A STATELY home which has doubled as such famous buildings as Buckingham Palace and the sanctuary of the legendary caped-crusader is celebrating 50 years of big and small screen stardom.
Osterley House and its parkland, off Jersey Road, Osterley, will tomorrow (Saturday) unveil its Real to Reel exhibition to the public.
Created to showcase many of the locations and props which have helped carry its fame around the world, the exhibition has taken months of painstaking work.
Even the launch date was carefully chosen to coincide with the release of the third instalment of the re-booted Batman franchise: The Dark Knight Rises.
Starring Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Sir Michael Caine as Alfred the Butler and Anne Hathaway as the seductive Catwoman, producers Warner Bros spent several weeks filming at the house last summer.
The 18th Century building, once called ‘the palace of palaces’ was designed by Robert Adam and is now owned and managed by the National Trust, which admits licensing its properties for filming is now the principal way it raises cash for restoration projects.
Speaking at a sneak-peek event on Tuesday Neil Cole, the trust’s property manager for Osterley House and park, said: “We are the trust’s premier site for filming, which provides a huge income for us, which is all driven straight into the conservation projects we run year-round.
“The effort that has gone into creating this exhibition has been amazing and I look forward to seeing the public’s reaction.”
Six parts of the house will feature in the new Batman movie, doubling for Wayne Manor.
They are the entrance hall, long gallery, great stairs, library, breakfast room and the little-known secret passage, accessed through a bookcase in the library.
The passageway will leave readers familiar with the comics in no doubt as to its purpose.
It is how Bruce Wayne accesses his secretive ‘Bat Cave’, a series of underground chambers hewn out of the rock on which the manor stands.
In reality, visitors to the exhibition will see that the passageway leads
only to a bathroom, which has
been stocked with bat-related props and facts about bat conservation.
Dark Knight’s location manager Nick Daubney explained that when director Christopher Nolan saw Osterley House he wanted it.
He said: “Chris is a god and we treat him as such, but when he came here the first time he said, ‘I want Osterley, I want all the rooms, and I want to paint the whole place green (so digital effects can be placed over the top in post-production).
“I explained to him it was National Trust, has 10 million visitors a year and they make four million cups of tea.
“I told him he needed special permission to do what he wanted.
“He said four menacing words to me…‘Are. You. Telling. Me?” and, of course, thanks to the trust we came up with many solutions which didn’t involve damaging the heritage of this wonderful location. They literally turned darkness to light and helped the Dark Knight to soar.”
Real to Reel runs from tomorrow (Friday) until November 4 and is included in the normal admission price for the house which is open from Wednesday to Sunday.
For more information visit http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/osterley-park/things-to-see-and-do/events/#iframeEvents
