3 Best Christopher Hampton Monologues

Dangerous Liaisons (Marquis de Merteuil)

Dangerous Liaisons (Marquis de Merteuil)

Category: Movie Role: Marquis de Merteuil From: Dangerous Liaisons

When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelist to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.

Atonement (Briony Tallis)

Atonement (Briony Tallis)

Category: Movie Role: Briony Tallis From: Atonement

I’m dying. My doctor tells me I have something called vascular dementia, which is essentially a series of tiny strokes. Your brain closes down, gradually. You lose words, you lose your memory, which for a writer is pretty much the point. So that’s why I could finally write the book, I think. I had to. And why of course it is my last novel. Strangely enough, it would be just as accurate to call it my first novel. I wrote several drafts as far back as my time at St. Thomas’ hospital during the war. Just couldn’t ever find the way to do it…Yes, entirely, I haven’t changed any names, including my own…No. I had for a very long time decided to tell the absolute truth. No rhymes, no embellishments. And I think you’ve read the book, you’ll understand why. I got firsthand accounts of all the events I didn’t personally witness: the conditions in prison, the evacuation to Dunkirk, everything. But the effect of all this honesty was rather pitiless, you see. I couldn’t any longer imagine what purpose would be served by it… By honesty or reality. Because, in fact, I was too much of a coward to go and see my sister in June, 1940. I never made that journey to Balham. So the scene in which I confess to them is imagined…invented. Any of that could never have happened, because Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on June 1st 1940, the last day of the evacuation and I was never able to put things right with my sister, Cecilia, because she was killed on the 15th of October, 1940, by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains of Balham tube station. So, my sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for and deserved. And which ever since, I’ve always felt I prevented. But, what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion. But a final act of kindness I gave them: their happiness.

Atonement (Robbie Turner)

Atonement (Robbie Turner)

Category: Movie Role: Robbie Turner From: Atonement

Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame.