1 week Ago By Neela Debnath
WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Black Mirror Hotel Reverie Netflix has released Black Mirror season seven worldwide with six new episodes, including the romantic Hotel Reverie. The episode imagines new technology which allows actors to go into old black-and-white movies and essentially create reboots. Hollywood A-lister Brandy Friday (played by Issa Rae) is enlisted to star in the 1940s movie Hotel Reverie, which features one of her favourite actresses Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin).
Through a technical glitch, Brandy gets locked into the film with the American actress and Dorothy falling love. Hotel Reverie reveals how Dorothy was a closeted lesbian and unable to live her true, authentic life due to the social mores of her era. Many Black Mirror fans are keen to know if the character Dorothy is based on a real person.
While there doesn’t seem to be a specific person Dorothy is based on, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has cited Brief Encounters as a touchstone for Hotel Reverie and how he watched it before writing the episode with Bisha K. Ali. Brooker said of Hotel Reverie’s premise: “It’s a story in which somebody is thrown inside a film like Casablanca and then they have to bring the story to an end in order to survive.
It’s like The Purple Rose of Cairo meets Back to the Future, but through a Black Mirror lens.” In fact actress Dame Harriet Walter said during the filming of Hotel Reverie: “We also had Brief Encounter on a loop, which was wonderful. You look at that and the acting was so brilliant.
“We didn't hear Celia Johnson’s voice, we just saw her face, and could see what went over that face in a matter of seconds, the number of emotions that went through it.” Audiences may be curious to know about some real-life parallels between Hotel Reverie and stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Celia Johnson’s performance in Brief Encounter was clearly something of an inspiration for Hotel Reverie, with her character Laura Jesson - a married woman - falling in love with a doctor after a chance meeting.
Iconic actress and singer Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 at the age of 36 from an overdose of sleeping pills - similar to Dorothy who took her own life alone in her home. She suffered from a troubled personal life after her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller both ended in divorce. She’d also had a traumatic childhood with her mother diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and Monroe placed in foster care and various orphanages growing up.
Marlene Dietrich was known for dressing in sharp suits and trousers on the silver screen in the likes of Morocco, The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress as she broke down gender constructs. Her sartorial choices echo Brandy’s gender-swapped role as Dr Alex Palmer with the contemporary Hollywood actress donning a well-tailored tuxedo for her role. Dietrich was said to have both male and female lovers, living and loving freely.
The Washington Post columnist Diana McLellan said of the actress in her book The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood: "Marlene was perhaps the busiest and most passionate bisexual in theatrical Berlin...
(she had) a notorious and compulsive appetite for the sexual seduction of other beautiful women." Dietrich reportedly had a romance with Greta Garbo that went sour and they ended up in a bitter feud, reported the Daily Express. Greta Garbo was said to be have been involved with Dietrich, but the German star was reportedly cruel to her.
Dietrich even wrote once to her husband Rudolph Sieber, with whom she was in a life-long open marriage, about her surprise at Garbo’s long list of lovers. She penned: "I don’t understand how she gets them all." Garbo and Dietrich are also thought to have shared lovers including actor John Gilbert and actress Mercedes de Acosta.
Unlike Dietrich, Garbo was more reserved and private about her personal life. Black Mirror season 7 is streaming on Netflix now.
