For Release: 2008-12-22 11:47:00
Gemma Arterton stars in Thomas Hardy’s powerful story of a blameless woman tested by fate in “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” an adaptation of the classic tale opening the new season of Masterpiece Classic. It airs Sundays, Jan. 4 and 11 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET1 and KET HD and Thursdays, Jan. 8 and 15 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET2. “Tess” also marks the debut of new Masterpiece Classic host Laura Linney and the first Masterpiece production offered in high-definition.As “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” opens, Tess’s father has just learned that his long-impoverished family descends from ancient aristocrats called D’Urbervilles, from which their name has been corrupted to Durbeyfield. The new status is all but useless since no ancestral property remains, yet the discovery has an ennobling effect on Tess, reinforcing her natural sense of honor and integrity.
Seeking employment with a wealthy widow whose family has unjustly taken the D’Urbervilles name, Tess falls prey to the woman’s dissolute son, Alec. An unrepentant libertine, Alec wants to possess Tess, but she flees him, eventually finding work as a milkmaid at a farm. There, she encounters a young man she had met at a dance years earlier, Angel Clare, a well-educated clergyman’s son learning to be a farm manager. He and Tess fall in love.
But Tess finds herself judged for qualities that Victorian society holds more dear than her sterling purity of soul, even by those who profess to love her. To author Thomas Hardy, the radiant Tess is a symbol of rural Britain, a pagan goddess at odds with the social and technological change sweeping across England’s West Country in the late 19th century.
Masterpiece is produced by WGBH/Boston. More information about KET programming and education services, as well as how to support KET, can be found at www.ket.org.
Contact: Ellen Soileau
###
Download this release as an RTF file - 14 Kb
View or link to a public version of this release.
- Downloadable image(s) included. Please 