Fortunately, Branagh cottoned onto a solution: "I kept putting my hand on his bottom," he explained. "I don't know if he took that the wrong way."

[How did Branagh explain the 'creation scene' in which he and De Niro, both largely naked, wrestle and slither in one ton of K-Y Jelly? "We have to do these things for art." (Each man ended up with a mouthful of K-Y, handfuls of rubber eels flopping around, and a serious case of the giggles. De Niro's chief concern? "Don't get the K-Y up my ass! Don't do that, for f---'s sake!") Like Mary Shelley's novel, the film is thick with strange natal imagery (Mary Wollstonecraft had died a lingering, painful death after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley, who later lost a prematurely born child in 1817, the year before she began writing Frankenstein). In Victor's lab, a huge phallic tube shoots electric eels at an enormous womb-like sarcophagus. And when the Creature is born, the amniotic fluid in which it is cooked spills out into an awful delivery room. Indeed, so intent was Branagh on remaining faithful to the spirit of Shelley's story that he banned the word "monster" from the set during shooting.]

[Trivia: Robert De Niro's classic line from Taxi Driver - "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?" - was improvised during filming.]


Branagh, Kenneth Charles (1960-    ) Irish actor and director, Renaissance Theatre Company founder [noted for his roles in such films as Henry V (1989, Oscar nominations for Best Actor and Best Director) Dead Again (1991), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Frankenstein (1994), Hamlet (1996), and Alien Love Triangle (2002); and for his autobiography, Beginning]

[Sources: USA Today, November 3, 1994; Interview magazine, November 1994; US Weekly, November 1994]

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