British Museum, Bloomsbury

The British Museum is often played by University College on Gower Street, but has occasionally appeared as itself. In Alfred Hitchcock’ s first talkie, 1929’s Blackmail, the blackmailer Tracy (Donald Calthrop) stops at the drinking fountain at the entrance, though the chase through the museum’s galleries was shot in the studio using giant photographic blow-ups.

It’s the real McCoy, though, in the Merchant-Ivory film of EM Forster’s Maurice, when Maurice (James Wilby) bumps into his old teacher (Simon Callow) in front of the Assyrian statues.

Hywel Bennett meets up with his nurse in the sculpture court in the 1971 penis-transplant comedy Percy. Vanessa Redgrave is entranced by the Elgin marbles in Isadora, just as, years later, is Jane Horrocks in David Kane’s underrated salsa-flavoured rom-com Born Romantic. For Hindi smash Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham..., the museum’s newly-roofed sparkling white Great Court became the college interior in the Deewana Hai Dekho number. The old Circular Reading Room, where Karl Marx used to grapple with the problems of Capitalism, is where the assassin Edward Fox consults French daily newspaper Le Figaro in The Day of the Jackal. The first film to shoot extensively in the museum during public opening hours, and in non-public areas, too, was Neil LaBute’s Possession, the adaptation of AS Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam.

British Museum

Blackmail (1929, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)
Maurice (1987, dir: James Ivory)
Possession (2002, dir: Neil LaBute)
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (2001, dir: Karan Johar)
The Day Of The Jackal (1973, dir: Fred Zinnemann)
Isadora (1968, dir: Karel Reisz)
Born Romantic (2000, dir: David Kane)
Percy (1971, dir: Ralph Thomas)