Earls Court - Film Locations and Novels

Film Locations and Novels

• Kensington Mansions, on the north side of Trebovir Road, was the mysterious mansion block in Roman Polanski’s movie Repulsion (1965), in which the sexually repressed Carole Ledoux (played by Catherine Deneuve) has a murderous breakdown. The film won the Silver Berlin Bear-Extraordinary Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival later the same year.
• 64 Redcliffe Square is featured in An American Werewolf in London (1981). The movie is a horror/comedy about two American tourists in Yorkshire who are attacked by a werewolf that none of the locals admit exists. The flat in the Square belongs to Alex (Jenny Agutter), a pretty young nurse who becomes infatuated with one of the two American college students (David Kessler), who is being treated in hospital in London.
• Earls Court was the setting for the 1941 novel 'Hangover Square: A Tale of Darkest Earl's Court' by novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton. Often cited as Hamilton's finest work, it is set in 1939 in the days before war is declared with Germany. The hero George Harvey Bone innocently longs for a beautiful but cruel woman called Netta in the dark smoky pubs of Earls Court, all the while drowning himself in beer, whisky and gin.