大象传媒

1. Marriage Story

Mark Kermode says that Noah Baumbach's Oscar-winning drama was supposedly inspired by the director's divorce from actress Jennifer Jason-Leigh. It's a pretty sad-hearted, but ultimately hopeful portrait of a divorce.

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are a couple who have fallen out of love with each other but try – often unsuccessfully – to divide civilly for the sake of their son. Laura Dern won an Oscar for her role as a lawyer who is out for blood; blood her client ultimately does not want, preferring something that will be kinder to her son.

2. Blue Valentine

Technically speaking, 2010's Blue Valentine is a film about everything that happens up to the point of divorce. Partly inspired by his own parents' divorce, and his childhood fear of it, director Derek Cianfrance made a desperately sad film that, in split narratives, tells simultaneously of the burgeoning romance between a couple (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) and the collapse of their marriage.

It's not a film that promises everything will be okay, or that love will come again. It's a film that says sometimes love ends and that's a fact of life.

3. First Wives Club

If there is such a thing as an uplifting divorce film, this 1996 movie is it. Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton play old pals who reunite after decades apart when one of their friends kills herself after learning her ex-husband has married a much younger woman.

The three women, who have experienced or are currently experiencing divorce, renew their bonds as they help each other through the process with wine, comic revenge and a big sing-song. It celebrates divorce as an act of liberation from unworthy men and an opportunity to define yourself instead of being defined by your relationship. It was a huge worldwide hit.

4. War of the Roses

Mark calls 1989's War of the Roses “the most extreme, played for black comedy laughs, completely acrimonious split”. It stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a couple whose divorce is so fuelled by hatred that that they will stop at nothing – even murder – to make the other one suffer.

Audiences loved the two stars going at one another, but the film initially took things a step too far. There was originally a scene in which Turner's character serves her husband pate made of his pet dog, but, says Mark, “they had to go back and insert a shot of the dog being alive in the garden, because the one thing that preview audiences said was, ‘We can handle it all but you can't kill the dog.’”

5. Heartburn

Nora Ephron, the writer of such classic romcoms as When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, mined her own life for this frank and funny divorce drama from 1986. It was inspired by Ephron's very public split from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein.

Meryl Streep plays Rachel a food writer who is smitten by charismatic political columnist Mark (Jack Nicholson) and impulsively marries him. His infidelity, while Rachel is pregnant, ruins the marriage and the film follows Rachel's journey to plucking up the courage to leave him and go it alone.

6. Kramer Vs Kramer

Arguably the most significant and influential divorce drama ever made, 1979's Kramer Vs Kramer follows a careerist father (Dustin Hoffman) who is shocked when his wife (Meryl Streep) walks out on him and their son.

Depicting a wife as the one to leave the marriage was, and still is, highly unusual in Hollywood films. “Talk about subverting,” says writer Abby Morgan, who wrote 大象传媒 One divorce drama The Split. “It was about a mother leaving her son with her very chaotic and self-absorbed husband. It's really about a father who discovers his relationship with his son again and in doing so sort of understands what he's put his wife through.”

The film won Oscars for Hoffman, Streep, writer/director Robert Benton and as Best Picture. It's become a touchstone for divorce stories. As Ellen says: “That beautiful closing scene is referred to in the closing scene of Marriage Story and many others. You come to understand it's not about men versus women or mums versus dads… it's two absolute heroes who have found their way back to kindness and self-respect.”

7. His Girl Friday

One of several divorce comedies of the 1930s and 40s starring Cary Grant (no stranger to divorce in real life, having married five times). Grant plays the editor of a newspaper, with Rosalind Russell as his star reporter and his newly ex-wife. The pair are thrust back together to work on a huge story about an escaped criminal, which reignites their attraction, with lots of witty repartee.

Film critic Pamela Hutchinson says: “It might seem a bit depressing that she goes back to this guy who treats her a bit off-handedly, but the way Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are in this film – they're so brilliant and so sexy with each other. And she really nails the story. So she gets to prove something a lot of women were struggling with in the 1940s: you can have a great career and be married.”

8. Philadelphia Story

Released the same year as His Girl Friday – 1940 – and again starring Cary Grant, Philadelphia Story has Katherine Hepburn as Tracy, a sardonic socialite who is about to marry stuffy George (John Howard). The wedding is complicated by the arrival of both her ex-husband (Grant) and a charming tabloid reporter (James Stewart).

In common with many divorce films of the era, it's a story in which the divorced couple realise they should never have split. Pamela Hutchinson says the Hayes Code, a list of ‘morality rules’ for cinema at the time, forbade any undermining of the institute of marriage, “so you have comedies about divorce that show you marriage is hard but divorce isn't always the answer to their troubles. So we have a comedy about divorce which ends in people getting married again.”

9. The Awful Truth

Cary Grant again. One of the first divorce hits, from 1937 and a time when divorce was still a rather controversial thing but happening fairly frequently in Hollywood. Studio films treated divorce as an opportunity to have two attractive people bickering amusingly, such as in this story of a separating couple (Grant and Irene Dunne) who sabotage each other's future romances.

It's about divorce but it's really a romcom. “You have a couple who are splitting up, so they get to bicker and flirt with other people,” says Pamela Hutchinson. “The essence of these comedies is the witty interplay between our two lovers… All the way through the film you know they’re going to stay together because nobody else is as funny as they are together.”

Hear more from Mark and Ellen about how divorce has been depicted in both the movies and on TV – including an interview with Rob Brydon about his comedy series Marion and Geoff – by listening to the episode in full.