Heavenly Creatures

On Tuesday June 22, 1954, during mid-afternoon, two teenage girls were seen accompanying a woman into Victoria Park, just south of Christchurch, New Zealand. Thirty minutes later just the girls returned, seeking medical assistance for the woman, claiming she had been injured in an accident.

For two months, there was world-wide interest as a deluge of bizarre revelations followed.

It transpired that the girls — Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme — had descended into an elaborate fantasy world of their own construction and, on that fateful day, had hit Parker's mother over the head 45 times with a brick.

The case stunned the world and 40 years later, formed the basis for Heavenly Creatures.

Peter Jackson, the man behind upcoming epic, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, picked up an Oscar-nomination for his screenplay based largely on the girls' diaries. Aside from writing and directing the acclaimed movie, he also had the foresight to cast Kate Winslet in her pre-Titanic days as Juliet.

Jackson was absorbed by Pauline Parker's notes which provided a disturbing account of the girls' desperation and of Pauline's hatred for her mother. They also detail the pair's fantasies and the contempt in which they held nearly everyone around them:

‘1953, April 3 (Fri). ‘Today Juliet and I found the key to the 4th World. We realise now that we have had it in our possession for about six months but we only realised it on the day of the death of Christ. We saw a gateway through the clouds. We sat on the edge of the path and looked down the hill out over the bay.’
Unsurprisingly, the most chilling entry is on the day of the murder.

1954, June 22 (Tues). “The Day of The Happy Event.”

‘I am writing a little of this up in the morning before the death. I felt very excited and ‘The night before Christmas-ish’ last night. I did not have pleasant dreams though. I am about to rise.’

Despite the macabre content, the director also saw a lot of dark humour in the diary.

“There's a whole section where they fantasise about marrying James Mason,” Jackson remarks. “And they're not sure whether or not Mason is married, so they resolve to murder his wife so that they can get their hands on him.”

The film-maker was meticulous about using actual locations, artefacts and even archival film footage. His goal was to recreate the environment, the known facts and the real people involved in the case.

Until Heavenly Creatures arrived, Kate Winslet had never starred in a film before. Having cut her teeth with the Honey Monster in a cereal advert, she moved on to bit parts in Casualty before making the leap to big screen stardom.

Kate knew as soon as she read the script she just had to play Juliet Hulme, the British half of the murderous duo.

“I was so happy when they asked me to do it. I just cried,” she recalled in one interview.

Heavenly Creatures brought Winslet to the attention of the movie world and it wasn't long before high profile scripts were dropping on her mat.

“I suppose it has sort of broken through the shell into millions of other possibilities,” she said in 1995. “At the same time, I could never get another job again. That's just the nature of the game. You've got to take the highs with the lows.”

Now she's one of the hottest actresses on the planet with Sense and Sensibility, Hamlet, Titanic and the upcoming Marquis De Sade biopic, Quills, upping her asking price. She's also one of the most lusted after with many a site on the Internet devoted to the Reading-born thesp.

“I don't see myself as glamorous she laughs. It's a big joke. Having said that, I love all the make-up and dressing up. It's great fun.”

Kate also became the darling of the American press with Rolling Stone magazine among those taking her to their heart.

“The world probably isn't big enough for Kate Winslet,” wrote one journalist. “Everything she says is larger than life: She uses the words ‘brilliant’, ‘absolutely’ and ‘gorgeous’ a lot and because of that, what she says really does seem brilliant, gorgeous and absolute, a slightly better world than the one you live in.”