Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (I’d say it’s his masterpiece, but he has many of those), came out 20 years ago next month. To celebrate the anniversary, Vulture published an oral history of the erotic mystery-thriller starring then-married Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, with an emphasis on the infamous orgy scene. The whole thing is worth a read — out-of-context quote: “They explained that the women would no longer be wearing their G-strings and that the men would be completely naked except for a cup over their bits” — but one of the more interesting revelations has to do with an Oscar-winning actress.
Actress-model Abigail Good is credited as playing the “Mysterious Woman” during the orgy, but “Stanley died before the dubbing was done,” she said. “And I always wondered before the film came out whether they were going to dub me, because I didn’t have an American accent.” They did, indeed, end up dubbing Good, but according to Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s personal assistant (he was also in Barry Lyndon), the voice wasn’t provided by an American actress:
“It was Cate Blanchett! That was her voice. We wanted something warm and sensual but that at the same time could be a part of a ritual. Stanley had talked about finding this voice and this quality that we needed. After he’d died, I was looking for someone. It was actually Tom and Nicole who came up with the idea of Cate. She was in England at the time, so she came into Pinewood and recorded the lines.”
This is where I’d usually link to the scene in question, but considering the website that hosts the video begins with “porn” and ends with “hub,” you’ll have to do the extremely NSFW Google-ing yourself. But the next time you watch Eyes Wide Shut, either on DVD or some naughty corner of the internet, remember that it’s Queen Elizabeth herself as Tom Cruise’s orgy tour guide.
The trailer (with very misleading music!) is clean, at least.
(Via Vulture)
