Coming of age

Say this for Jane Austen: She’s an inexhaustible source of roles for actresses who have aged out of the film industry’s ingenue straitjacket. Or so we might conclude from some recent casting news:

* Our small screens are soon to see a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Our big screens are soon to see a new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. And both will feature the wonderful Irish actress Fiona Shaw, 67: as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in P&P and as Mrs. Jennings in S&S. Indeed, Shaw is already a veteran of the Austen adaptation game: Thirty years ago, she played a warm and sympathetic Mrs. Croft in the 1995 Amanda Root-Ciaran Hinds Persuasion.

Speaking of the new S&S, Focus Features just announced that the role of Mrs. Dashwood will be played by Catriona Balfe, of Outlander fame--at 45, still a couple of decades away from her Lady Catherine moment.

Although—why, really? Lady Catherine is the mother of a twenty-something daughter, so she needn’t be the wizened battleaxe of most portrayals. But far be it from me to deprive sixty-something actresses of a good part.

* Meanwhile, Emma Thompson, 66, is starring in Becoming Meg Dashwood, an audio sequel to Sense and Sensibility that gives an adventurous afterlife to Margaret, the youngest Dashwood sister. She goes to London! She falls in love with a woman! She befriends a sex worker! And also a witch!

“This one’s about liberation, class, queerness, and all the things that, on Jane’s 250th birthday, we are still fighting to say out loud,” the writer Rebecca Humphries explains, in a recent MSN story. The new adaptation will be released on October 6.

Thompson won an Oscar for adapting Sense and Sensibility into the masterpiece that is Ang Lee’s 1995 film, in which she also played Elinor Dashwood. In the new audio sequel, Thompson plays Margaret, while 69-year-old Imelda Staunton--Charlotte Palmer in Lee’s film--plays Mrs. Jennings. (Perhaps Fiona Shaw was busy?) Thompson's husband Greg Wise, who played Willoughby in the 1995 movie, also has a role in the sequel. It's practically a class reunion!

I will admit that I’m a tad skeptical about Becoming Meg Dashwood. (A witch?) But hey—you know I’ll be listening. They had me at “Emma Thompson.”