Stage Beauty

“She was the first of her kind. He was the last of his.”

In seventeenth-century London, women are forbidden from the stage, so Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup) plays the great female roles himself and is adored for it. Maria (Claire Danes) is his dresser, laces him into the costumes, and wants to act far more than she lets on. Richard Eyre follows her as King Charles II lifts the ban, and Maria must now ask the man she has served for the training she has never been allowed to have.