HOLLYWOOD has finally discovered what followers of the England football team have long suspected: the British do not like a happy ending.

The proof came when executives at Working Title, the British film production company, cringed at the ending to their adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and decided to lop it off.

As a result, the British version of the film is an estimated two minutes shorter than its American equivalent, after the producers at Working Title Films had a change of heart and left their Hollywood-style “pay off” shot on the cutting room floor.

“You got the more sugary one,” Matthew MacFadyen, who plays Mr Darcy to Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet, revealed to a USA Today reporter. “The Brits hated it.”

The British version of the film instead concludes with Elizabeth’s father (Donald Sutherland) giving his consent when Mr Darcy asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage. “And if any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at my leisure,” he declares, in the film’s final line. American audiences, however, are treated to a lingering shot of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy kissing under moonlight, on a terrace. Mr Darcy asks his new wife how he should address her. Should he, he inquires, call her Mrs Darcy? She replies that he should only call her that if he is absolutely in love with her.

“Mrs Darcy . . . Mrs Darcy,” he repeats as the credits roll.

The change came about after executives watched a screening of the longer film in America. David Livingstone, vice-president of Universal marketing and distribution, said that the American audience loved it but the British executives had reservations. “There was a moment when somebody said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it ended with Donald Sutherland?’,” he told The Times.

The extra scene was kept for the Americans, as well as some Asian territories that prefer emotion to be “laid on quite thickly”, Mr Livingstone added.

The ploy certainly worked with the American critics, who forgave the film its lack of faithfulness to the novel. “The sumptuous new screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has so much to recommend it that it seems almost churlish to point out that its plucky, clever heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, played by Keira Knightley, is not exactly the creature described in the 1813 novel,” Stephen Holden wrote the New York Times.

But not all British cinemagoers are happy. A petition has been started demanding that the US ending is added to the DVD version. Margaret Smith, a member of the Austen Society, said that there was something missing. “It was lacking,” she said. “I hope that the other ending will be on the DVD.”

Mr Livingstone said that Mrs Smith’s wish would probably be granted. “I imagine the DVD will be over the moon about it. It is a viable possibility.”

Meanwhile, some members of the Jane Austen Society of North America have voiced their disappointment with the US version. “It has nothing at all of Jane Austen in it, is inconsistent with the first twothirds of the film, insults the audience with its banality,” Elsa Solender, the former society president, told the BBC.

The success of the film version of Pride and Prejudice has prompted ITV to commission a season of costume dramas based on Austen’s novels. Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey are to be given the small-screen treatment in autumn 2006.

AUSTEN'S POWER

She is buried in Winchester Cathedral

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