84 Charing Cross Road Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, Judi Dench Director: David Hugh Jones
84 Charing Cross Road was originally an epistolary memoir by New York writer Helene Hanff. Adapted for the stage by James Roose-Evans and then for film by award-winning screenwriter Hugh Whitemore, it tells the true story of the 20-year correspondence between Hanff and an antiquarian bookseller named Frank Doel.
Anthony Hopkins (far right)plays Doel, who is chief buyer at the famed London bookstore Marks & Co, which according to '84 Charing Cross Road Revisited' - a website dedicated to the history of the store - began trading from that street in the 1920s.
Marks & Co was well known for its comprehensive collection of the works of Charles Dickens, and for its authority on Freemasonry and the occult sciences. Mark Cohen, whose surname was shortened for the name of the store, was a specialist in Dickensian literature, while Benjamin Marks was an active Freemason for most of his life.
When asked if Hanff's book, which was published in 1970, had had any effect on sales at Marks & Co, Cohen replied: 'I get about 80 letters a week. If things had happened differently I could have sold everything I've got twice over.' Sadly, the store closed in December 1970, two years after Doel passed away. He and Hanff never met, wherein lies much of the story's magic.
Anne Bancroft won a Bafta for her turn as Hanff, a kind and outspoken New Yorker with a passion for English literature. The writer's correspondence with Doel begins when, frustrated with the shortage of early-edition English books in New York, she sends a letter to Marks & Co in October 1949 requesting copies of Hazlitt's Selected Essays and Robert Louis Stevenson's Virginibus Puerisque.
Doel responds to her request, and a friendship is forged that spans two decades and a host of historical milestones - Churchill's 1951 election, Queen Elizabeth's coronation, the student protests against the Vietnam War - that appear in their letters.