With the summer holidays nearly over, we remember the late actor Julian Sands when he told Harry Mount about the glorious picture of him and Helena Bonham Carter in Florence
The plot of EM Forster’s novel, A Room with a View, turned of course, on a gentlemanly exchange of rooms in a Florence guest house.
In the book, the view is of the River Arno, but in the famous Merchant-Ivory film version in 1985, the setting was re-imagined to include the Duomo. Sadly though the view from the guesthouse suggested by the filming does not exist.
As co-star Julian Sands said, the shot of the “room” had to be faked on the terrace of another building. "The iconic moment in the film, of me with Helena [Bonham Carter] with the Duomo and the belltower in the background was, in fact, carefully constructed by the film’s carpenters. The number of people who've said, 'We stayed in that room'!
I say, 'Are my initials carved into the window frame?'
'Yes,' they say!"
