A series about Canadian music icon Leonard Cohen’s romance with Marianne Ihlen – who inspired many of his songs and poems – is coming to Crave.
So Long, Marianne, which takes its name from a song on Cohen’s 1967 debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen, is part of the 1,037 hours of original content unveiled for the 2023/24 season by Bell Media on Thursday. (Bell Media is the parent company iHeartRadio Canada.)
A co-production with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, cameras started rolling on So Long, Marianne in March. It will be partly filmed in Montreal.
Alex Wolff portrays Cohen, Thea Sofie Loch Næss is Ihlen and the series co-stars Anna Torv and Noah Taylor as the novelists Charmian Clift and George Johnston.
So Long, Marianne is described in a release as “an intimate tale of two, lonely people falling in love, during a period of their life when they are trying to figure out who they are and their place in the world, while one is becoming one of the most famous singers of all time.”
After meeting Cohen on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, Ihlen accepted his invitation to live with him in Montreal.
She died in Norway in July 2016 at 81. Cohen died a little more than three months later.