Kelly is primarily a writer for film and television but started her career in musical theater with the UK version of "Debbie Does Dallas, the Musical". She is a co-artistic director of "The Bad Dog Theater Company"; founded in 2010 alongside the actor Tom Hardy and fellow writer Brett C. Leonard. She lives in London.
The minute it ["Mr Banks"] sold to Disney, I was like 'Oh boy we are in trouble. I'm going to have to sanitize this and I'm going to have to make line cuts and I really don't want to' and they never did. They genuinely never did. I've worked for a lot of studios and I know that that sounds completely impossible, but they absolutely gave me and John free reign with the script. They specifically didn't want to come in and sanitize it or change Walt in any way. They wanted to feel like they were telling something that was truthful and I think they're... Yeah, he smokes and drinks in this film. I just think that's incredibly brave of them.
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When it [Saving Mr. Banks (2013) script] sold to Disney, they opened up all of their archives to me. They were amazing. They let me read all of Walt's correspondence. All his letters. Anything I wanted to look at was available for me to look at and they also introduced me to Dick Sherman, who was completely invaluable and they gave me the tapes while we were in the room. So the draft that they bought is not the draft that we filmed, because once I had access to all of that stuff I did another big rewrite from it with a lot of help from Richard M. Sherman and the script changed quite a bit. The LA part of the script changed quite a bit. Having had access to the real thing didn't change the arc of the story or the time of it or anything like that, it just became historically accurate where it hadn't necessarily been before.
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Fact
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Revealed that she wasn't able to watch Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), because it reminded her of how her original screenplay was eventually changed by the novel's author E.L. James and that the final script felt too much of a compromise for the screenwriter. Marcel said the difference between what she imagined and what eventually ended up on screen was too big of a mountain for her to overcome. When she delivered her draft, James told her that she liked it but the fans wouldn't because they wanted a faithful adaptation. For days, Marcel and James worked on it together until the novelist was happy with the result, which Marcel calls 50% hers and 50% James'.
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Kelly gave up being an actress in her mid-20s because she "hated it". She had left school at 15, had never been to college and ended up working in a UK video shop when she began to write. Her success in writing for TV and films came very quickly.
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