Brief Encounter Fun Facts:

•The original Broadway production was presented as the one act play “Still Life” as part of the repertory presentation “Tonight at 8:30” that opened at the National Theatre on November 24, 1936 and ran for 118 performances with a cast that included Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence.

• The screenplay was adapted and based on Noel Coward‘s 1935 short one-act (half-hour) stage play “Still Life”. It was expanded from five short scenes in a train station (the refreshment tea room of Milford Junction Station to include action in other settings Laura’s house, the apartment of the Dr. Harvey’s friend, restaurants, parks, train compartments, shops, a car, a boating lake and at the cinema.

• On initial release, the film was banned by the strict censorship board in Ireland on the grounds that it portrayed an adulterer in a sympathetic light.

• Carnforth station was chosen partly because it was so far from the South East of England that it would receive sufficient warning of an air-raid attack that there would be time to turn out the filming lights to comply with wartime blackout restrictions.

Brief Encounter is a 1945 British film directed by David Lean about the mores of British suburban life, centring on a housewife for whom real love (as opposed to the polite arrangement of her marriage) was an unexpectedly “violent” thing. The film stars Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway and Joyce Carey. The screenplay is by Noël Coward, and is based on his 1936 one-act play Still Life. The soundtrack prominently features the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, played by Eileen Joyce.