Karen Blixen, the trailblazing former Karen Estate landlord, has been immortalised in a new international TV series.
The series, dubbed The Dreamer - Becoming Karen Blixen, premiered at the world-famous Cannes Festival and stars a stellar cast including Connie Nielsen, known for her role in Wonder Woman and Justice League movies in Hollywood.
Set in the 1930s, the film is a six-part series following Blixen's life after she left East Africa and went back to Denmark, her home country.
"The Dreamer - Becoming Karen Blixen is the story of one woman’s struggle to find her place in life while freeing herself from the expectations of family and society. The series takes place in the 1930s and follows Karen Blixen’s return to her childhood home in Denmark after many years in East Africa.
"Penniless, sick, divorced and with her dreams in ruins, The Dreamer - Becoming Karen Blixen shows Blixen’s journey from her lowest point to becoming a renowned writer," reads the synopsis of the series as presented at Cannes.
Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 when the country was still known as British East Africa and was determined to set up a dairy farm.
Her husband, however, preferred setting up a coffee farm. With the help of her uncle, the coffee farm was established and occupied the expansive Karen neighbourhood, which is now an affluent estate.
During her time in Kenya, she suffered numerous tragedies including poor harvest of coffee and the death of her husband in the 1930s which is around the time she decided to head back to Denmark and become a full time writer.
The Karen suburb was subdivided after she left.
Speaking to Variety, Nielsen, an established Hollywood heavyweight, noted that she did a lot of research of the star before she embarked on the role.
"One big concern was her voice. I aimed at first to speak like her. There are records and films. She had a very archaic, kind of guttural Danish. But a lot of the Danish actors' ninth series maintained a kind middle Danish.
"So there was too much of contrast and I toned down. I had to kind of “physicalize” her voice. And I found this place where the breathing, the voice felt just internal," stated Nielsen.
Blixen's writing prowess was considered on various occasions for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
