Papa on the
Small Screen
Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman steam
up HBO as Hemingway & Gellhorn
Ernest Hemingway has been dead for
50 years, but he’s still showing up in the
spotlight. Last summer his character had a
key role in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in
Paris. And the recent best-seller The Paris
Wife is a fictional account of his marriage to
Hadley Richardson.
Now HBO brings him and another of his
loves to the fore in Hemingway & Gellhorn,
an original film starring Clive Owen as Papa
and Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn, the
third of his four wives.
The film, as the title implies, is about the
two of them together and their turbulent life
as a team, in bed and on the battlefield as competing war correspondents. But the story is
filtered through the perspective of Gellhorn.
It begins with her as a chain-smoking elderly
woman, relating to an unseen interviewer her
days with Hemingway. With unnerving 60
