27 thoughts on “Top Five Travelers Who Need Movies Made About Them

  1. I love this idea, and the chance to learn a bit about these fascinating women, who with the exception of Coleman, I’d never heard of! Ms. Unpronounceable from Iceland would be a great subject for a flick, but I fear with the current over the top treatment of Viking, Medieval, Renaissance etc. stories, we’d end up with way too much leather, metal, buckles, helmets, lame and panne velvet, flowing hair on both sexes, gritty battles, CGI, all in Technicolor.

  2. Sure! I’d also watch flicks about the 3 squadrons of Russian women aviators in WWII, especially the night bomber unit that flew open cockpit planes with only map and compass navigation, and WWI’s Battalion of Death, commanded by Maria Bochkariova

      1. Which was apparently fairly awful according to A historian looks at Films. It made it look like her explorations were all to escape unhappy love affairs!

    1. There was a pretty good documentary about Bell, but I, too, wish for a feature film: http://www.gertrudebellthedocumentary.com/

      I’d also like to see a movie about Richard and Isabel Burton. “Mountains of the Moon” was not bad, but there was even more to their marriage and partnership than it suggested. (I visited their tomb in Mortlake, London, which Isabel designed as a (stone) “Arab” tent; you can climb a ladder to a window onto the interior, and see the camel bells and other artifacts, photographs of the Burtons, etc.)

  3. Alexandra David-Neel

    Starting from her early Bohemian days dipping into the occult in Paris with the Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society & being a youthful feminist around 1905-1910’s era to her extensive travels through China, India, Southwest Asia,and finally: Tibet – her bio is what writer’s dream of writing about.

    She lived and traveled these places from being a high end socialite pseudo ambassador to a lowly pilgrim disguised with her adopted son. Her books are free in E book format at https://www.gutenberg.org/ & other sites if you just search her name.

    So much political intrigue followed her – the British, the French, – and several other European countries thought she was a spy and she had many close calls with life and death and seeing many strange occurrences and mysteries in Tibet when she lived as a Tibetan nun and wandering pilgrim.

    She lived to be 100 – what a century of amazing accomplishments.

  4. Mary Kingsley, explorer, ethnographer and writer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kingsley
    M.K. is a famous Victorian heroine in Britain, not so well-known here.The Wikipedia article neglects to mention that she was the daughter of her father’s cook, born a few days after her parents’ wedding. She was also self-educated, and spoke with a working-class London accent, and at 30 went off to West Africa on her own, because she was fascinated by what she had read about it. There was a chapter about her in the television series “10 Who Dared,” but I wish Vanessa Redgrave had starred in a feature film about Kingsley.

  5. A fictional tale, but one well worth filming. Sur [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sur_(short_story) ] by Ursula K LeGuin is about a group of Edwardian era South American women and their expedition to the south pole. While they’re the first people to have made the journey, they don’t announce it, as they don’t seek glory, just the thrill of adventure.

  6. I’m part HELLA YASS but also I’d be worried that the TV people would make them strong on the outside, but yearning for a menz underneath and the invented romantic subplot where they are head over heels will be accompanied by menz talking about them all the time and the whole thing being more about how it was for the menz- like the Cilla Black one. I would rather it never happened

    1. Always a risk, true. But at least we’d get some stories about different women instead of just repeating another version of Little Women or another Queen Elizabeth I drama.

  7. super interesting! thanks for sharing–I would love to see (well-made) movies about these folks.

  8. Aloha Wanderwell. “A real-life Indiana Jones!”–“Brains, Beauty and Breeches!”–“World’s Most Traveled Girl!”–“The Amelia Earhart of the Automobile!”

    How is it that there is no film or series about her? She was a filmmaker, author, explorer, aviatrix, vaudevillian, journalist, radio broadcaster. She holds the Guinness World Record as the 1st woman to circumnavigate the globe in a car. She made a dozen documentary films which are now in the Academy Film Archive and the Library of Congress. She’s even at the center of an unsolved murder mystery.

    Please, someone bring her to life on screen! https://www.alohawanderwell.com

    1. Jeanne Dieulafoy, wearing pants and short hair, a fighter during the 1870 Prussian war, archeologist, photographer, writer ( memories on Google books) and, on the other hand, a very traditionalist catholic married woman.

  9. I’ve been waiting for years a movie or series about Mary Wortley Montagu; such fascinating life and travels; her letters are quite a screenplay ready-made!
    Let’s not forget the life and Middle-Eastern travels of lady Hester Stanhope, such a remarkable plot!

    1. Gorgeous frocks for both of them too! I was hoping someone would raise Lady Mary W-M. Her story has everything – travels, introducing vaccination for smallpox, friendship with, then bitter enmity with Alexander Pope, Top Poet but poisonous, political intrigues at the highest level. She knew everybody and went everywhere she wanted. Wearing paniers and a fontange.

  10. Would love to see a movie about Nellie Bly’s trip “Around the World in 72 Days.” So far, adaptations about her have focused on her “10 Days in the Madhouse” piece, but maybe it’s time for something a little more light!

  11. Isabella Bird, in 1873 travelled all around Colorado, being the first white woman to reach to top of Longs Peak. She also went to Hawaii and Australia. Romance, adventure along the way.

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