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News Article for Saturday 4th August 2012

Directed by J Lee Thomson, written by Ted Willis and starring Yvonne Mitchell, Anthony Quayle and Sylvia Syms, StudioCanal are pleased to announce the DVD release of the long unseen, Golden Globe Winner, Woman In A Dressing Gown, out on DVD from 13th August 2012.

A powerful and progressive drama that follows the turmoil caused when the marriage of twenty years is rocked by the husband's infidelity.

Showcasing adultery really is a timeless concern, this classic British drama tells the story of Amy (Yvonne Mitchell, Queen of Spades, Tiger Bay, The Divided Heart), a hopeless housewife - she burns meals, does not finish housework, listens to the radio too loud and some days does not even get around to getting dressed. By contrast, her husband Jim (Anthony Quayle, Lawrence of Arabia, Ice Cold in Alex, The Eagle Has Landed), is much more together and still attractive. When Jim tells Amy he has fallen in love with his young, beautiful secretary Georgie (Sylvia Syms, The Queen, Victim, Ice Cold In Alex), Amy's already fragile world threatens to fall apart.

Originally released in 1957, the film anticipated not only the British New wave of Social Realism, but also Betty Friedan's ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique. Woman In A Dressing Gown shows us that Amy's hopelessness in the home is born out of loneliness, boredom and depression - dissatisfaction with her "confinement" to the home that Freidan later labeled "the problem with no name". As such the film can be heralded as more progressive, at least in terms of gender politics, than its better known successors - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Look Back in Anger, etc - because it has as its heart a middle-aged housewife, rather than an angry young man.

Based on Ted Willis' (The Blue Lamp) TV drama of the same name, Woman In A Dressing Gown is sensitively directed by J Lee Thompson, otherwise better remembered for his more masculine films including The Guns of Navarone, Ice Cold in Alex and Cape Fear. The film was also nominated for two BAFTAs and Yvonne Mitchell's emotional performance won her the Silver Bear in Berlin, where the film also picked up the FIPRESCI prize and the OCIC Special Mention prize.