Brilliant actors Charlotte Frost and Richard Mark will be bringing their unique brand of magic to the roles of the Young Woman and the Young Man in the new Ian Woodward film I Love You Truly which begins principal photography this summer.

Charlotte and Richard confess that they are “beyond thrilled” to be cast in the latest love story from Encore Films about two people discovering and building trust and finding a soul mate who they pray will be with them forever.

“The film’s theme,” says Charlotte, “touches on an emotion that everybody, young or old and all those in-between, can relate to. As the Storyteller puts it at the beginning of the film: ‘Love is such a simple four-letter word…yet so complicated in its meaning.’”

“After all,” adds Richard, “love – in all its manifestations – is the true universal emotion. For better or for worse, we can’t escape it or stop it!”

“Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony,” the filmmaker insists. “Neither condition is immune from the other because love doesn’t bring and never has brought total happiness. On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield, sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we’re doing the right thing.”

This is the starting point of I Love You Truly. Based on a screenplay by Ian Woodward, the film explores in words, music, song and moving images the on-off-on-off relationship of a Young Woman and a Young Man as they slowly begin to discover more things about each other and experience, they believe, true love for the first time.

The Young Woman is an American actress from Boston, Massachusetts, now living near London. She is vibrant and fun-loving on the surface but beneath the bright exterior lurks a more serious, deeper person who constantly questions her very existence. She has been unlucky in love once too often and it has cultivated in her a nagging, prolonged neurosis and insecurity. She wonders if she will ever find true love.

The Young Man, a rising star at a swish London advertising agency, is a head-in-the-clouds romantic with a love of Byron and Wordsworth. He has a penchant for penning melancholic verse in the style of his poet heroes. The Young Woman becomes the recipient of a steady flow of his poetic outpourings. When he first meets her, he has not been in a serious relationship for five years. He wonders if he will ever find true love.

Joining the cast is Stephen Carroll (above left) who plays the priest. A family friend of the Young Man, he officiated at the weddings of the Young Man’s two elder sisters. He is an upbeat, somewhat sardonic personality. To him, being a man of the church does not equate with being a man of sombre bearing. He enjoys a good joke and a pint of beer.

Encore Films is delighted to welcome Stephen’s return to the fold. He played the charismatic Tsar Alexander III (seen above right in the St Petersburg Winter Palace scene) in Ian Woodward’s 19^th-century biopic Love Song: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tchaikovsky which won the prestigious Award of Excellence at the Canada International Film Festival 2015 and has since been screened in many other countries around the world including Portugal, Croatia, Cyprus, Armenia, Greece, Romania, Belarus, India, the Czech Republic, Estonia, the United States and, of course, the United Kingdom.

Charlotte Frost, a BA (Hons) graduate in Drama and English from Queen Mary College, London University, and Richard Mark, a graduate of the Drama Studio London with a BA (Hons) degree in Music from Bristol University, are primed and ready to go. “We’ll be filming mostly outside, so fingers crossed that the weather is going to be kind to us,” grins Charlotte.