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Love Actually's 'lost' storyline could have solved a big criticism of the film

Photo credit: Amazon Prime
Photo credit: Amazon Prime

Love Actually is arguably the most divisive festive mainstay around, especially for the fact that despite the movie featuring nine love stories, there isn't an LGBTQ+ storyline to be found.

There's been a lot of discussion about the Christmas movie since its release back in 2003, but there's still a chance you won't have known that a storyline was cut from the movie that could have solved that criticism.

Originally, Love Actually featured a storyline that saw Anne Reid play the school's stern headmistress, who we later learn has a partner called Geraldine (played by Frances de la Tour), who is terminally ill.

In the deleted scenes on the home release, writer/director Richard Curtis noted that he was "really sorry" to lose the scene, but once they had cut a bit with Karen (Emma Thompson) and her son at the school, it wouldn't have made sense.

Watch Love Actually on Prime Video

"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 you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love," Curtis explained.

As good as it would have been to have a lesbian relationship in Love Actually, it could have led to a different criticism of the movie as the only gay storyline was a tragic one.

The storyline was one of a reported four that were cut from Love Actually.

Photo credit: Universal
Photo credit: Universal

Unfortunately, another one of those cut was a lesbian storyline about "a schoolgirl who fell in love with another schoolgirl", according to Curtis, which might have helped it avoid some criticism.

Like the other cut storyline that remains a mystery, that schoolgirl storyline sounds like it was cut before the movie was filmed, but there was one more that was deleted after being filmed.

This brief storyline would have zoomed in on a photo in Sarah's (Laura Linney) office of two Kenyan women, cutting to a scene of them talking about how they weren't happy with their daughters' choice of partners.

According to Curtis, the idea behind it was to show that "love was literally all around" in the most obvious way possible (because they were "literally" in a different country in the world).

Love Actually is available to watch now on Amazon Prime Video and Netflix in the UK.



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