The coming of age of a much-loved story

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

It’s one of the best-known opening lines of any British novel, and one guaranteed to elicit knowing smiles from fans of “I Capture the Castle,” written by playwright and novelist Dodie Smith and published in 1949.

Smith (1896-1990) is most famous for her 1955 children’s book “The Hundred and One Dalmatians,” which was soon adapted by Disney as a cartoon classic. But “I Capture the Castle,” her first novel and widely regarded as her masterpiece, went 54 years without reaching the big screen.

Finally, after years of inactivity followed by legal wrangling, it is over. In May, a modestly budgeted (around $9 million) film of “I Capture the Castle,” backed by British and South African financiers, including the BBC, received a small release in London (on some 75 screens), attracting favorable reviews. The film opens today in the United States.

“I Capture the Castle” is a rite-of-passage novel set in the English countryside in the 1930s. The narrator is Cassandra, a 17-year-old girl who lives in a house built into a ruined castle with her attractive older sister Rose, her bohemian stepmother Topaz (who likes to prance naked outdoors on rainy nights) and her eccentric father Mortmain, who once achieved success with an experimental novel but has since suffered from writer’s block. They have lived in genteel poverty for five years. When the two young American men who own the castle show up with their mother, both sisters predictably fall in love. But nothing is resolved easily.

Romola Garai, seen in this year’s TV adaptation of “Daniel Deronda,” is Cassandra. Tara Fitzgerald and Bill Nighy play Topaz and Mortmain; Henry Thomas is the brother with whom both girls are smitten.

But why has it taken five decades to be made into a film? Screenwriter Heidi Thomas, who adapted “I Capture the Castle,” says with a sigh: “This is not a novel that’s easy to dramatize.”

It’s true. Cassandra is a difficult character to capture, poised as she is between girlhood and adulthood. Her observations are sophisticated, yet she only sees and knows part of what is going on around her, especially in the troubled relationship between Topaz and Mortmain and the romances between Rose and the American brothers. Yet there is far more to the long delay than mere technical difficulties with scripts.

On publication, “I Capture the Castle” was a runaway bestseller, with sales surpassing 1 million. Rights to the novel were bought by British film companies but lapsed during the 1950s.

In 1961, after the huge success of “101 Dalmatians,” Smith approached Walt Disney and pitched him the story of “I Capture the Castle.” She had it in mind as a vehicle for British-born Hayley Mills, then 15 years old and star of Disney’s original version of “The Parent Trap.” Smith thought she would be a perfect Cassandra. Disney agreed, and the studio paid Smith $50,000 and commissioned Sally Benson, author of “Meet Me in St. Louis,” to travel to Britain to collaborate with her. But the two women did not get along, and Benson soon returned. Hayley Mills’ career as a teen star faded, and “I Capture the Castle” was shelved.

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Sat in the archives

British novelist Julian Barnes, who became Smith’s literary executor on her death, says: “Hayley Mills got too old for the part. It’s not an easy book to script. So it just sat in Disney’s archives.

“But this is a book that attracts new generations of fans, so from time to time someone would come along and say: ‘Can we buy the rights?’ And Disney would say: ‘Absolutely not.’ So nothing happened.”

Remarkably, this situation continued for 30 years until Smith’s death. “Finally,” recalls Barnes, “there came a time when there was a moment of leverage. [Disney] said they’d like to make a live-action version of ‘101 Dalmatians.’ At that point, I put two and two together and asked for the rights to ‘I Capture the Castle.’ ” He was successful -- Disney made the rights to “Castle” part of the deal for the live-action rights to “Dalmatians” with Smith’s estate. This was in the early 1990s, but the novel’s long journey to the screen still had some way to go. Barnes approached director Mike Newell about “I Capture the Castle,” having admired his film “Enchanted April.” For a while, Newell was attached to the project, but he then signed a deal with Disney and decided to bow out, feeling his loyalties might be split.

Producer David Parfitt (“Shakespeare in Love,” “Gangs of New York”), who had been a partner with Newell, took on “I Capture the Castle” and continued developing it, with help from the BBC. A script by Amy Jenkins (BBC-TV’s “This Life”) did not work out, so Parfitt turned to Heidi Thomas, who had successfully adapted Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” for British television. She in turn suggested that Tim Fywell, the director of “Bovary,” might be suitable for “I Capture the Castle.”

“They came to me in 1998,” Thomas says. “The whole process was like a literary rodeo, and I stayed on the horse longest.” She turned herself into an expert on Smith, perused her diaries for clues to her life, and spent long hours talking with Valerie Grove, author of Smith’s biography “Dear Dodie.”

“While writing, I constantly thought to myself: Would Dodie like this or that?” Thomas says. “I feel I know the woman. It’s personal between me and her.” Thomas lives only six miles from Finchingfield, the rural Suffolk village where Smith lived for much of the last 60 years of her life. “I used to sit outside her cottage for inspiration, and think ‘Dodie, please let it be all right,’ ” she recalls.

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From page to screen

At last the script was all right, and Parfitt and Fywell started casting. “We saw a lot of girls, but only Romola came close,” Parfitt reflects. “It was hard. Cassandra was a 17-year-old girl in 1930s England, a very different creature from now. Even 13-year-olds today are so much more knowing. So the task was to find a certain innocence without being twee.”

Romola Garai has to carry the story as Cassandra, in a complex script by Thomas that incorporates in its themes the circumstances in which Smith wrote the novel.

In the 1930s, Smith was a successful West End playwright, with commercial hits like “Autumn Crocus” and “Dear Octopus” to her credit. But her husband Alec Beesley was an avowed pacifist, and when World War II broke out in 1939, the couple fled Britain (with their Dalmatian, Pongo) so Beesley would avoid jail. They spent time in New York but ended up in Los Angeles, where Smith’s reputation attracted the studios.

“She earned a considerable living in the States,” Heidi Thomas says. “[The studios] used to give her $2,000 just to have lunch with fledgling screenwriters to give them advice. But none of her own screenplays was ever produced.”

Smith began work on “I Capture the Castle” in 1943, and her agent showed three chapters to MGM, who told her they would buy the story if she simply dictated the rest of it to a secretary. She declined, claiming she had forgotten what happened next, and began writing the book in earnest in 1945 in the house she and Beesley shared in Malibu.

“She wrote it in this mist of nostalgia for England, which was almost a foreign country to her by then, as she’d been away for six years,” Heidi Thomas says. “It was an intense expatriate longing that almost engulfed her. The novel is a deep expression of many things within her: being in exile, Anglo-American relations.”

Barnes, who befriended Smith when he was in his 20s -- she was in her 70s -- thinks the film does justice to “I Capture the Castle.” “The book is not sentimental in the least. It deals with tough truths. Everyone in it loves someone who doesn’t love them back or doesn’t love them enough. There are very few moments when they get the person they want. Without that underlying toughness, it wouldn’t work as well as it does.

“And that’s how Dodie was. Because she wrote ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and a book set in a castle about adolescent girls, everyone thinks she must have been a sweet old lady who lived in a thatched cottage with roses round the door and gave pennies to passing children. But she was a strong, intelligent, highly motivated character, who was only sentimental about animals.”

Barnes finds Garai “remarkable” as Cassandra: “It’s hard to convey that innocent half-knowledge and make it work in the modern age. Seeing the film was almost as bad as seeing something made from your own work, because you’re there representing the author, and you’ve given permission to people to make something of her work. But I think Dodie would have approved. It’s a faithful, honorable, attractive and at times moving film.”

Heidi Thomas puts it more succinctly: “Thank goodness,” she says, “they didn’t make the film in 1961.”