within the cinematic mainstream.¹ Scholarship on 1960s British cinema treats the Swinging London films, Darling among them, as drawing on an image of swinging London that proved highly attractive to international audiences and to the Hollywood studios, which invested heavily in the British film industry at the time.¹⁷

The film's Oscar-winning creative team of Schlesinger, Janni, and Raphael reunited two years later for Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), a move that surprised observers given Darling's hip contemporary image.¹⁸ For its 60th anniversary in 2025, StudioCanal released a 4K restoration scanned from the best available 35mm elements, and the film returned to cinemas and to Blu-ray and 4K UHD.^{5 • 6 • 2}

References

1. Darling (1965), BFI
2. Darling, Rialto Pictures catalogue
3. Darling (1965) Awards, IMDb
4. Darling, Rotten Tomatoes
5. Buy cinema tickets for Darling, BFI Southbank
6. The game of observation: a new interview with Frederic Raphael, BFI
7. DARLING, Festival de Cannes
8. Darling, British Board of Film Classification
9. Darling, Turner Classic Movies
10. Darling, collection of original photographs, Royal Books
11. London After Dark: the nocturnal 1960s films, BFI
12. Object of the week: Costume designs for Julie Christie in Darling, BFI
13. John Schlesinger archive, The National Archives
14. Darling (1965), The Numbers
15. The 38th Academy Awards (1966), Oscars.org
16. Darling critic reviews, Metacritic
17. Sample chapter, British Cinema (Cambridge University Press)
18. The only way is Wessex: the making of Far from the Madding Crowd, BFI

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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