This is Abi Morgan’s year. She’s had an incredibly well reviewed show — The Hour — air in England and here in the States. To top that off she has not one, but two, films hitting the movie theatres this awards season — Shame and The Iron Lady. Shame has gotten star making reviews for Michael Fassbender (and there are talks of an Oscar nomination) and The Iron Lady hasn’t even yet started to unroll.
I honestly didn’t know that Morgan had even been involved with Shame until recently — all the energy and discussion has been sucked up by the star Michael Fassbender and the director Steve McQueen.
What’s also impressive is the wide diversity of topics that Morgan writes on. Shame and The Iron Lady couldn’t be any more different.
It’s not like Morgan has come out of nowhere, she’s been a successful playwright, but she has become a writer who is able to be successful in several mediums. That’s not easy. In case you don’t know what she’s written, here are some of her credits include: the screenplay for Brick Lane; Tsunami; Sex Traffic among others.
Here’s how The Guardian described her this summer when The Hour premiered:
It is hard swiftly to categorise Morgan’s ways — a little bit feminist, a little bit pro-underdog, more than a little bit of constantly surprising, overwhelmingly fine writing.
What I like about Morgan is that in a lot of her work she writes about strong women. And come December her profile will get a huge boost with the premiere of The Iron Lady. You don’t get any bigger or more prestigious than Meryl Streep.
Here’s what interested Morgan in the Thatcher story (and she still hasn’t seen the final version) according to a recent interview with IndieWIRE:
But I wanted was to write about power… a loss of power. Whether I’m left or right, I just wanted to write about that. It’s been called a ‘left-wing fantasy.’ But as I said then, if I was going to have any fantasy — whether it be left or right-wing, it would not involve Margaret Thatcher.
We’ve seen so many films about men with power. Here we are going to see a film (whether we agree with her or not) about a woman in power. I can’t wait.
Hopefully once The Iron Lady starts rolling out Abi Morgan’s name will no longer be unknown.
Abi Morgan: Television’s best-kept secret (The Guardian)
Tricks of the Trade: “Iron Lady” and “Shame” Scribe Abi Morgan Muses on Screenwriting (IndieWIRE)