Any Human Heart - update

Jim Broadbent, Matthew Macfadyen and Sam Claflin take on the lead role of Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd's adaptation of his best-selling novel Any Human Heart. From one man's emotional, tumultuous and unpredictable journey through the 20th century comes a funny, moving and ambitious four-part drama, coming to Channel 4 in 2010.

Told through Logan's intimate journals - beginning with the idealism and arrogance of his youth, through triumphs and tragedies to the calm wisdom of his twilight years - his story reveals that all our lives are ultimately random and defined by luck and seemingly inconsequential choices.

Hayley Atwell, Natasha Little, Emerald Fennell, Ed Stoppard, Samuel West and Kim Cattrall star alongside Gillian Anderson and Tom Hollander as the lovers, wives, friends and infamous figures he encounters throughout his ordinary and yet utterly extraordinary life.

Matthew Macfadyen takes Logan through middle age from the thrill and heartache of true love and the birth of his first child to scandal in the New York art scene in the '50s and '60s, via the horrors of war. Newcomer, Sam Claflin embodies the idealism, vitality and naivety of the young Logan, where his lust for life and women truly begins as a student in Oxford and then Paris in the 1920s.

William Boyd says: "I am both thrilled and exhilarated at the prospect of these three sensational actors taking on the role of Logan Mountstuart as we follow him through the 20th Century on the emotional, dramatic and rackety journey that is his long and tumultuous life."

Gillian Anderson and Tom Hollander as the Duke & Duchess of Windsor

Throughout his life it is Logan's personal relationships which define him; through numerous flirtations and affairs to finding true love. Logan also has encounters with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Tom Hollander and Gillian Anderson); Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming (Tobias Menzies). Boyd's epic tale charts an entire existence and in doing so reveals that all our lives are ultimately random, defined by luck and seemingly inconsequential choices. As Logan himself says; "I am all of these different people. All these different people are me."

"Doing this role made me more nervous than I have been doing anything. I hope I don't make an idiot of myself." (Gillian discussing her role as Wallis Simpson)

The women in Logan's life are many and varied; newcomer Emerald Fennell plays the young writer's wife, Lottie, Hayley Atwell plays Freya; Logan's mistress and the love of his life, Natasha Little plays third wife Alannah and Kim Cattrall takes on the role of older Logan's glamorous lover Gloria.

Other cast in the ambitious four part serial include: Julian Rhind-Tutt playing revolutionary John Vivian, the older versions of Logan's two best friends are played by Ed Stoppard as Ben and Samuel West as Peter. The cast also includes Freddie Fox, Hugh Skinner, Charity Wakefield and Lydia Wilson.

Source: Channel 4

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