This beautiful lesbian storyline was cut from Love Actually
Geraldine, played by Frances de la Tour, was cast to play a lesbian partner in Love Actually. (Love Actually)
A touching lesbian plotline was removed from Love Actually with scenes cut.
The Christmas classic originally included a love story involving a headmistress and her terminally ill lesbian partner Geraldine, who was played by Tony and Olivier Award-winning Harry Potter actress Frances de la Tour, but it ended up on the cutting room floor.
The deleted lesbian scenes, which were included in the 2003 film’s DVD release, show the partners at home, drinking wine. They talk and laugh about Emma Thompson’s character’s son, who the headmistress says wrote an essay about how his Christmas wish was to be able to see people’s farts.
Watch the lesbian love story cut from Love Actually:
The headmistress calls Geraldine “my love” and her lover responds by telling her she’s a “domestic goddess,” before the pair are shown in bed at night, cuddling together while Geraldine coughs violently.
It is revealed in the next scene that Geraldine has died as Thompson’s character, Karen, stands in front of the school to pay tribute to the headmistress and her partner, who she calls “a wonderful and wicked woman.”
Karen adds that “sorrow is particularly hard at Christmas.”
Director Richard Curtis “really sorry” he cut the Love Actually lesbian scenes
The scenes are introduced on the DVD by Love Actually writer and director Richard Curtis, who said he was “really sorry” to lose them from the film.
He said that the lesbian couple’s involvement had been thought out, but having cut the scene in which Karen’s son is brought to the headmistress’s office for his essay about farts, there was no way to include the other footage.
“No matter how unlikely it seems, any character you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love.”
— Richard Curtis
Curtis explained: “The idea was meant to be that you just casually met this very stern headmistress, who you would just think: ‘Well, there’s a stern headmistress.’
“The idea was meant to be that later on in the film… we suddenly fell in with the headmistress, and you realise that no matter how unlikely it seems, that any character that you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love.”
The lesbian love story between the headmistress and Geraldine was cut (Love Actually)
The man behind Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary apologised for the abrupt nature of the last scene, saying: “It jumps rather quickly at the end because you find out what’s happened to them in a bleak manner.”
Love Actually‘s decision to kill off queer love story is common
In killing off Geraldine, the rom-com stumbled into the Bury Your Gays trope, which involves the death of one or more characters in a queer storyline.
In August, the showrunner of Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender Joaquim Dos Santos apologised to fans after killing off gay character Adam just weeks after revealing his existence.
And in deleting the storyline entirely, Love Actually joined another club of films to cut queer stories after filming them.
This year, a scene in Thor: Ragnarok confirming that superhero Valkyrie was bisexual was shot, but mysteriously edited out of its general release and DVD.
The Black Panther comics depicted a lesbian relationship between warriors Ayo and Aneka—but the romance was allegedly dumped from Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film adaptation.
