The Mayfair Witches Parlor: Mayfair Witches In Pictures

I have found various pictures of the First Street house on the Internet as well as in books. Included are scans of important places, people and objects in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches. The Gallery, once it is restored, will open in a separate browser window.

Until then, I thought I would rededicate this page of the site to focus on the Mayfair Witches in...motion pictures.

Graphics By AMC+

A section of pictures of actresses said to resemble particular Mayfair legacy witches, and one actress who I thought would have made a great Rowan Mayfair, which are from the original site, will follow my thoughts on the miniseries (I think it's a miniseries?) that premiered on AMC on January 8, 2023...

Let's start with the house.

The house used in the new show is not the actual house Anne Rice lived in and set her Mayfair Witches books in. BUT. It has a lot of structural similarities, doesn't it?

Soria-Creel House, Prytania Street, New Orleans - NOLA.com

The house used is apparently about half a mile from the Brevard-Rice house. It is the Soria-Creel house on Prytania Street. A little over a year ago, I was doing some research in the very beginning stages of rebuilding the site here, and it was sort of reminiscent of when Michael Curry shows Rowan Mayfair books about some of the historic homes surrounding hers.

There are other homes in the Garden District that are townhouses like the Brevard-Rice house, and look very similar in details. Details such as the row of four columns on the upper and lower galleries on the fronts of the homes, a main entrance on one side with two parlor windows next to it, and similar basic floor plans. Of those houses like the Brevard-Rice house, I could see that the double parlor was quite a prominent feature in them.

The Soria-Creel house is a bit more ornate in places, and the only thing I saw that was a major difference on its facade was the doorway. The Egyptian keyhole doorway, that is. However, the Brevard-Rice house was not available for filming for whatever reason (I do not know the reason, although I have seen the house has recently received quite a paint job). Some of the houses similar to the Brevard-Rice house do have Egyptian keyhole doorways at the entrance, but not all of them.

I'm guessing this might have been why instead of a small, thumbnail shaped emerald set in a rectangular or square setting, the Mayfair Emerald is actually a setting of smaller emeralds in what looks like an enormous skeleton key. To compensate for not being able to feature the doorway in the film, or simply that film is a different medium. You have a finite amount of time to tell a story, but it can't be told only in words. Imagery helps tell the story. Settings, costumes, props of any kind help tell the viewer what is going on, what might be going on, what might not be going on. A piece of jewelry that looks ordinary might not be able to do that in such a limited amount of time, hence making the piece of jewelry something unique and symbolic.

So far, I recognize Rowan Mayfair's focused anger being the unintentional source of the sudden deaths of some of the people in her life. You can see the aneurysm happening, and there's no question as to what has happened to these people. It's what drives her to search for her own history to answer these troubling questions. We see Ellie, and then we see Dierdre Mayfair, both at the time of Rowan's birth and, presumably, just before she dies.

Above is a trailer for the show on AMC's YouTube Channel.

I KNEW I recognized that actress playing the older Dierdre! Annabeth Gish. She isn't the one someone called out to in a public restroom to ask if she had been in Mystic Pizza; that was Julia Roberts. Gish played Julia Roberts' sister...

I'm playin' with ya. Gish played Kat in that film. Another film you will have seen Gish in is Double Jeopardy. She played Angie, the character who adopts Libby Parsons' son and runs off with her (not) dead husband. Ironically, this movie starred Ashley Judd, an actress I thought would have made a great Rowan Mayfair, as Libby Parsons.

It took me a moment, but I also recognized Harry Hamlin. I remember him in a movie made for TV years ago called Deceptions. He was married to his co-star from that movie, Nicollette Sheridan, for a while, if I recall. He was on L.A. Law in the late 1980's to the early 1990's. And if you are a fan of early Hollywood and ghosts of 1920's flappers, he had an uncredited role in a film called Maxie, a 1985 movie starring Glenn Close.

I think I just spotted on Hamlin's list of credits that a movie had been made of the prequel to Flowers In the Attic?!

I might have seen the actress playing Rowan, Alexandra Daddario, in something else. The White Lotus? So far, so good, though. In the novels, Rowan Mayfair had pale blonde hair and gray eyes, but it always seemed to me that this was something that indicated what traits she had inherited from her Mayfair ancestors rather than something that had a pivotal role in the story. In the book, though, it was Carlotta who insisted the baby be named Rowan, despite the priest's insistence that it was not a proper Christian name.

Rice once said the name Rowan was chosen because she wanted to portray the character as fairly androgynous. The rowan tree has appeared in Greek, Norse and Welsh mythology and has long been believed to protect occupants from evil if a branch of a rowan tree is hung over entrances. Decidedly un-Christian, especially since this was the reason Carlotta insisted the baby be named Rowan.

Another difference is that it was Dierdre Mayfair who insisted her child retain her surname of Mayfair and her claim on the Mayfair legacy or she would not cooperate with the adoption. The film does, however, show Ellie as a young woman being given Rowan, and being told she must change their names from Mayfair. Ellie was a Mayfair in both book and film, and this seems to have been kept.

Does it matter if Rowan first spotted Lasher on the deck of the house in Tiburon, California or the deck of the Sweet Christine? In both scenes, when Rowan wakes and realizes something strange is going on, the Pacific ocean is very turbulent, causing the floor Rowan is standing on to move around. It's a given this will happen onboard a seaworthy vessel, yes. The Tiburon house in the book is described as being able to gently move on its stilts, as the house is built on a hillside--and over the water.

There has been no mention of Ellie having a spouse, and the only character so far who has to wear gloves to avoid inadvertent peeks into residual aftereffects of events long passed is in New Orleans, not San Francisco. It's hard to say just yet whether or not modifications to this early part of the story will help or hinder, but I haven't been scared off yet!

I even found a book on Garden District homes that I plan to add to the Suggested Reading which had some fascinating historical photos of some of the houses.

One photo in this book was of two young ladies sitting on a gallery in front of a massive window with shutters like the ones on the Brevard-Rice house. It was not that house they were at in the photo, but it gave a good idea of just how massive those windows were and are...