Educating Rita

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Educating Rita is

a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell which premièred at The Warehouse, London, in 1980; and

a film (1983) directed by Lewis Gilbert and starring Julie Walters, Michael Caine, and Maureen Lipman with a screenplay by Russell. The film won the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Educating Rita
Walters & Caine
Directed by	Lewis Gilbert
Produced by	Lewis Gilbert
Written by	Willy Russell (also play)
Starring	Michael Caine Julie Walters
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	September 14, 1983 Toronto Film Festival
Running time	110 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

Educating Rita is about Susan White (Walters in the movie), a married woman in her twenties working as a hairdresser who signs up for a course at the Open University because she is eager to learn. Susan has changed her name to Rita because Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown is her favourite book. Her husband urges her to have a baby and strongly opposes her decision to go to university. When the play opens Rita meets her tutor for the first time. Dr. Frank Bryant (Caine) is an unsuccessful middle-aged academic with a drinking problem who has no experience in teaching students but who has agreed to tutor OU students because he needs the money to fuel his out of control drinking habits.

The plot is a reworking of the old Pygmalion motif: As time goes by, Frank gradually overcomes his initial repulsion to teach English literature to an utterly uneducated person. Eventually, his rising ambition to turn Rita into a respectable and educated member of society gets the better of him, and when he sees how quickly Rita learns he falls in love with his own creation. Failing to see that Rita is no longer dependent on him, he asks her to spend the rest of her life with him, but Rita -- or rather Susan, as she calls herself now again -- politely declines.

Educating Rita is a play for two characters and set entirely in Frank's office at the university, whereas the filmed version includes a number of minor characters who are only talked about in the stage play.

[edit] Trivia

Although the setting for the film is Liverpool, the film was shot in Trinity College, Dublin. All other scenes were also filmed in Ireland, with "France" in fact being Maynooth, and Dublin Airport also appearing.