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Charlie's Angel Jaclyn Smith takes the lead role of the lady with the lamp in this 1985 drama that also features a superlative supporting cast, including Claire Bloom, Jeremy Brett, Timothy West and Timothy Dalton.

Jaclyn Smith might have been forever immortalised in the role of Kelly Garrett in Charlie’s Angels – but her performance as Florence Nightingale in this 1985 TV movie warrants more than a footnote in her career history.

Opening in the midst of a celebratory ball that wouldn’t look out of place in an Andrew Davies Dickens adaptation, we learn that the titular Lady of the Lamp actually came from an incredibly well-off background and flouted social mores of the day, resisting her family’s insistence that she wed dashing young Timothy Dalton (playing politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes) in favour of training to be a nurse (at a homely nunnery-cum-orphanage in Kaiserswerth in Germany). It isn’t, however, until Nightingale takes up her first position (in a hospital that more closely resembles a prison) and you start to glimpse the revolution she led in terms of sanitation and patient care, that the drama really comes into its own. With solid supporting from the likes of Claire Bloom, Jeremy Brett and Timothy West (and an early performance from Emily Watson), Florence Nightingale is the kind of drama that they just don’t make any more.

 

MovieMail on 23rd March 2010
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