The real-life Edith, meanwhile, died just a few years after the Sutton Hoo dig, after suffering a stroke in late 1942. Her husband Frank had died in 1934 after a battle with stomach cancer.

At the time of the dig, she was a widow with a young son, Robert, born in 1930. Some of the details of the real Pretty's life, however, have remained. Both are based on real-life people – though the age-gap between them is an invention of the Netflix movie.

In the Netflix movie, however, she is played by Mulligan, 35, acting alongside the 58-year-old Fiennes.Ĭarey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes as Edith Pretty and Basil Brown in 'The Dig'. In 1939, when the majority of The Dig is set, Pretty was 56, five years older than Brown, the amateur archaeologist she appointed to excavate some earth mounds on her Sutton Hoo estate in Ipswich, England. Hollywood's arguably sexist tendency to cast women who are much younger than the women they are portraying has long been the subject of jokes, and so is the case in The Dig with landowner Edith Pretty-ironic, as she is played by Carey Mulligan, who has been criticising sexism in the media recently following a controversial review of her film Promising Young Woman by Variety. However, Netflix has decided that it is a story worth telling-though they have made some typically Hollywood changes to the film to amp up some of the details. Real archaeology (as opposed to the whip-cracking, globe-trotting type dreamed up by the Indiana Jones movies) is a slow and laborious process, and as such seems an unlikely topic for a starry movie.

The Dig is the latest movie released by Netflix, which is a dramatic retelling of the Sutton Hoo archeological discovery of the late 1930s, which saw amateur archeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) discover an ancient burial mound full of amazing Anglo-Saxon artifacts.

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