The Beggar Bride

Very good TV movie enjoy it every time I've seen it on BBCAMERICA it introduced me to Keeley Hawes and her acting. Since then I've searched for other movies she been in. I've found many that I have enjoyed and would love to own. Since I"m new to British TV movies it's been a pleasure to search and find actors that I've never heard of before and see the work they have done in UK. Keeley happens to be one of them and this TV movie happens to capture a certain feel maybe it'a a woman thing but I have enjoyed it has much as Notting Hill and other romance movies that are based along the same theme. Keep making good movies Keeley

This was a rather unusually brilliant drama, Angela Harper used selfishness to give her family a better life.

Keeley Hawes is an amazing actress and played her double life with perfection.

The highlight was seeing actress current Eastenders star, Kacey Ainsworth in a totally different part to what she is famous for playing now.

On Eastenders she plays quiet, shy Little Mo Slater, yet she was a very gobby hooker who befriended Angela in the council estate they were both forced to live.

At the outset, I was fascinated enough with the concept of this film,and the acting didn't seem too bad. But as the story unfolded, I kept shaking my head, and asking myself how the scriptwriter could think anyone could keep on swallowing this. Once I had made the commitment, though, I stuck it out to see how it would crash, or whatever. After two hours (with commercials), the screen said "End of Part I". Well, maybe Part II exposes Part I as a dream-sequence, and all the improbabilities and impossibilities in the story will become irrelevant---but I doubt it. I chose not to yawn through Part II.

Nicely played rôle from Keeley Hawes, well backed up even by Joe Duttine as her useless unemployable husband and a more or less acceptable Nicholas Jones as the multimillionaire cabinet minister with private helicopter and a 314-windowed Georgian house set somewhere in Yorkshire. However, to start with, the story comes from a rather mushy would-be romantic origin, which, if you changed the clothing, omitted any number of telephone calls and put in a bit of mist and packs of hunting hounds, might have been just about anything second-hand and second-class by Jane Austen or any of the Brontës. But it is not – as the author is Gillian White, who, I gladly glean from IMDb, seems to go in for writing this kind of novel so that the BBC can turn them into two-part TV films.

So the story rolls on, tediously somewhat, from predictable step to foreseeable outcome, barging through to the inevitable, lacking the lustre of anything that really holds you awaiting events. Do not get me wrong: the story is not so so bad, and the acting is reasonably good, but it did not need over 150 minutes of screen time for the importance of anything it had to say.

A year later Diarmuid Lawrence and BBC blessed us with `The Echo' (1998)(qv), an excellent, intelligent TV film which is really worth your time and keeps you hanging on to the story-line the whole time. And that alone is the reason why I bothered with watching `The Beggar Bride', which, in the end, is only a dehollywoodised version of things like Notting Hill, Runaway Bride, etc., with better directing and acting.