Clothes maketh the mother

In Park Avenue, British film-maker Gaby Dellal has created one of the most gloriously monstrous mothers in cinema history, with a wardrobe to die for. And both are drawn from real life.

“The mother was based on a woman who kept a secret from the family she disliked, with whom I walked around Central Park for years while I was living in New York,” says the award-winning writer and director. “She looked like Katharine Hepburn and was very cinematic in style, but the clothes worn by Kit, the character I called after her, were the clothes my own mother wore.”

Although Dellal’s mother, Zehava, was born in Binyamina and grew up on a citrus farm in Palestine, a career as an El Al stewardess fostered an interest in fashion she turned into the kind of fabulous clothes collection Kit, played by statuesque Fiona Shaw of Harry Potter and Killing Eve fame, whirls and twirls in throughout this engrossing film about a mother-daughter relationship passing secrets and lies down through the generations.

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While Kit and her daughter Charlotte, played by Katherine Waterston, are not identifiably Jewish, their tussle to try and resolve their lifelong differences – an often-painful, but also sometimes funny watch – is universal, believes Dellal:  “Like so many daughters, I grew up challenging my mother and only in her death did I learn to accept and applaud her.”

The film, which has been a big hit on the festival circuit from Santa Barbara to Dublin, co-stars some other famous faces, including Timothy Hutton and Phylicia Rashad, famous for TV appearances as Bill Cosby’s wife on The Cosby Show and more recently in The Gilded Age. “Phylicia was a big hit with the residents who spotted her passing through the apartment building  where we filmed scenes in the lobby doubling for the mansion on Park Avenue,” says Dellal, who will take part in a Q&A at the UKJFF screening.

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The writer-director’s impressive track record has helped her get cinema distribution, with a general release at Odeon cinemas from November 17. She won a BAFTA and two other awards for her movie On A Clear Day, which opened the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, has made films featuring Susan Sarandon and Helena Bonham Carter and gave Sienna Miller her first leading role.

But although Dellal is glad to see her film opening in her native country, she also longs to see Park Avenue play in the city where the world’s finest urban residential street is situated: “This film is my love letter to New York.”

As for the clothes, which in the case of the movie include a covetable Missoni cardigan which passes between mother and daughter, Dellal regrets that unlike the fictional Charlotte, she did not get to inherit her own mother’s fabulous wardrobe.   “She had incredible style and wore all these amazing clothes, but after she died we couldn’t find them.”  Like many of the plot points in this deliberately ambiguous film, the fate of Zehava’s real-life wardrobe remains a mystery.

Park Avenue is at Everyman Belsize Park on 15 November at 6pm parkavenuemovie.com