11/16/2023 0 Comments Deep water 2006![]() ![]() ![]() To stick with the nautical metaphor, the yacht race is his chance to get his head above water before he drowns in debt. Crowhurst emphasises that its hero’s business is sinking fast. When he heard about the Golden Globe race, he saw it as a golden opportunity to publicise the Navicator, among other gadgets.īut the two new films don’t quite agree on his motivation. His pride and joy was the “Navicator”, a handheld proto-GPS, but sales were slow. The Mercy and Crowhurst were preceded by a 2006 documentary, Deep Water, which told the amazing tale of the middle-aged inventor who lived modestly with his wife and four children in Bridgwater in Somerset. “It’s a unique situation in the history of cinema,” says Rumley. It may not be unprecedented for different studios to release concurrent biopics of Winston Churchill, Alfred Hitchcock or Truman Capote (as a rule of thumb, the lower-profile biopic in each case will star Toby Jones), but both of the Crowhurst biopics are being released by the same company, StudioCanal. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Imagesīut here’s the surprising part. Inventor … Donald Crowhurst prior to sailing in the Golden Globe single-handed, non-stop race around the world in 1968. Adding yet more Oscar power, Colin Firth stars as Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz plays his supportive but understandably nervous wife. Dreaming of being the first person to circumnavigate the planet singlehandedly without touching land en route, he left England and his family behind.īrave British hobbyist reaching for the impossible? Homegrown pluck and ingenuity versus foreign expertise? It’s the kind of story that keeps the UK’s film industry afloat, so it’s hardly surprising that, in February, Crowhurst’s voyage can be seen in The Mercy, directed by James Marsh, the Oscar-winning director of Man on Wire and The Theory of Everything. The boat’s wiring was a bird’s nest, and screws kept coming loose, but if Crowhurst had delayed any longer he would have been disqualified. He had little funding and less experience compared with his eight rivals, but he set off, anyway, on 31 October 1968, on a trimaran he had helped to modify and equip. Fifty years ago, an amateur sailor named Donald Crowhurst entered the Golden Globe solo round-the-world yacht race. ![]()
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