Winners of the Bowmore Scottish Screen Awards 2000, polled by readers of The Sunday Times are: House Of Mirth voted Best Film; Robert Carlyle, Best Actor; Valerie Edmond, Best Actress; Craig Ferguson, Best Filmmaker.

Pictured are Carlyle, Edmond, and House Of Mirth Producer Bob Last. Craig Ferguson was unable to attend.
Carlyle is a previous Scottish Screen Award winner, who, in the days when he lived in Maryhill, earned his living as a painter. He’s now one of Scotland’s best screen talents and clearly a favourite with the public who voted for him. This time around he is likely to have been nominated through his powerful performance as Malachy McCourt in Angela’s Ashes.
Valerie Edmond has been popping up regularly on the screen, playing a reporter in the thriller adapted from Iain Banks, Complicity, whilst in another Banks adaptation, she played Joe MacFadden’s girlfriend in The Crow Road, for TV. She was the significant other to cannabis farmer Craig Ferguson in Saving Grace, a Silesian farmer’s wife in the period drama Simon Magus and in One More Kiss, she was a successful business woman blighted by illness.
Craig Ferguson has recovered from his personal dark period that prompted a move to the US and regular appearances on The Drew Carey Show. Wrote The Big Tease and persuaded Warner Bros to fund it, with himself producing, directing and starring. He bounced back from a disappointing box office with Saving Grace, which he co-wrote and in which he plays a gardener who helps Brenda Blethyn clear her debts by growing cannabis on an industrial scale. Better received in the US than here.
House Of Mirth, starring Gillian Anderson and her parasol, was filmed by a director best known for autobiographical films about growing up in Liverpool. However Terence Davies slowly breathes 19th century New York society into life with careful focus on the characters. The City of Glasgow doubles for New York of the period reasonably convincingly. The warm reception the film had at the Edinburgh International Film Festival caused a re-think on transatlantic distribution. Slated just for cable, it is now to have a US theatrical release.