Geraldine, played by Frances de la Tour, was cast to play a lesbian partner in Love Actually. (Love Actually)
The heartbreaking lesbian storyline that was cut from Love Actually is making the rounds again, just in time for you cry into your Christmas wrapping paper.
The 2003 festive favourite is endlessly repeated on TV at this time of year, and while it has been often criticised for only showing straight relationships, many don’t know that it originally included a tearjerking lesbian love story.
The romcom originally included a relationship between the headmistress (Anne Reid) of the school that hosts the final Christmas concert, and her partner Geraldine (Frances de la Tour).
Deleted scenes show the headmistress return from school to find her partner, who is terminally ill, in bed.
They laugh and drink wine, before it cuts to them sleeping in bed together, Geraldine painfully coughing.
In a later scene that was also cut, Karen (Emma Thompson) gives a speech at the concert while the headmistress sits in the audience wearing dark glasses, and says: “I’d just like to say to our headmistress, on behalf of all the parents, that we think it’s very brave her being here today in light of her recent loss.
“Geraldine was a wonderful and wicked woman, and sorrow is particularly hard at Christmas.”
3. Love Actually (dvd deleted scene)
Did you know there was a deleted lesbian storyline in Love Actually? I did because I have nothing else in my life.
It had Anne Reid and Frances De La Tour as a couple coping with terminal illness. Not exactly Xmas cheer. pic.twitter.com/sumCvTo10U— Jasmin Billinghay (@jazhands17) November 11, 2020
Director Richard Curtis has previously said, in a bonus interview on the Love Actually DVD, that he regretted the storyline not making it into the final cut.
“I was really sorry to lose this,” Curtis said.
“The idea was meant to be that you just casually meet this very stern headmistress, but later on in the film we suddenly fell in with her and you realise that, no matter how unlikely it seems, any character you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love.”
Curtis, who also wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary, apologised for the abrupt nature of the last scene, saying: “It jumps rather quickly at the end because you find out what’s happened to them in a bleak manner.”