Effie Gray is a 2014 British biographical film written by Emma Thompson and directed by Richard Laxton, starring Dakota Fanning, Emma Thompson, Julie Walters, David Suchet, Derek Jacobi, James Fox, Claudia Cardinale, Greg Wise, Tom Sturridge, and Robbie Coltrane, in his final film appearance before his death in 2022.

In a pre-credit sequence Euphemia "Effie" Gray is seen walking through a garden speaking to her younger sister, Sophie, about a fairy story in which a girl married a man with wicked parents.

Elizabeth advises her to seek legal advice as John clearly has no desire to fulfill any of his obligations in the marriage, and Effie doesn't deserve the type of treatment she is receiving.

Ruskin's family is horrified when Effie's lawyer calls round with a notification of annulment proceedings on the grounds of John's impotence.

[4] Another copyright dispute arose, with playwright Gregory Murphy, author of the play The Countess which had been positively received,[5] and ran Off-Broadway for 634 performances during the 1999/00 season.

[7][8][9] The judge's ruling was based on a second, revised screenplay that the court allowed Thompson to submit in the middle of the case, which Murphy called "unprecedented".

Murphy filed an appeal, but in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of the initial lawsuit instigated by Effie Film, petitioned the Court for pro bono counsel.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Effie Gray benefits from its strong cast, elevating a period drama that doesn't strike quite as many narrative sparks as it could.

[19] Mark Kermode said that the film "intelligently dramatises the prison-like nature of Effie's status while struggling to engage us in what is essentially a non-relationship...we have a handsome but rather inert portrait of a suffocating social milieu in which it is left to Thompson herself to inject vibrant relief as the independently minded Lady Eastlake.

She's meant to be playing a trapped Pre-Raphaelite muse, frequently ill and/or sedated, but moons her way through the film seeming mostly dazed and confused.

"[21] David Sexton, in contrast, praised Fanning's performance as "remarkably good", but objected to the caricatured portrait of Ruskin and what he called the "Everyday Feminism" of the portrayal of Effie as a victim.

[22] Stephen Dalton in The Hollywood Reporter was unflattering, calling the film "an exquisitely dreary slice of middlebrow armchair theater which adds little new to a much-filmed story.

Despite a lurid plot involving sex scandal, family dysfunction and proto-feminist revolt, the end result is depressingly conventional and deadeningly tasteful...yet another surface-level rehash of Victorian costume-drama clichés."