Actor Juliet Stevenson has revealed Nicole Kidman annoyed her by claiming she brought attention to Rosalind Franklin’s story when she played the scientist in 2015.
The 68-year-old actor, who’s best known for her role as Nina in the romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply, herself tried to popularise Franklin’s story when she played the scientist in the Bafta-winning 1987 BBC TV drama Life Story, almost three decades earlier.
Stevenson starred in the drama alongside Jeff Goldblum and Tim Pigott-Smith, who played James Watson and Francis Crick – the two scientists who were credited to have discovered DNA’s double helix structure in 1953 and later won the 1962 Nobel prize in medicine.
Franklin, an expert in X-ray imaging who died aged 37 in 1958, was studying DNA at King’s College in London, along with a scientist named Maurice Wilkins, while Watson and Crick were working on modelling the molecule’s shape at Cambridge University.
During a visit to Franklin’s lab, Watson was able to look at Photograph 51, an X-ray image she had taken showing DNA’s criss-cross shape. Although Franklin remained largely unrecognised for her findings, Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick – a testament to her influence on their work.
Kidman played Franklin in Anna Ziegler’s play Photograph 51 in 2015. “It made me slightly annoyed that she said ‘I am the person who brought Rosalind Franklin to the world, nobody knows this story,” Stevenson admitted while speaking at Hay Festival, per The Times.
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“I thought: ‘Hang on, we told the story all those years ago,’” she said, adding that perhaps it was “petty” of her to be complaining about the remark.
The Independent has contacted Nicole Kidman’s representatives for comment.
Stevenson said Franklin had done “a large amount of the groundwork” for the discovery of the double helix structure but had been “totally sidelined” when the discovery was announced.
“Watson used to come and listen to her lectures at King’s, write everything down and then whip back to Cambridge and use that work to make their extraordinary imaginative leaps,” she told the festival. “This is not to undermine their achievement in making those leaps and putting the solution together but they did owe a great deal to her.”
