What is interesting is the way the audience’s sympathies are manipulated. Alex is a siren, then she is sick and mad and dangerous; she has no human feelings that we need take into account, and when Glenn Close manifests them, with a haunted and poignant face, she is acting against the drift of the direction. But when—at an early date—Dan sets the law on the troublesome harpy, and when he suggests she abort her child, and when he half-strangles her, we must somehow sympathize with him. It is the casting that sets this up.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 330