SYLVIA tells the story of the real-life relationship between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and looks at its relation to Plath's psychological problems and her blossoming into one of the 20th century's most important poets.

At the start of the film, Sylvia is already a leading academic, but she burns with ambition to become a successful poet. Arriving in Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship, she is a splash of brash American colour against a backdrop of a dour Britain in the grip of Fifties austerity.

The disappointment of a bad review for a poem she's submitted to a university magazine is alleviated when she reads a poem by a young English graduate called Ted Hughes. She determines to meet him at a drunken launch party for the literary magazine. From the moment they set eyes on each other, their fates are inextricably intertwined.

Beginning with their courtship as students in Cambridge, the film follows the course of their marriage as it spirals into a vortex of bitterness, infidelity and even violence a sequence of events which over the period of a few short months produced both the astonishing outpouring of poetic work which would make Plath famous, and the profound mental distress which would lead to her tragic and untimely death at the age of 30 by her own hand.

"The film is very much a love story and Sylvia Plath's movie as she tries to cope as a creative person and a mother. I was interested not only in the love story but also the implications of two powerful creative forces being brought together and how that made their lives so difficult for each other," says director Christine Jeffs.

The story of Sylvia Plath has fascinated Gwyneth Paltrow for many years. She explains: "When I was 21, I worked on a film called Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle and several of the women I was working with told me that I should play Sylvia Plath one day. On the last day of shooting, they gave me a copy of The Bell Jar and after reading it I thought she was fantastic and I became very interested in her and her writing. So when (producer) Alison Owen approached me, I told her I was very interested."

Paltrow researched the subject extensively and spoke to a number of Plath's friends: "People describe her as very alive and vivacious but she was very complicated at the same time. She has never struck me as being a girl's girl and she seems to have had difficult relationships with women."

Gwyneth Paltrow feels that Plath's work holds a strong message for the reader. She explains: "In your early twenties, you have all these ideas about what you're supposed to be as a woman what it means and what that's supposed to represent sociologically.

"You are at odds with whom you are inside and what the world expects you to be. I think that the way Sylvia Plath wrote resonates with young women because this was a person who was so in touch with her own identity, who she was, and what was happening within her.

"While inside she felt that she was going mad, on the outside she was showing a different persona. I think that the message here is that you have to integrate and be true to whom you actually are, otherwise you suffer. For her, as an artist, as a woman with sexuality, with a brain, as a mother, as a cook she was always a bit at odds with who she was internally and who she was externally."

Daniel Craig had been interested in Ted Hughes for many years. He explains: "I've had tapes of Ted Hughes reading his poetry since I was a child and I remember when I was at secondary school we sneaked in to see him when he spoke at the local grammar school. There are so many people who've met Ted Hughes and they all have a different story to tell, but in the end you have to make up the character because you can only take on so much."

Gwyneth Paltrow's mother Blythe Danner plays Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath. She says: "What amazes me is that I sometimes forget she's my daughter. Gwyneth has this extraordinary capability of becoming the other character so completely that you can lose yourself in that."