From The Sunday TimesJanuary 4, 2009

BBC unveils Anne Frank the sexual teenager

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article5439489.ece

ANNE FRANK is to be portrayed as a stroppy teenager undergoing her sexual awakening in a new television adaptation of her wartime diary.

In the drama to be shown this week, Anne, a Jewish victim of the Nazis, is shown having her first experience of love, kissing a boy with whom she is hiding from the Nazis.

The portrayal is a deliberate attempt to make Anne a more rounded character than in previous versions that have shown her more as a child martyr and symbol of Jewish suffering.

“I’ve not made her the sanctified Anne as she has been portrayed before,” said Deborah Moggach, the screenwriter and novelist. “Nor is she the voice of 6m Jews who died in the Holocaust. Again she’s been portrayed as that before.”

Moggach is the first writer of an adaptation to have permission to use Anne’s own words and also to have had full access to passages of the diaries previously excised by the family.

“I’ve made her a very sexual young woman whose hormones are all over the place,” said Moggach, who wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice and her novel Tulip Fever.

Anne began her diary in 1942 when she was 13 and her family moved into hidden rooms in a house in Amsterdam. She wrote for two years until they were discovered. She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

Moggach has elaborated the diary version of Anne’s relationship with Peter van Pels, who was two years older than Anne.

The BBC version, which runs in half-hour episodes from Monday to Friday, shows the relationship, at first frosty, growing into infatuation and possibly love. “Here were two teenagers stuck in one house for two years with no idea that they might survive,” said Moggach. “It’s not surprising they fell for each other.”

Anne, played by Ellie Kendrick, is shown “thinking about him all the time” and talking about his lovely blue eyes as they kiss and cuddle.

The dramatisation also builds on Anne’s awkward relationships with Edith, her mother, and Margot, her elder sister.

In one scene Anne’s mother turns on her to ask: “How can I make you love me?” In another, Margot, who is shown as far more serious than her sister, says to Anne: “You suck up all the air in this house. I’m the one who has to be good.”