Likewise, said Mirren, who likes shooting guns for target practice or the movies, but does not understand the American fixation with weapons. “It’s a cycle you continually build, and are paying the check with the very thing you are trying to run away from, which is the cause of your grief.” “Eric thinks there is a compulsiveness, a disorder, and tries to get to the cause of that,” Clarke said. to declare Winchester insane in order to wrest back control of the company. Mirren’s co-star, Jason Clarke, plays an invented character, Eric Price, a psychiatrist sent to the mansion by the Winchester Rifle Co. This film, directed by Australian identical twins, Michael and Peter Spierig (who were hovering in the house like animated spirits), takes a decidedly supernatural tack, undoubtedly the most entertaining version of Winchester’s unusual life. “Was she a Rosicrucian? Was she a straight-down-the-line Christian? Was she haunted? Was she crazy?” “There are many understandings of her,” said Mirren, who visited the house for the first time last week. Or, she was an architect manqué, whose construction oddities like the “staircase to nowhere” were simply the result of a lack of formal training. Or, the sound of hammers could never stop, lest she would die. The stories surrounding Winchester’s construction compulsion are as entertaining as they are contrived: A famous Boston spiritualist told her to keep building to placate the tormented spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles. Winchester spent decades creating this extraordinary mansion, which, upon her death in 1922, became one of California’s first roadside attractions. Most of the filming was done in Melbourne, but the crew is here for some critical exterior shots. Mirren is about to wrap shooting on “Winchester,” an Australian-made feature film in which she portrays Sarah Winchester, heir to the magnificent rifle fortune. By 1966, the one-room country school had become a thing of the past.It’s not mysterious, but it is a little strange to be sitting across from Helen Mirren in the not-so-grand “grand ballroom” of the Winchester Mystery House, a famously rambling and chaotic Victorian architectural marvel that is the antithesis of the sleek Silicon Valley aesthetic that has grown up around it. School districts consolidated, pooling their resources to provide more teachers, broader curriculum, and opportunity for extracurricular activities. Equipped with little more than a blackboard and a few textbooks, teachers passed on to their pupils cultural values along with a sound knowledge of the three Rs.īy the turn of the century, the population began to shift to the cities and country schools began to lose students and tax support. She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet for less than $50 a month. The school teacher, sometimes slightly older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English. They got to school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives swirling past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas.
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