Jessica Lange & Jonathan Kent On The Turbulent Road Of Bringing ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ To The Big Screen: “Sometimes The Struggle Is Helpful” — Glasgow Film Festival

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Of all the characters Jessica Lange has played throughout her illustrious career, it’s Mary Tyrone, the restless, morphine-addicted mother of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, that has been her favorite.  “She’s the character that has touched me more deeply than any role that I’ve ever played,” says Lange. “You never get to the bottom of Mary Tyrone and I’ve played her hundreds of times on stage in London and New York.

She’s written with such beauty and love and truth and intensity that you never complete her. I could keep on playing her for the rest of my life.”  After Lange completed her run on the 2016 Broadway revival of the play with prolific British theatre director Jonathan Kent, which won her a Tony Award, the pair were keen to immortalize the epic story as a feature film.  “It happened very organically,” Kent tells Deadline. “I’d never directed a film before but my knowledge of the material and having worked with Jessica before on the play, it meant that I wasn’t swimming out in an alien sea.”  Set across a single day in August 1912 at the Tyrone family’s Connecticut seaside home, the story follows the four members of the family – Mary, her husband James, and their two sons Jamie and Edmund – as they face the dual looming spectres of Edmund’s potentially fatal consumption diagnosis alongside his mother Mary’s increasingly fragile and anxious state of mind.

The family knows that the situation threatens to return Mary to her severe morphine addiction that was only recently overcome.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abiare was brought aboard to adapt the project for the big screen and condense what is a four-hour play into 109-minute feature film.  “It was a