• November 10, 2003
• Vol. 60
• No. 19

Who Was Sylvia?

By Richard Jerome

Tortured Poet Sylvia Plath Gives Gwyneth a Role to Sink Her Teeth into

British producer Alison Owen had long dreamed of making a film about Sylvia Plath, the fearsomely talented writer whose anguished marriage to British poet Ted Hughes and battle with depression led to a legendary suicide. "I could only picture Gwyneth Paltrow" in the role of the well-bred artist, says Owen. As it turned out, "Gwyneth said all her life people have given her copies of [Plath's autobiographical novel] The Bell Jar, saying she should play Sylvia."

It's fairly certain Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes, 43, was not one of those people. Fearing that her father will be vilified and her mother exploited, she refused to allow Plath's poetry to be quoted at length in Sylvia, which opened in the U.S. on Oct. 17.

While critics have praised Paltrow's performance in particular, Frieda—just 2 when Sylvia killed herself in their London flat while she and her brother slept nearby—has told Britain's Sunday Times, "I will never, never in a million years go see [the film]."

An accomplished painter and writer, Frieda also decried the film in a poem in the glossy Tatler. "She would rather see Sylvia's poetry celebrated than her death," says friend and Tatler editor Geordie Greig. To that, Owen suggests one Gwyneth may be worth 1,000 lit classes: "I hope this film will introduce a whole new audience to Sylvia's work."

In fact, the story of Plath's life and her work are inextricably linked. Over the years her struggle to reconcile her calling as an artist with her domestic role has divided observers into two camps. Some see her as a martyr abandoned by a brutal philanderer; others, sympathetic to Hughes—England's Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998—suggest that she was a manic-depressive who simply self-destructed.

This much is clear: Plath was never free of melancholy. And if Paltrow brings authenticity to the part, it's because she was mining her own fresh loss. Her father, Bruce, died just before filming began. "I was so raw and so torn apart," she told Britain's The Mirror, "it was cathartic to wring myself out every day of all those feelings."

Plath was just 8 when her own father, Otto, died of complications from diabetes. Her mother, Aurelia (played by Paltrow's mother, Blythe Danner), raised Sylvia and brother Warren, now 68, in Wellesley, Mass., where Sylvia earned straight A's and a scholarship to Smith College.

"She was a very warm personality; she could also be very trying," says Enid Mark, a classmate. "She could go out for a spaghetti dinner, then discuss the taste of the spaghetti ad infinitum until you'd go out of your mind."

While at Smith, Plath began to battle deep depression. On Aug. 24,1953, she attempted suicide by gulping sleeping pills. Treated by a psychiatrist, she improved enough to graduate summa cum laude from Smith and win a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University in England. In February 1956 she met Hughes at a party. Drunk, she collared him and started reciting his verse. Then "he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off," Plath wrote."...when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek."

The lovebirds wed four months later. In 1960 Plath produced The Colossus, her first volume of poems; in 1963 came The Bell Jar. By then she'd given birth to Frieda and Nicholas (now 41 and a marine biologist who has made no comment on the film), and the marriage seemed on solid ground.

That summer, however, Plath became unhinged when she learned Hughes was having an affair with friend Assia Wevill. Later that year Hughes and Plath separated; in February 1963 she put the kids to bed, left them some bread and milk, then lay down with her head inside the gas oven. "I never thought she would leave the children," says friend Jillian Becker, 71. "She loved them so."

Six years later, Wevill, who had continued her relationship with Hughes and borne him a daughter, killed her-self and the girl with sleeping pills and gas—perhaps, suggests Plath biographer Anne Stevenson, because "she could never really compete with Sylvia, even with a dead Sylvia."

That mystique endures. "People tend to be fascinated by beautiful girls who kill themselves for love," says Stevenson. "Think of Anna Karenina. Think of Phaedra. Because Sylvia Plath wrote so well and so passionately, she is both author and heroine of her own story."

A story that her daughter, at least, wishes could remain Plath's alone.

RICHARD JEROME
Eileen Finan in London and Mary Green in New York City

• Contributors:
• Eileen Finan,
• Mary Green.

More From This Article

Frieda Hughes Has Her Say About Sylvia

Angered that her mother's life—and death—are being brought to the screen, poet Frieda Hughes wrote "My Mother," published in the British magazine Tatler in March. An excerpt:

Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children. Then It can be rewound So they can watch her die Right from the beginning again.