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Actor Carey Mulligan says she's never watched her films more than once — until now.


 
 
She stars in "Suffragette," a movie currently playing in Minneapolis. It revolves round a young woman swept up in the campaign for votes for women in Britain in 1912. She said she loves the film because it retells an important story that's still relevant today.
 

 
The Suffragette movement grew out of frustration. After years of campaigning peacefully and unsuccessfully for women's right to vote, some militants moved to direct action. In the film "Suffragette," a peaceful afternoon is shattered when a group of women quickly gathers around a baby carriage that turns out to hold not a child, but a pile of rocks. 

 
Shouting "Votes for women," some of them grab the stones and hurl them through store windows. Everything descends into chaos, but then the police arrive and the women run, melting away into surrounding streets.

 
Mulligan said the film tells a story that has been largely forgotten in recent years, making the movie harder to finance. It took eight years to raise the money, because people had an erroneous view of what happened.

 
"Kind of the image you have in your head sometimes of Suffragettes, which is polite, tea-drinking, flower-bearing ladies, as opposed to the militant suffragettes which we show in our film. I think it was very difficult to get the money, for sure," she said.

 
Mulligan laughed a little when reminded that the only point of reference many people have to the Suffragette movement is the comic song "Sister Suffragette" from the Disney film "Mary Poppins."

 
"Yes, it is people's only reference," she said. "I didn't even study it at school. So it was one of my only references. I knew a little bit more than that from my parents, but it's not something, amazingly, that's really taught at school. It's not a compulsory part of the curriculum in England, which seems crazy."

 
Mulligan plays a fictional character, Maud Watts, who has worked in a London laundry since she was a girl. She initially wants nothing to do with the movement, but eventually joins the Suffragettes' campaign of civil disobedience as a way to counter the abuse she and her friends continually suffer. She takes part in bombings of mailboxes and, later, of larger targets.

 
Mulligan said she can see how those tactics make people uncomfortable today, given concerns about domestic terrorism.
 

"I think the difference in the way the Suffragettes approached it and modern terrorism, which I think is a different thing, is that it was their intention to protect human life," she said. "They would never harm a human life in the process of their act of civil disobedience."

 
 
The Suffragettes drew special attention from the police. In the film, Maud is arrested, put in solitary confinement, and when she goes on a hunger strike is force-fed. When an investigator tries to get her to become an informer, she refuses.


 
"The law means nothing to me," she replies. "I've had no say in making the law."


 
"That's an excuse. It's all we have," he counters.

 
"We break windows. We burn things. Because war's the only language men listen to. Because you have beaten us and betrayed us and there's nothing else left." 

 
While "Suffragette" portrays events from a century ago, Mulligan said today's issues of inequality resonate through the film. The movie comes out during a new debate over pay equity for women within her own industry. However, she said she sees this as only a platform for a larger debate.

 
"I think it's good that we can talk about it as actors and actresses because it's unfair," she said, "but only so it has a wider impact on society, so everyone is talking about it instead of just what actors and actresses are paid."

 
 
Mulligan said one point of pride in the cast was that fellow actor Helena Bonham Carter is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Henry Asquith. As British prime minister, he argued along with his wife against giving the vote to women.

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The actor says the story of England's battle for women's rights echoes loudly today. She stars in "Suffragette," a movie currently playing in Minneapolis.

Carey Mulligan portrays a Suffragette who never met Mary Poppins

Courtesy Focus Features

In the movie, police break up a suffrage protest.

Carey Mulligan portrays a Suffragette who never met Mary Poppins

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