It’s the festive season, which always brings with it seemingly endless repeats of Love Actually on the box.
But while many of us have seen Richard Curtis’ romcom enough times to know all the words, including those on Andrew Lincoln’s soppy placards, few know of the highly emotional storyline about an older lesbian couple that ended up on the cutting room floor.
The relationship was between the headmistress (Anne Reid) at the school attended by Karen’s (Emma Thompson) son and her terminally ill partner Geraldine (Frances de la Tour).
The audience was supposed to see a moving scene in which the pair bicker over their differing tastes in fancy sausages and display wicked senses of humours, before cuddling up at night.
It is later revealed during a school assembly that Geraldine died shortly before Christmas.
There are only heterosexual couples in the final edit of Love Actually, leaving many to wish that Curtis had kept this brief but touching subplot in.
“I was really sorry to lose this,” the director says on the DVD’s bonus footage.
“The idea was meant to be that you just casually meet this very stern headmistress, but later on in the film we suddenly fell in with her and you realise that, no matter how unlikely it seems, any character you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love.”
This article was originally published in December 2018
