Claymation

According to Walter Murch, CLAYMATION was an integral part of his conception of the film from the beginning.  The principal antagonist whom Dorothy must confront and defeat in this new adventure in the Nome King, an evil being who, in the company of his faithful nomes, moves through solid rock as if it were water.  Murch had seen Will Vinton's THE LITTLE PRINCE at Marin County Film Festival several years earlier, and had always imagined that CLAYMATION was the ideal technique for bringing these rock creatures to life.

     When Murch first visited the Vinton studio in Portland, Oregon, the script for RETURN TO OZ was in its first draft.  The characteristics, powers, and design of the Nome King were hammered out in the discussion with CLAYMATION Director Will Vinton, Art Director Barry Bruce and other artists from Will Vinton Productions studio even as Walter Murch and co-writer Gil Dennis revised and polished the story.

     One of the first issues to be addressed was the look of the clay itself.  It was not difficult to match the color of the rock samples Murch sent, but getting a rock-like texture was more difficult.  The addition of various materials from sand and walnut shells tried.  Finally an aggregate of small black rocks was settled on.  The addition of these rocks required many adjustments in the closely guarded and delicately balanced clay formula in order to get a consistency that could be easily moved for animation.  To give the clay a burnish rock surface, small rocks were dipped in water and used to shape the clay as in was animated.

      In the course of the film, as the Nome King captures and imprisons each of Dorothy's friends, he gradually becomes less rock-like and more human.  Dorothy first encounters him on a rocky ledge where she and her companions have fallen after their flight from the castle of the Wicked Witch Mombi.   At this stage the Nome King appears in the cliff wall with features barely distinguishable from the natural rock formations which fissure and rumble as he speaks.  Later, in his Throne Room -- a cavernous chamber in the bowels of the mountain -- the Nome King becomes more and more human.  His head emerges from the rock wall.  The outlines of a body become visible.  Hands and arms emerge.  Eventually human eyes fill the rough-hewn sockets, and the rock surroundings his body begins to form into a robe of sorts.

     At the dramatic climax of the film, Dorothy begins to gain the upper hand, freeing her friends from the Nome King's power, and the Nome King begins to regress and decay until he is finally reduced to an angry pile of rubble.

      The OZ production required extensive matching of CLAYMATION  with live-action photography.  CLAYMATION Art Director, Barry Bruce went to London's EMI Studios during pre-production to work with Production Designer Norman Reynolds, to coordinate design of the sets with the design of the Nome King.  During principal photography either CLAYMATION Director Will Vinton or CLAYMATION Producer David Altschul were there for any shot which related to the Nome King or nomes.  They consulted with Walter Murch on live action background shots into which CLAYMATION Nome King and nomes would be composited. 

    They took extensive notes, snap shots and drawings that would enable them to match composition, lighting and texture.   While Actor Nicol Williamson recorded his lines in England to be used in the clay sequences, reference film was simultaneously shot.  This was referred to by the animators at Vinton's studio in Portland, as they matched the Nome King's lip and body movements to the actor's movements.  The animators also used TV monitors to track movement.  These were particularly important where movements were more rock-like than human.  In scenes like Nome King on the ledge, or the spy sequences, the faces tend to stretch and fissure in very complicated ways.

Chicago Tribune Article

Chicago Tribune
June 30, 1985
Author: Jeff Silverman.

 

    Somewhere, under the rainbow, Hollywood set up a yellow-brick-roadblock it has never quite been able to get around. The year was 1939, the studio was MGM, and 10 scripts, three directors and a pair of ruby slippers later, ``The Wizard of Oz`` clicked its heels in a way that seemed to make the route to the Emerald City forever impassable to the filmmakers who tried to follow it.

    Not even Walt Disney could crack the nut. Disney had the wherewithal to snatch the rights to the 13 Oz books that followed L. Frank Baum`s original foray into the wonderful world inspired by the White City of the 1893 Chicago World`s Fair, but even Disney`s imagination, expansive as it could be, failed to map the journey. Not that he wasn`t persistent. He tried twice; two scripts were commissioned a

nd written, and a series of preliminary design sketches made, but no new movie was able to emerge from the shadow cast by the 1939 musical. Meanwhile, the books simply gathered dust on Disney`s shelves, their only likely destination the public domain.

    ``The `39 film,`` says director Walter Murch--he almost always refers to it as the `` `39 film``--``is definitely a part of the mental furniture of everyone`s life.''  Which makes Murch a kind of celluloid re-upholsterer, daring enough in his vision to strip the antimacassars from a living artifact and create a whole new piece that stands or falls on its own. His ``Return to Oz`` is neither a remake of nor a sequel to the icon that whisked Judy Garland over the rainbow and into a star. It has no songs, no dances, no Munchkins, no Wizard--and a Fairuza Balk instead of a Judy Garland. Its wicked witch plays second fiddle to a Nome King, and the anthropomorphically lovable Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion have been supplanted by a trio of characters that works by remote control. The film, to take a Baum creation, is a Horse of a Different Color, one that tries to leap over the 1939 classic to get closer to Baum's (and his illustrator, John R. Neill`s) at times dark conception of their magic kingdom, and then back again to make the most of today's wizardlike film technology.

     "It would be impossible to actually pick up and continue along the wavelength that they had started with the `39 film," Murch explains from London, where he is still remixing the "Return to Oz" soundtrack for foreign audiences. ``It took almost two generations to reach that point where we can really go back and reinvent the whole form in which the story tells itself.`` Reinvention seems the magic formula, or at least the direction with the most likely chance of success. Anything too like the original would naturally suffer by comparison. Anything too distant would miss the spirit of Oz.    

     "You can never hit the note of the `39 film again," says the 41-year-old director, "but the closer you come to trying to get that note precisely, the more upsetting it would be. It's like hitting two notes too close together on the piano. They don't harmonize. What we tried to do is go further down or further up the piano and find another note somewhere else on the keyboard that in a sense is different from the original film but harmonizes with it so when you play the two notes together they begin to produce a chord.``

    For Murch, searching for the right chord brought him precariously close to sounding the lost chord on his directorial debut. One of the industry's most respected film and sound editors, he has toiled in some of the movies` most prestigious vineyards. Through the years, he has worked closely with Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Phil Kaufman, his San Francisco Bay area film-making neighbors, and, in the end, they helped Murch regain the confidence and control that had begun to erode on the "Return to Oz" set. Murch worked on both ``Godfather`` films with Coppola, and his efforts helped turn ``The Conversation`` into one of the most talked-about films of the early `70s. In 1977, he received an Oscar nomination for his editing of Fred Zinnemann's "Julia."  Two years later, he won an Academy Award for mixing Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."  With Lucas, he co-wrote "THX 1138," and then mixed "American Graffiti." Phil Kaufman offers him special thanks in the credits of "The Right Stuff." Still, Murch wanted to direct a film of his own. In the right place at the right time, he got that chance in 1980.

    The Disney brass was on the lookout for new directors. Since Disney`s death in 1966, the studio had slipped to a sort of secondary status in the Hollywood hierarchy; the brass felt an infusion of new talent could help bring them back to a community force. So Tom Wilhite, then Disney's head of production, drew up a list of potential directors who had yet to helm a feature film. Murch was on that list. "When he got to the M`s," says Murch, "Tom gave me a call."  The two met, and Wilhite asked Murch if there were a subject he was particularly interested in. Without hesitation, he said Oz. Not just for the challenge of filming something that seemed unfilmable, but for his own relationship to the stories. They played an important part of his growing up, a legacy passed on to him from his mother. Her parents were Canadian medical missionaries based in Ceylon at the turn of the century, the same time that the Oz books were being published.  "They were the biggest thing happening if you were a child," Murch explains.  "They were the equivalent of `Star Wars` today."


    For his mother, each arriving edition seemed to represent home, a link with a place far away she barely remembered. ``I think they conjured up images in her mind of a country she was going back to where these books came from, and,`` he stresses, ``it was a fabulous place. She was only 5 or 6 at the time, and I think in some ways she may have gotten the subject matter of the books and Canada mixed up together. They made a big impression on her.``  On her son, as well. As soon as he was old enough to read, his mother plopped the books down in front of him. He was hooked from the start.

    In the summer of 1980, Wilhite gave Murch the go-ahead to cowrite the "Return to Oz" script, which he based on a compilation and telescoping of Baum`s second and third Oz adventures, ``The Land of Oz`` and ``Ozma of Oz.`` More brooding than his original ``The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,`` the second book chronicles the troubles that beset the Emerald City after Dorothy goes back to Kansas. In the third, Dorothy returns to Oz and helps restore Ozma to the throne that had been taken from her by evil granite Nome King and the
wicked Princess Mombi, played in the film by English actors Nicol Williamson and Jean Marsh.

    When Murch handed in his first draft two years later, the studio was nervous. His conceptions both of Oz and Kansas were bleaker than Disney had envisioned. But the studio proceeded, and in late 1983, a $20 million budget was assigned to the project, and filming was set to begin in December.

     Now Murch had to find his Dorothy. An eight-city casting search yielded a 9-year-old from Vancouver named Fairuza Balk. ``In the earliest tests that we shot of her,`` Murch says,  "she seemed to slip into that character almost as if passing through an invisible wall."  And she did something else: She conjured a memory of Judy Garland without fixating on Judy Garland. ``There were so many girls that we looked at who tried to be as much like Judy Garland as possible, and I discounted them for that reason. From the very beginning, Fairuza was very aware that this will be her Dorothy. I encouraged her to become herself.`'  He spent several weeks with the young actress going over the story, going over Dorothy`s character and motivations from situation to situation. He even screened the `39 film for the cast and crew he had assembled-to put it behind them.

    
Then, six weeks before his start date, Wilhite`s replacement at the studio, Richard Berger, shut the production down. The budget, he realized, was closer to $27 million than the original estimate. Child-labor laws would allow Balk, who is in every sequence of the film, to work only 3 1/2 hours a day. And the script as a whole was considered too complicated and unwieldy.  "It was let known to me," says Murch, ``that if the script was cut and if it was cut in a way to make it possible to shoot in 16 weeks, that they might consider making the film after all.``

     Murch sliced 20 pages, and an inflexible 16-week schedule was established. Berger gave the green light, a budget of $25 million was set, and the film was set to roll almost entirely in England, where the exchange worked in favor of the dollar and the talent pool of technicians and crew--many who`d worked on the ``Star Wars`` movies, ``Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom`` and the three ``Superman`` films--were experienced in serving the special needs of an effects movie. Then, six weeks into the shoot the bottom fell out. Murch was already a week behind schedule. And Disney was at the end of its rainbow. Berger flew to London, and producer Paul Maslansky insisted the director should be fired. ``As we started the film,`` says Murch, ``we started to fall behind as many films do. It`s not a new experience. The difference in this case was that I was a first-time director, and there wasn`t any film they could point to where I had directed and they could say it went over by 10 days, but it turned out okay, and it made a lot of money.``

    Any film that has to rely on effects is logistically more difficult, and add to that a film trying slip out from under the shadow of a classic, with a huge budget and a 9-year-old unknown star, and you have a film likely to give executives bad dreams. ``It was,`` Murch admits, ``a high-wire act from the start.``

     Murch, naturally, was the first one to fall. ``It didn`t come out of the blue,`` he says. ``There was a mounting sense of doom that something was going to happen, and I was desperately afraid that this dream that I had carried around for all my life was going to evaporate. Or that I was going to be forced to compromise it in some unspeakable way that you just couldn`t imagine.`` Berger fired him on March 28, 1984. By 3:30 the next morning, George Lucas was calling from Japan to say he`d be right over to check things out.  Lucas looked at the footage already shot, and pronounced it ``wonderful.`` Then he went over the production schedule, and felt it ridiculously tight and should be expanded. Then, as Lucas played big brother to Murch, offering pointers and encouragement, he played politician with Berger, explaining that bringing in another director foreign to the project would only put the production further behind. After two days, Murch was reinstated, his confidence a bit shaken, but certainly on the mend.

    Lucas` mission opened a floodgate of support. In time, Coppola flew over to the set for a week. So did Phil Kaufman. And Steven Spielberg dropped in from his postproduction chores on ``Indiana Jones.``  They were, in the deepest sense, friends who were there at a time when I felt that the world had kind of caved in on me,`` says Murch. ``They reassured me that it would all turn out great, gave me some slaps on the back, and pushed me back onto the stage and said, `Go finish it.'"  Murch did. He may have even reopened the Yellow Brick Road to a new generation of filmmakers.

    

In the beginning...

In the beginning.... 

     Walt had long been a fan of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books. In fact, back in the mid-1930s, just as Disney Studios was starting to search for a story that would serve as a suitable follow-up to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".  Walt had Roy inquire about the movie rights to the original "Wizard of Oz".  Unfortunately, the Baum family had just sold the rights to this best-selling fantasy novel to rival mogul Samuel Goldwyn for some $60,000. Which is how Disney Studios missed out on the chance to make an animated version of "The Wizard of Oz." 

     But even though this initial opportunity had slipped through Walt's fingers, he never lost his enthusiasm for the Oz books, their colorful characters and spectacular settings. Which is why -- in 1954 -- when the movie rights to 11 of Baum's books became available Walt quickly snatched them up.  But Walt was really pushing to get the "Rainbow Road to Oz" movie made. Even going so far as to acquire the rights to a 12th L. Frank Baum book, "Dorothy and the Wizard of  OZ," for an amount that was said to be the equivalent of what the studio had paid for the first 11 books.
   
    But then the previously-announced start-of-production date in November came and went. And then -- by February of 1958 -- rumors began circulating that Disney had abandoned plans to shoot "The Rainbow Road to Oz." That Walt had suddenly tabled this project and was now searching for a more suitable production to serve as his studio's entry into the world of live action musicals.  (And finally in the early eighties) every day that ticked by -- the options that Disney had held on those 12 L. Frank Baum books back in the 1950s were losing their value. Given that many of these titles -- just like the original "Wizard of Oz" had -- were getting ready to slip into public domain. Which meant that any studio could then produce an Oz picture.

     Finally, in 1980, Tom Wilhite --
 

the then-head of production at Walt Disney Studios -- had had enough. He was tired of seeing the company produce this seemingly endless series of mediocre films. Particularly since the studio was sitting on the movie rights to this spectacular series of children's books. So Tom began searching for a director who'd be willing to tackle the Oz project.

     To hear Walter Murch tell the story, "Tom had to work his way down to the Ms before he finally found me." Murch -- an Academy-Award winning sound & film editor -- may seem like a rather unlikely candidate to direct Disney's Oz movie. But Walter's pedigree (I.E. Murch had worked with Francis Ford Coppola on the "Godfather ") was impeccable. More to the point, given that Murch had just won an Oscar for his work on "Apocalypse Now," he had a fairly high profile at the moment.  So Murch was signed to both write & direct what was then known as "Oz" ...

     The "Return to Oz" title wouldn't actually be tacked onto the film until much further on down Disney's developmental track  And -- when Wilhite first announced the project to the press in January of 1991 -- he revealed that Dorothy would most likely not appear as a character in this picture.  "We'll probably combine characters from various books and structure a new storyline."  But the screenplay that Walter would submit in the spring of 1982 did feature Dorothy as a character. It was also much darker in tone than the studio had been anticipating. Which caused Disney executives much concern.   Still, development of "Oz" continued. A veteran production designer, Norman Reynolds (Who had worked on "Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back ") was hired to bring Baum's world to life. And work then began on the various robotically-controlled characters that would be featured in the film ...

    
    At this point, some $6 million had already been spent by Walt Disney Productions on "Oz." And then -- in November of 1983 -- Richard Berger (I.E. The executive who had replaced Tom Wilhite as president of production at the studio) suddenly shut down production of the picture.
As Berger explained to the New York Times back in July of 1985:

     ''The budget was up to $27 million (Which was significantly higher than the $20 million that 'Oz' was originally supposed to cost) ... The movie was supposed to (be shot in) Algiers, Sardinia, Spain, Canada, Kansas and England ... All of Disney's recent movies had (gone) over budget. 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' had been $5 million over budget. (Which is why I) decided to close down the movie and write off the $6 million (that the studio had already invested in the picture).''
     
    Eventually however a compromise was reached. "Oz" 's budget was pared back to $25 million. Which meant that virtually all of the movie's on-location sequences (Which would have sent the cast & crew off to Sardinia & Algeria to shoot the scenes set in the Deadly Desert, Kisserta near Naples to shoot the Nome King's throne room sequence and Hadrian's Villa outside of Rome for Mombi's palace as well as the ruins of the Emerald City) were scrubbed. Except for the scenes that were set in Kansas (Which were shot out on the U.K. 's Salisbury Plain, near where Stonehenge is located), the entire film would be shot on five soundstages at Elstree Studios.
 The film (as Murch and his production team had originally envisioned it) never quite recovered from all these budget cuts. Though much time & effort had already been devoted to creating authentic likenesses of favorite old characters like the Scarecrow.
     Now there was no money left in the budget for the complicated electronics that would have brought his face to life. Which is why the Scarecrow mostly had a fixed expression in the finished film.  As for Jack Pumpkinhead....

It often took as many as six puppeteers to bring Jack to life..

Where even the seemingly simple act of standing up and/or sitting down involved all sorts of elaborate off-screen mechanics.

    The "Return to Oz" shoot did not go well. Given that Fairuza Balk, the film's 9-year-old star, could only work 3 1/2 hours each day and that characters like Billina the talking chicken were notoriously difficult to operate, the production quickly fell behind schedule. At one point, Disney execs actually tried to remove Murch as director of "Return to Oz," only to have George Lucas intercede on Walter's behalf.   Once production was completed, Murch's movie had to deal with other problems. You see, by the time that "Return to Oz" had finally made out into theaters in June of 1985, Mouse House management had changed yet again.

   Now it was Michael Eisner & Jeffrey Katzenberg who were calling the shots in Burbank. And -- to be honest -- Michael & Jeffrey didn't know quite what to make of Walter's film. A PG-rated pseudo-sequel to 1939's "The Wizard of Oz" with no music that was often too dark & scary for small kids to handle.

  

    So while "Return to Oz" may have been the centerpiece of an elaborate presentation at Radio City Music Hall that summer, around the rest of the country this Walter Murch film didn't receive very special treatment. At that time, noted author Harlan Ellison actually accused Disney Company management of deliberately sabotaging "Oz" 's chances at the box office. Which is why he urged his readers to " ... go see it, before it disappears."  But,  luckily, thanks to VHS and DVD, "Return to Oz" has not disappeared. And while this movie may have been a real box office disappointment back in 1985 (Earning only $11.1 million during its entire domestic run), it has since gone on to be embraced by Baum enthusiasts around the globe. Who have applauded Murch's efforts to keep the look & style of this film consistent with that of L. Frank's books.

Interview with Brian Henson

 – In celebration of Oz The Great and Powerful, Disney’s latest foray into writer L. Frank Baum’s fairy-tale world of Oz, puppeteer, actor, director, producer, and chairman of The Jim Henson Company Brian Henson reminisces about Disney’s 1985 cult classic Return to Oz, his voice role as Jack Pumpkinhead, the days when pre-production was king, and the legendary Walter Murch.

"It’s seared in my memory—in a good way," he says.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Return to Oz. How do you remember the film?

It’s seared in my memory—in a good way. It was a big movie, but it was the first film I did as an adult. I think I was 19 when I auditioned and 20 when I did the film.

How did you get the role?

[Former Muppet Workshop sculptor and designer] Lyle Conway, who had done a lot of work with my dad [Jim Henson] at The Henson Company, had gone off to do Return to Oz. It was before we had a Creature Shop [Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is a division of The Jim Henson Company that provides visual effects, animatronics, and puppetry services] in London or anything like that. Lyle was looking for smart performers who understood animatronic-y-like characters, kind of like what we did for Dark Crystal [the 1982 Jim Henson-produced film], not just hand puppets like the Muppets.

Did your dad give you a recommendation?

I think my dad just told Lyle you should audition Brian because he’s done all the radio control and marionette stuff with the Muppets and he sounds actually like the right balance. So I flew over and auditioned.

Were you confident you’d snag the role?

I actually flew over to audition because I wanted to see a girl that I had met [laughs]. I did not think I was going to get the movie. And then I got the movie and did the film.

Tell us about the making of the film.

Well, the way we used to make movies back then, everything had to be done in the camera, not in post [production]—which I kind of love but will never come back. Movies were not post-production heavy back then. So we started five months before shooting. There was a team of us that were on the movie throughout a big chunk of the film—most of the film, actually. We would start with mockups, then we would rebuild them and rebuild them and rebuild them. That’s the way we used to make movies. You’d have this long build, stroke, rehearsal, puppet development process—and the puppeteers were there throughout this long process.

 

Who were the main characters in Return to Oz, and who brought them to life?

With Return to Oz, we split the characters up into little teams. There was a team that did Billina the Chicken [a yellow hen], led by Steve Norrington, who went on to become a great director [Blade, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]. The Jack Pumpkinhead team—Chris Ostwald was the main builder, and I was the head performer. He and I were the same age, and we became best friends. There was the Gump team [a moose-like character fashioned from a sofa and palm fronds] led by Lyle Conway himself because he was also a performer. There was the Tik-Tok team, there was the Tin Man team, the Lion team, and the Scarecrow team. The Billina, Jack Pumpkinhead, and Tic-Tok team worked the most because we were in almost all of the scenes in the movie.



Tell us about Jack Pumpkinhead.

Watch the film and you’ll see Jack is sometimes a puppet and sometimes a costume [worn by an actor]. So there was a “movement” guy who wore the costume, played by Stewart Larange. Now Stewart at the time was a top “body popper,” which at the time in the UK was a very popular form of dancing [involving the quick contraction and relaxation of muscles], and it was so popular that there were competitions all over the country [laughs]. I guess you could say it was robotic dancing—being able to move your body like you’re a robot. It was really very slick. Stewart was the one we put in the costume. We always had to make sure the puppet’s movement matched what Stewart was doing when he was in the costume.



Did you coach Stewart on how to move?

Yeah, yeah. He came in a little bit later, and then he and I worked on how to merge the movements of the puppet and him in costume.



When would you use Stewart and when would you use the puppet version of Jack Pumpkinhead?

Every time Jack is a walking figure, it had to be Stewart. All the other shots were of the puppet. All the wide shots when you see Jack walking would be Stewart.



How did the physical production differ from puppeteering, say, a Muppets film?

It’s quite different, because you’re basically shooting a live-action movie, not a puppet movie. [Director] Walter Murch had a real shooting style that was very important to him. He’s a very careful, considered director. He really knew what he wanted. Whereas with a Muppet movie, you design how you’re going to shoot the movie around what puppets can do. This was different. We kind of had to figure out how to do every shot he wanted to do. We had five or six versions of every puppet, so the moment when Jack stands up full figure is actually a puppet made to complete that one motion. It was a different time when you could really take apart every shot and really build and prepare for every shot. Which is similar to the way post-production is approached together today, but pre-production never is anymore.

Could you describe Walter Murch and his visual style?

Well, Walter is rather an extraordinary genius. It takes a while to get to know him. But he’s got one of the most sophisticated creative minds I have ever come across. I don’t even know how many Academy Awards® and nominations he has for sound design and film editing [five Oscar® nominations, two Oscar wins]. He really understands filmmaking. And coming from the editing room to the floor, he was very clear what he was going to need when he got into the editing room. There wasn’t a lot of overshooting, which is really good when you’re doing a movie that’s full of effects. He knew exactly what he was trying to get technically and visually.



Murch is obviously a big fan of the L. Frank Baum Oz books. Are you as well?

Walter is a huge fan of the L. Frank Baum books—as my dad [Jim Henson] was too—and when I was a kid, my dad gave me a collection of Bomba the Jungle Boy books and the L. Frank Baum Oz books, and I loved them and read them as well.
It’s interesting I came in as the young man on that film, but I totally knew the books Walter was coming at it from, and I knew he did not want to make a sequel to the MGM movie The Wizard of Oz; he wanted to make the L. Frank Baum movie, he wanted to make a movie of the books. Which is darker, it’s scarier, it’s more of a Grimms’ fairy tale kind of tone. So he was keeper of the tone. He knew what he was looking for. And it’s an odd tone.


What do you think of the movie today?

When you watch the movie, it has a unique and unusual tone.

When was the last time you saw it?

I decided to show it to my daughter when she was six—thinking to myself, well, it might scare her—and she fell in love with it. She actually watched it over and over and over. So I haven’t returned to it in the last couple years, but I saw it at least three times in the year or two before that.

It’s a strangely mesmerizing film.

I know. It weaves an odd spell over you. It’s interesting. It’s creepy. And that’s what fairy tales were designed to be. Little morality lessons like that.
There’s an interesting backstory about the making of the film. Murch—a first-time director—had a few problems getting shooting off the ground, and some of his rather high-profile friends famously rallied to his side, coming from around the world to the Return to Oz set in England to offer advice and lend their hands.

Were you there when they visited the set?

The movie was trying to survive the transition into new leadership at Disney. And it looked like it wasn’t going to survive that transition. With Walter, he had a whole big team in London, and we’d all been working for months and months and months. And it was tough because there was talk of shutting down the movie, and then there was talk of changing Walter—that he just wasn’t a commercial enough choice as a director, even though there never would have been a project if it wasn’t for what Walter had done for years. So then there was thinking that maybe we’ll continue it with a more commercial director.



Must have been a tough time on set…

It was a tough time. I think shooting got postponed. And Paul Maslansky, the line producer, was put in a very awkward position of trying to act on instructions coming from L.A. It was a very awkward atmosphere for a little while, and Walter took the unusual route of calling George [Lucas], Steven [Spielberg], and Francis [Ford Coppola] and saying, “Guys can you help me?” And they all got on planes, which is pretty impressive, and they all just sat on set. And now you have Paul Maslansky calling L.A. and saying, “Well what do I do, I have the three biggest directors in the world saying they want to see Walter direct this movie?” And then I guess in the end, I guess they said, “You know what? If those three guys are vouching for him, there must be more to him than we know.”



What was his problem, do you think?

Honestly, I don’t think Walter had any problems. I think he was prepared, I think he knew what he wanted to achieve, but he didn’t know how to communicate in a Hollywood-friendly way. He’s a man of very few words who knows what he’s looking for. But I think in terms of problems… now I’m just guessing. I’m just assuming that him interacting with Disney executives in L.A. was probably a little confounding and probably confusing to the people in L.A. He was a quiet man but very stubborn and very determined. And he really has an eye and an ear for something very specific in a scene, and it’s not what you expect. There’s something specific that he thinks is the strength of the scene that wouldn’t be what someone else might think.


Do you have a particular memory of working with Walter that stands out?

I remember when we were in post-production. There was a scene where Jack’s head is falling out of the sky, and it lands with a thump on its body. And Walter said he needed to record the yell but he couldn’t do it in a recording studio—that it wouldn’t sound right. So he said to me, “Can you meet me at 5:45 in the morning on this street in London?” And I said all right [laughs]. And at 5:45 in the morning, I met him at the top of a hill on this street in London, and he said, “Okay, here’s my car. I’m going to go to the bottom of the hill and to record this with my reel-to-reel. When you see me wave, I want you to put the car in neutral and when it gets to speed, I need you to hang your head out the window while you’re driving it in neutral with the engine not running and scream at the top of your lungs; then just as you hit me, I need you to cover your mouth with one hand.” Because he really wanted to get the sound of me screaming as I was approaching him.


Well Walter is a legendary soundman…

Walter helped redefine sound design by going out with a microphone and headphones and just recording real and wonderful sound effects. And it was great seeing him do that on Return to Oz. He went out and recorded the sound effects that were most important to him.

As both puppeteer and voice actor, how did you prepare for the role?

As I said, I had never performed and I always assumed my voice was going to be replaced. So what I was doing was just trying to be real, in the moment, in the scene. I was trying to do, I guess, what any actor would do, certainly trying to consider who Jack Pumpkinhead was—he’s certainly a kind of infant and looking for his mother. He’s been separated by his mother, sitting in this storage room for years and years. And then he’s reunited with Dorothy, whom he’s decided is his mother. And it’s just a weird simple character that he’s incapable of lying. Incapable of being anything but 100 percent innocent. And that was rather delicious.

Now in terms of preparing for the puppetry, we had to rehearse every little moment of every scene. Any time he had to do anything, pick things up, we had to rehearse all that. And like I said, we had lots of different types of puppets and we would often set up a shot in the evening and Walter would say I really want it like this and this, and we would set up a shot and then realize this puppet’s not going to do it, and Chris Ostwald and I would stay up all night and build a new puppet. And that’s the way we would do the first shot in the morning.


What did you learn while making the movie that you might still be employing in your art today?

For me it was the first time I ever spoke [in a film]. Because growing up in my father’s family, I was the gadget puppet guy. My plan was to go into special effects and I was very into radio-control puppets and doing marionette effects and using strings and you know, trickery. That was what I really adored. I had never been an actor as a kid in stage shows, maybe one in middle school, but I never thought I was heading in any way in a performing direction. It was surprising to me to have a speaking role in the movie. And it was even more surprising that Walter didn’t replace my voice, and he replaced everyone else’s—except for Lyle’s. His voice stayed on the Gump and mine stayed on Jack. And Walter just thought there was an emotional honesty to my performance that just sort of resonated as real. It wasn’t jumping off the screen in any way. I watch it, and I think I’m doing a simple thing character-wise, but that was what he was looking for. So what did I learn coming out of it? I learned so much from Walter. I can’t even begin to tell you what I learned: how to break down a scene, how to create wonderful and unique shots—he was very good at all that.


What did you learn about yourself?

I also learned that I just loved working all night with Chris getting the puppet ready for the next day’s morning shot. And my father was somebody who would often work for two days on a trot without sleeping, and I discovered that I was similar. And I have to say it was Return to Oz that sparked in me that kind of obsessive passion for realizing some little thing that’s otherwise impossible unless you approach it obsessively.




Original Article Link - http://d23.disney.go.com/news/2013/02/web-extra-23-questions-with-brian-henson/

Return to Oz in next D23 Magazine

Return to Oz, and some of its props, will be featured in the next D23 magazine.  Here's hoping we get a Blu-Ray!!  :) 

Here is the full article:

http://www.movieweb.com/news/exclusive-d23-spring-2013-first-look-featuring-oz-the-great-and-powerful

The Three Fetishes: Transformation and Ethical Engagement in Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985)

Here is an article written recently by Jesse Miksic about our beloved movie;

The Three Fetishes: Transformation and Ethical Engagement in Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985)




There is a vast mythology out there, deeper and wider than Middle Earth or Hogwarts, and yet more intimate, more rooted in the flights of fancy and weirdness that writhe in the dirt of our collective childhood. This is the mythology of Oz, created by Frank L. Baum and articulated in his fourteen novels about Dorothy and her various companions. For over 100 years, it’s been dormant, waiting patiently to be mined for spectacles and narratives; unfortunately, most of us only know it by a single film, the celebrated 1939 adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The whole thing is tragic case of untapped potential.

There was one other notable film drawn from this mythology, however, and it vibrates with richness and rabid weirdness. This is director Walter Murch’s 1985 Return to Oz, a film sentenced by the cruel hand of circumstance to obscurity and cult status. Murch was a first-time director, and the film was generally considered too harsh and frightening for the children that would presumably make up its primary audience. It’s a sad outcome, because locked within this Labyrinthian orgy of a pseudo-children’s horror moviemare some mind-bending subtexts, glimpses of some interesting ideas about transformation, childhood, and ethical agency.



In this essay, I’ll be breaking some of those ideas down. Using three potent symbols – the ECT machine, the Magic Powder, and the egg – as guideposts, I’ll unpack some of the paradoxes and explorations of identity and transformation that underlie the film’s pixie-dust grotesqueries. I’ll show how these subtexts connect with ideas of ethics and responsibility, allowing humble little Dorothy to be the savior of a whole imaginary universe. Don’t expect too much… the film resolutely refuses to make sense, or behave in any linear or predictable way… but as with any genuinely eccentric film, this shouldn’t stop us from looking for the deeper ideas locked away within all the weirdness.



And so, without further ado – the first of the three fetishes of Oz:



I. The Electrotherapy Machine



“Now this fellow here has a face. Do you see it? There are his eyes, and this must be his nose, and this must be his mouth. What’s this? Why, it’s his… tongue!”



Dr. Worley thinks his ECT machine is alive… so much so that he is destined to die trying to save it from his burning hospital. Of course, he also thinks the human brain is just an electrical machine, functioning entirely by way of switches and currents. And though he is an ephemeral figure, only appearing for a few minutes, his confusion seems to preside over this whole story, the dramatic and mind-bending return of Dorothy Gale to the land of Oz.



Dorothy follows a path of waking dreams and resonant artifacts to get back to the land of Oz, her hallucinogenic ancestral home. Months after her first journey to Oz, Dorothy became an obsessed insomniac, seeing visions of a place nobody else believed in. She was taken to Dr. Worley so that he could use his psychiatric devices to cleanse her of her melancholy. The implied objective: to make Dorothy forget about Oz, so that it no longer keeps her awake at night. If the ECT machine is truly alive, then it’s a monster that eats memories.



Making a machine of the mind entails a paradox, and Dr. Worley falls squarely into it. In trying to give Dorothy back the gift of an everyday life, he is denying her the desires and interiors that make her who she is. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing process, turning her into a sort of a tool and an ornament for her parents, who just want her to be useful around the farm, and “normal” in her behavioral patterns.



This meddling in Dorothy’s brain certainly doesn’t purge Oz from her thoughts. In fact, at the moment she is supposed to undergo treatment, she actually goes back, returning to her dreamscape by way of a confused and desperate escape attempt. Whether the ECT machine itself induces the journey, or whether it’s simply a significant landmark on the way, is irrelevant. The implication is that, through the misguided treatment of a patronizing, dehumanizing old doctor, Dorothy makes her inevitable Return to Oz.



Oz is a world where everything in Dorothy’s life is reflected in a great mirror of non sequitur. The translations are often revealing: people with pernicious influence in Dorothy’s waking world are reframed as melodramatic villains, and people (and animals) endeared to Dorothy become her supporters and companions. Dr. Worley, however gentle and well-meaning he seems to be in the real world, is transformed into a despotic tyrant, a sentient mountain with the manner of a self-important bully. He is the Nome King, through whose malicious influence the Emerald City and the Yellow Brick Road have been destroyed, and the heroes and citizens of Oz have been imprisoned in stone.



As Dr. Worley’s counterpart, the Nome King also has an agenda of control, and this agenda also uses amnesia as a weapon. When Dorothy goes off to browse his ornaments, he says something telling: “Soon there’ll be no one left who remembers Oz… and I will be completely human.” This enigmatic mechanism is never mentioned anywhere else in the dialog, but to the Nome King, it’s been the key pillar of his strategem– turn everyone who knows about Oz into stone or ornaments, thus eliminating the memory of Oz from the world.



The room where the Nome King’s guessing game takes place is a sterile gallery of ornaments, presumably representing his hundreds of victims. Dorothy enters through a morphing cave wall of rock, and the contrast between the stone chamber and the soft white gallery is striking, bringing to mind an earlier, more highbrow interior scene: the ascendance of Dave Bowman in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Nome King’s gallery has the same stylized flatness, the same shrill sense of dead space, as David’s cosmic bedroom. Both settings are liminal spaces for mind and identity, sites where the boundaries of consciousness are crossed; and both stories struggle with the man/machine dichotomy. The most important difference is that in the Nome King’s gallery, humanity is being stolen, rather than transcended.



Dehumanizing and aestheticizing, sealing people inside objects, in order to become human himself… a sinister, fascistic agenda, the exaggerated projection of Dr. Worley’s desire to treat the mind as an electrical machine, thus downgrading it from the animate to the inanimate.



There is another player in the ecosystem of Oz who insists on downgrading the organic into the inanimate. Her name is Queen Mombi, and even as she saps the life out of her henchmen and herself, she also holds her own antithesis – the Magic Powder – in her hands.



II. The Magic Powder



Queen Mombi is a hellish character, both sadistic and tortured, so powerless in the face of the Nome King that she turns her aggressive instinct back upon herself. Aside from the Nome King, she is the only actor in the ruined Oz who makes an active attempt to backtrack along the ladder of consciousness, turning herself from an autonomous individual into an empty terminal for the interchange of identities.



Mombi’s thing is that she has stolen the heads from dozens of citizens of Oz, and she keeps them in a living trophy hall, gazing back at her whenever she passes through to take stock of them. These heads apparently have their own personalities, as they can talk, even when detached from Mombi’s body. Her original head is kept locked away in a protective encasement at the end of the corridor, along with the Magic Powder, one of the powerful artifacts that the lazy, self-absorbed queen has apparently been assigned to guard.



Mombi’s sins closely resemble the Nome King’s: she aestheticizes the organic, treating identities as accessories and imprisoning personalities in decapitated heads which she puts on display. Not so different from capturing humans and keeping them as ornaments… the biggest difference is the ambition. Mombi has no real interest in taking over Oz, nor in becoming human (conquering the plateau of the ladder of consciousness). She is outright lazy, lingering and sleeping, sedated by her opulent surroundings and army of servants. Her menagerie of human heads gives her more than enough variety without having to conquer some foreign territory.



Mombi’s henchmen, the Wheelers, are her complimentary inferiors. They are human/mechanical hybrids, humans merged with automobiles: wheels for hands and feet, communicating in car noises. They are also deranged and irrational and cowardly, easily dominated by Mombi.



Both Mombi and the Wheelers are deconstructed human types, but it’s worth noting the difference in their strategies. The Wheelers are mechanical constructs, almost steampunk in their primitive morphology. Mombi, on the other hand, is cybernetic. She is a highly adaptive system with interchangeable identities, wearing faces and demeanors like it’s a matter of fashion. She is more dynamic than the Wheelers, but also more fragmented, with seams and couplings that penetrate right into her soul.
In what seems like somebody’s terrible delegation decision, Mombi has been placed in charge of guarding some very important things. One of them is a substance called Magic Powder, fairy dust gathered into a vial, that gives life to anything it’s applied to. She keeps this powder locked up with her original head; why she has it, why she values it, and what she might ever do with it are all mysteries that won’t be answered by this narrative. In no time at all, Dorothy will steal it and use it to animate a new companion (the Gump). Though it doesn’t have much more of a role to play, the powder is a symbolic cornerstone within the text. Honestly, Oz might as well be made of the stuff.
Like the ECT machine, the Magic Powder is an artifact of boundary-crossing, able to turn the inanimate into the animate, and giving the resulting creature a full personality and range of cognitive tools. This concept – the permeability of boundaries between object, animal, and man – is built into this story at an atomic level, spread so pervasively that it becomes sort of invisible. It may seem strange for a moment that Bellina suddenly learns to talk, but when we meet the Wheelers, and the Royal Army, and see the headless statues of the citizens of Emerald City, it becomes clear that this narrative is a sandbox of identity and ontological status.
This is what you might call a panthropomorphic world, fertilized at the intersection of surrealism and vitalism. Vitalism is the theory, regarded as highly scientific until around the 17th century, that all creatures possess some sort of principle, above and beyond the mere matter of which they are made, that allows them to move, and as a by-product, to form goals, make decisions, have desires, and generally perform actions within the world. It’s largely associated with theorists like Galen and Aristotle, and with the theory of the Four Humors. The Magic Powder, more than anything else in the story, embodies the animating principle behind living things – the vital force. Its power to place a spark within dead or inert objects, to make them capable of motion and thought, makes it seem almost redundant in this exotic land of Oz, where that sort of transgression is a prerogative, rather than an aberration.
In her return to Oz, Dorothy encounters three totems of vitalism. The first two are the ECT Machine and the Magic Powder. The third – both a reproductive symbol and a deadly weapon against the inert – is the Egg.



III. The Egg
Dorothy doesn’t realize that she has the most powerful weapon in Oz, right from the moment she arrives. This weapon is the egg that Billina the chicken is able to lay, apparently when she’s terrified of being eaten. The Egg is a potent symbol of matter becoming life, an object that can become a living creature, and its vital power is too much for the Nome King to bear. Why? It’s hard to say, either on a biological or a symbolic level; there’s lots of space for speculation, but how exactly the egg works its deadly magic is never answered by this narrative.
More interesting is the host itself, the adventurers that unwittingly bear the egg to the mountain palace. This host is composed entirely of boundary-crossing rogues, gathered around Dorothy herself, who began the journey by crossing the boundary from the real world into the magical land of Oz. This appears to be the only threshold the rest of them can’t cross, as Dorothy is destined to eventually return to Earth alone.
The first of Dorothy’s new wards is Tik-Tok, the Royal Army of Oz, a proud machine with all the capacities of a human, but who refuses to acknowledge that he is alive. Returning to 2001, he seems to be the steampunk second coming of HAL, happy to be free of the shortcomings of living creatures. Though he is not alive (a fact that he resolutely emphasizes), he has all the outward projections of life – thought, speech, and motion – which Jewish mysticism calls the “garments of the soul.” Once he is “empowered” by Dorothy, he is a relentless warrior, an easy match for the hordes of Wheelers, and a cunning strategist within the Nome King’s gallery.

Aside from Billina the chicken and Tik-Tok the wind-up soldier, Dorothy has two other companions, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Gump. Despite their absurdist nature, they are two of the saddest cases in Oz, both hand-made assemblages of objects given life by the Magic Powder. Both of them appear to be tragically incomplete… Jack yearns endlessly for his mother, and casts Dorothy as a surrogate, developing a rather unhealthy attachment to her. The Gump is constantly falling apart, losing limbs and large fragments. His personality seems to be resident within his head, a taxidermied trophy from some long-forgotten hunt. At any particular time, he’s lucky to have enough working parts to move around on his own power.
Despite the jankiness of her patchwork companions, Dorothy develops a fast and firm loyalty to them, and this is what ultimately sets her apart from Mombi and the Nome King. Her loyalty to her friends, and her concern for the Emerald City, indicate a strong ethical engagement on Dorothy’s part. This is a key to her character, and it’s also a key to unlocking the theme of transformation that floods this narrative.
In her book The Enchantment of Modern Life, philosopher Jane Bennett argues that despite all of Western culture’s claims of rationalist disillusionment, there still is – and must be – a sense of mystery and enchantment at work in our everyday lives. Further, she claims, this sense of enchantment is necessary for ethical engagement with the world. If we were truly disillusioned materialists, as some modern philosophers claim, we would fall into the ethical traps of nihilism and disinterest, because we feel no guiding hand or spiritual investment to shape our ethical lives.
A large portion of Bennett’s book focuses on boundary-crossers, like Deep Blue the thinking computer, Alex the reasoning parrot, and Rotpeter, Kafka’s ape that transforms himself into an ape-man to escape captivity. She has great affection for these cases of fluid ontology, and she ends their chapter with the following passage:
Inter- and intraspecies crossings might function as one of the sites of enchantment within a high-tech world where God’s presence, while available to many, is vague to others and absent for some. … Crossings can show the world to be capable of inspiring wonder, with room for play and for high spirits. And crossings just might help to induce the kind of magnanimous mood that seems to be crucial to the ethical demands of a society that is increasingly multicultural, multispecied, and multitechnical.

This kind of transformative magic is cranked up to eleven with Oz, the land where all identities and ontological states are fluid; and Dorothy, the visitor who has been adopted as a savior by the kingdom, is a test case for the power of enchantment to engage the moral sensibility.
Dorothy’s ethical engagement is tested by the Nome King in a very direct way. As she is going to play his lethal guessing game, he stops her:
“Dorothy. You don’t have to go down there. I could use the ruby slippers to send you back home. And when you get back, you will never think of Oz again."
“What about my friends?”
“Forget about them. You can’t help them now. … There’s no place like home.”

Dorothy goes on without even responding to this cynical manipulation. It’s a subtle, but viciously contemptuous response, more effective than any clever quip would have been. She may as well have rolled her eyes and spat in his drink. This is her strength of character – you know that if the Nome King himself were to be faced with such a challenge, he would balk, because he would never risk his own safety for anyone else. Mombi, the cybernetic queen, is equally disengaged; when you first see her lounging in her palace, she is apparently asleep, and until Dorothy steals from her, she seems to be in a stupor, like a well-supplied opium addict.

But Dorothy experiences her world as a wondrous, enchanting place, and she has a great sense of responsibility. She wants to free her old friend the Scarecrow; she risks becoming an ornament to save even her most recent acquaintances; she laments the destruction of the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City, and never dreams (even within this fever-dream) of accepting the status quo.

And at the end of her pilgrimage, it is the Egg that takes down the dictator, its real, physical, organic power of generation blowing open his cynical self-regard. The opposite of forgetting is not remembering, but creating, the spark of life within a talking chicken’s egg. Dorothy had the antidote with her all along, and the challenge isn’t in learning how to use it… it’s simply in resisting, asserting one’s presence as a moral force, so that eventually, that weapon can deploy itself.

And while those thresholds and boundary-crossings are a ubiquitous theme, and Dorothy’s ethical presence is a path to resolution, neither of these closes the narrative. Indeed, its lack of closure, its thematic illegibility, is one of the most wondrous things about this rendition of L. Frank Baum’s mythology. Like a true world of the imagination, it a language with a surplus of symbols, a place of play, possessed by fluid categories, spontaneous and pragmatic in its moral concerns. It is a moral and metaphysical dream, a lateral journey across the landscape of boundaries and differences, and a point of origin for an endless cycle of interpretation and inscription.
In her Return to Oz, Dorothy has rediscovered a place where animals talk, objects resonate with the vital force, and every entity is free to determine itself, as long as it’s willing to accept the responsibilities of ethical engagement that wonder and enchantment entail.


To see the original article follow  the link HERE

News Article

Here is a small News article I thought I would share.. 

Jean Marsh (Mombi) Honored by the Queen!

Here is a copy of the article:



"Born-and-bred Londoner Jean Marsh - the star of Upstairs, Downstairs - said she was "thrilled" to be made an OBE but admitted she initially ignored the official letter because she thought it might be a parking ticket.




The 77-year-old actress, who co-created the show with her friend Dame Eileen Atkins, said she was "overwhelmed" by the honour.



She said: "I thought it looked like a parking ticket but I knew I hadn't driven for a year.



"It feels extraordinary. I've had awards, like Emmys and all that sort of thing, but to have an official thing like this, I was thrilled."



Marsh, who played maid Rose Buck in the hit period drama, married actor Jon Pertwee when she was 19 and before he became a star as Doctor Who.



Upstairs, Downstairs, which was in part inspired by her mother's work in service, followed the lives of the well-heeled Bellamys of Belgravia and their servants below stairs.



Marsh said her parents would have been thrilled by the honour.



Soul singer and songwriter Omar, who has a home in south London, was so surprised by his MBE he had to read the letter to his parents to confirm he really had been given the honour.



The 43-year-old, perhaps best-known for debut single There's Nothing Like This, was awarded the gong for services to music under his full name Omar Lye Fook, has just recorded his seventh studio album and still tours internationally.



Omar has collaborated with musicians including Stevie Wonder and Angie Stone, and hit number 14 in the UK singles chart with There's Nothing Like This in 1991."



Copyright © 2012 The Press Association. All rights reserved.

Jean Marsh Article

By David Wigg

Jean Marsh — best known as Rose Buck, the parlour maid turned housekeeper in Upstairs Downstairs — was giving a talk to a group of fans about her life and acting career when she found herself the centre of some unexpected attention.
‘Suddenly, I realised people weren’t so much listening to me as watching me,’ she says. ‘I thought, “Why are they looking at me in such a strange way?”
And when an ambulance arrived, it was a great shock to be told that it was me they had come for. It was an extraordinary thing because I was ill — I’d had a stroke and a heart attack — but I didn’t realise it.’

No stopping her: Jean Marsh has vowed to carry on, despite suffering from a stroke AND a heart attack in the last year
She was taken from the event at a hotel in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, to the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. ‘Even as they were wheeling me away, I was asking, “Where am I going? What’s the matter?” In the hospital I asked if I could go home to my flat in Chelsea.
The doctor said,“No, I don’t think you will be doing that for a while.” I said I was fine but they told me, “No you’re looking a bit odd.” My hand did look a bit funny and they said, “You’ve had a stroke.”

‘A stroke? I had no idea. I didn’t think there was anything the matter with me physically because I was still moving. Even the next morning, when I woke up in my hospital bed, I was still convinced they’d got it wrong.
I looked around the ward at the other patients and saw a lot of elderly women. I thought they looked awfully poorly, so I got up and started helping them do things!’

Friends arrived to see her and said, ‘You know you really are quite ill’, but all Jean wanted was to get home. ‘Finally I thought, well maybe something is wrong,’ she says. ‘Then for about six days I gradually found out things were happening.’
Meanwhile, with only two weeks to go before filming was scheduled to begin at the BBC’s Cardiff studios for a new series of the revived Upstairs Downstairs — and with 77-year-old Jean due to appear in all six episodes — scriptwriter Heidi Thomas drew up three alternative plans of action.
Plan A was to leave the series as originally written on the assumption that Jean would make a quick recovery and be allowed back to work.

Marsh first revived her role as Rose Buck in Upstairs Downstairs in 2010, and the show is to return to our screens this Sunday
Plan B was to reduce her role drastically, and give her a small presence in just two episodes provided her doctors agreed.
And Plan C was the worst possible scenario —that Jean would have to be written out of the series altogether.

‘I didn’t know any of this at the time,’ says Jean now. ‘I just wanted to leave hospital and get back to work. After two weeks, I persuaded them to move me from hospital in Gloucester to one near my London home, the Chelsea and Westminster. Then the doctor said I hadn’t just had a stroke, as I’d been told, but a little heart attack as well.

‘I didn’t believe that, either. I told them I’ve always had a heart murmur, a rapid heart beat, but over the years I’d just got on with it. They were worried because I’d lost a stone in weight, but that was because I didn’t like the food.

Marsh (far right) with Gordon Jackson, David Langton, Angela Baddely, and Simon Williams from an episode in 1973

‘All that arguing with them must have worked in my favour, because eventually, after a week, they told me I could go home. I explained that I was well able to cook for myself, and I have a lady who comes in and will do things for me. I wouldn’t go hungry, or be lonely.
‘But I still had to go back to hospital for therapy three days a week. And the doctors said I could go back to work too, but do no more than four hours a day. But I was so worried about letting everyone down’.

So Plan B was adopted. It was agreed Jean would appear only in episodes three and six. Her absence from housekeeping duties at No. 165 Eaton Place, Sir Hallam and Lady Holland’s Belgravia home, would be explained by the staff as an enforced stay in a sanatorium due to a bout of TB.

When we meet, with filming over and Upstairs Downstairs beginning on TV this weekend, Jean is still frail, but clearly full of fighting spirit.‘I knew I was going to be all right, because you can’t have a stroke and be an actress.
You’ve got to get better. So I was doing everything to achieve that. I was reading sonnets and Shakespeare. People stopped me in the street to ask me if I was still ill, and I’d say, “Oh no, not very.”

The revival of Upstairs Downstairs has been a big hit for the BBC, and it has been portrayed as a rival to Downton Abbey
The most important thing is that you tick over and every day you get a bit better.’
After she left hospital, she was naturally anxious to rejoin the cast of Upstairs Downstairs.
Writer Heidi Thomas invited her to a ‘welcome back’ dinner in Cardiff.
‘I wanted to show them that I could do it. And I said, “I’m all right, don’t even think about me not rejoining you.” Returning was very sentimental for me because everybody loved me. They said, “Oh you’re much nicer than you normally are!”
‘Everybody was there, all the cast, all the crew and I knew they were looking at me and thinking, “Oh what a relief!” And when we started filming my episodes, they all forgot about it. I think they felt, “Oh well, she’s all right now, we’re back to normal.” ’

Marsh has been on British TV screens for a number of decades, and has also been a scriptwriter for television as well
Upstairs Downstairs was first created by Jean and her close friend actress Dame Eileen Atkins almost 40 years ago and became a resounding success when first shown on ITV.
It was broadcast from 1971 to 1975, running for 68 episodes, watched by 30  million people and sold to 80 countries. Jean, who won an Emmy for her role as Rose in 1975, is the only original member to return to the series.
When the drama was first revived at Christmas 2010, a new character was created, the imperious Maud, Lady Holland, the mother of Sir Hallam, for Dame Eileen to play (she had not taken part in the original series).
But shortly before the latest series was to start filming — before Jean was taken ill — Dame Eileen decided she didn’t want to keep her role. In the new episodes viewers will discover Maud has died and her ashes are resting on the mantelpiece at Eaton Place.
It has been speculated that Dame Eileen was unhappy with the way the story — and her character — was developing. ‘I never talked to her about her reasons’, Jean insists. ‘It was her choice, although I think everybody felt it was sad.

The show was created by Jean Marsh and her good friend Dame Eileen Atkins, and it has been revealed her character has been killed off in the new series
‘I know she likes to vary the parts she is playing, and it would have been a big commitment to take on a six-part series. It would have meant her turning down other parts. I didn’t try to persuade her to stay, because it was nothing to do with me. I’ve never ever talked to her about anything to do with her career. I don’t want it to ruin our friendship.’
Both from working class backgrounds, Jean and Eileen became firm friends in their early 30s. ‘We decided to write about our own background, something we were familiar with.
‘Both our parents were servants. Eileen’s father had been a chauffeur and under-butler in a very grand household and my mother had been a housemaid in a big pub hotel.
So we had lots of personal experience to draw on. It was actually the downstairs that came first. The upstairs element evolved later, because the servants had to have a family to serve.

The original cast, reunited in 2007. Back row (L-R): Christopher Beeney, Simon Williams, John Alderton, Meg Wynn Owen, Lesley Anne Down. Front row (L-R): Jacqueline Tong, Pauline Collins, Jean Marsh and Jenny Tomasin

‘About that time — 1967 — The Forsyte Saga was on and we kept asking, “Well, who does the laundry in their household? And who does the cooking and the washing up?” So instead of only being about downstairs, it became Upstairs Downstairs.’
Although the show made Jean a household name, she insists she’s comfortable, but not rich.
‘It didn’t make me into Elizabeth Taylor, but I was pushed three rungs up the acting ladder. So when it came to reviving the concept 35 years later,
I didn’t want to destroy the memory of the people and their characters who made it such a success.’

Jean speaks about her character Rose fondly. ‘She can be outspoken when she feels like it, appears more gritty than one might imagine, and beneath the smile and glint in her pale blue eyes, has a steely determination.

‘She is also very political. I wasn’t like her at all, but I loved her. I felt a closeness to the part. And that’s the nicest thing about being Rose — people like her, and so they like me.’

Jean Marsh with Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee on their wedding day in 1955, the couple divorced in 1960
When she was 19, Jean married actor Jon Pertwee before he became a star as Doctor Who and Worzel Gummidge.

‘He was 14 years older than me, and I was still growing up, so I changed. Our marriage really only lasted 18 months or so, and we were divorced after five years, so it was a small part of my life. He was a lot of fun, though, because he was a very amusing man.’
Then she had a short affair with actor Albert Finney. ‘He was adorable — very sweet.’ Afterwards, she lived with Kenneth Haigh for ten years, and says: ‘He was a brilliant actor and a fascinating man. Sadly, he has been ill and in hospital for a very long time.’
There was also a relationship with film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, but she has never had children.

It amuses her that there is talk of rivalry between Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs. ‘It’s flattering that people think they are similar programmes. We keep being asked if we are having a fight over it, but really the competition is good for us.’
She says she has no intention of retiring so long as her health is stable. ‘Why would an actress retire? We don’t have to because, when we are older, we can play older parts. Even if you are in a wheelchair you can go on working.’

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