Theatrical movie debut of Helena Bonham Carter (Lucy Honeychurch) and Rupert Graves (Freddy Honeychurch).
During the process leading up to placing trade ads for the Oscar nominations, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis made it known he was not interested in campaigning for an Oscar nomination. As a result, the production company concentrated on promoting Denholm Elliott in the supporting actor category. Elliott was enthusiastic in participating in the process and eventually won an Oscar nomination.
In a BBC interview aired in 1986, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis described his character as being "the sort of person you imagine you might be in your worst nightmares."
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and this movie opened in New York City on the same day, March 7, 1986. Both movies featured Sir Daniel Day-Lewis in prominent and very different roles: in this movie, he played a repressed, snobbish Edwardian upperclassman, while in Laundrette, he played a lower-class gay ex-skinhead man in love with an ambitious Pakistani businessman in Thatcher's London. When American critics saw Day-Lewis, who was then virtually unknown in the U.S., in two such different roles on the same day, many (including Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and Sheila Benson of the LA Times) raved about the talent it must have taken him to play such vastly different characters.
Charlotte Bartlett (Dame Maggie Smith) and Eleanor Lavish (Dame Judi Dench) discuss the plotline of E.M. Forster's other Italian novel "Where Angels Fear to Tread" when on the picnic. Helena Bonham Carter starred in the movie adaptation of the novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991).