10 Things I Learned: My Beautiful Laundrette
1.
My Beautiful Laundrette launched a number of careers: that of writer Hanif Kureishi, soon to be regarded as one of the most important voices of his generation; those of producers Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, whose then fledgling company, Working Title, is now one of the most renowned independent production entities in British film; and, of course, that of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who followed up the role of the skinhead Johnny with his performance as prissy Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View, confirming the range of his talent.
2.
Kureishi was inspired to write his screenplay when a family friend and owner of laundrettes, despairing for Kureishi’s future as a writer, introduced him to the small world of Anglo-Pakistani entrepreneurship.
3.
None of the actors in the film’s key Pakistani roles are actually Pakistani (they are of Indian, Persian, and Guyanese descent).
4.
Director Stephen Frears was inspired by Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas when he devised the use of the two-way mirror in the laundrette.
5.
My Beautiful Laundrette was originally made for UK television’s Channel 4. That network, made possible by the deregulation of the Margaret Thatcher era, ironically ended up giving voice to those hardest hit by Thatcher’s economic policies.
6.
Following an electrifying screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, My Beautiful Laundrette ended up bypassing television and instead going straight to theaters, where it played for six months.
7.
The always transgressive Frears came up with the idea for the famous scene in which Johnny secretly licks Omar (Gordon Warnecke) on the back of the neck on set, during the first day of shooting. Day-Lewis loved the idea, though Frears didn’t tell Warnecke what was going to happen, and the actor was taken by surprise.
8.
Actor Shirley Anne Field (Peeping Tom, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), dissatisfied with her character, Rachel, in its earliest iteration, famously said to the film’s young writer: “If you want me to wear red underwear, you’d better write this better.”
9.
Roshan Seth, who plays Omar’s sick, elderly father, was only forty-three at the time of filming.
10.
Frears has long been obsessed with westerns, and had the genre in mind for much of the shooting of My Beautiful Laundrette. He considers the film’s ending—the boys flicking water at each other, followed by the closing of the door—an homage to the ending of John Ford’s The Searchers.
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