More comments on the set report (spoilers)

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> 
> > And the one time her hairstyle is described--in the "Spinner's
End" scene--her hair is flowing down her back
 
> zanooda:
> 
> In DH Narcissa is also always has her hair down, it's just her
style, I guess. In the first chapter she has "her long blonde hair
hanging down her back", and the same in "The Flaw in the Plan", where
she is checking if Harry is alive or dead - "her long hair tickled his
face".

Carol responds:
sorry about that. I was thinking only of HBP and mostly of this scene.
(I don't think that her hair is described as anything but blonde in
GoF--don't have time to check it now. Interestingly, Bellatrix also
wears her hair down. It's only McGonagall who wears a bun--and
Hermione at the Yule Ball puts hers into some sort of sleek "knot" at
the back of her head, IIRC. Mostly, though, girls and women--including
Cho, Ginny, and Fleur--seem to wear their hair long and flowing, or
perhaps long and plaited like Parvati Patil and, IITC, Susan Bones in
OoP. It's as if Narcissa and Bellatrix, at least, never stopped
wearing the hairstyle they wore at school. (I should talk--my own hair
is almost down to my elbows at the moment!)

zanooda: 
> As for her beauty - I don't know, I think she is attractive but 
hauty. She must be at least better-looking than Bella, because she is
younger and she didn't spend 15 years in Azkaban. I imagined her more
beautiful than the actress and of a different type - taller, slimmer,
with more delicate features. 

Carol responds:
Yet, that's my sense, too. Beauty is a family trait for the Blacks.
Narcissa is fair rather than dark (I've always thought that her
parents named her after a flower rather than a constellation because
of her golden hair). Otherwise, she resembles the once-beautiful
Bellatrix except that she lacks the strong jaw and hooded eyes. I'm
sure that she's described in more than one place as slender, and until
OoP, she's taller than Harry ("He was taller than she was now"). She's
shorter than Snape, who looks down at her when she grabs his robes,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that she's short. I imagine her as
being at least five feet six, certainly not five feet three like Helen
McCrory.

zanooda: 
> It's really fascinating how differently us readers see things in the
books - I would never imagined Narcissa the way Steve imagines her 
> :-).

Carol responds:
Nor would I. "Stodgy," with her hair in a bun? Narcissa??? I think of
her more as an aristocratic beauty who imagines herself a queen--until
her husband is arrested and her world starts to fall apart. And even
in DH, with Voldemort living under their roof, she's more in control
than Lucius is. Her desperation in "Spinner's End" is all the more
effective because it's so different from her usual demeanor. Too bad
we see so little of it before that chapter!

Carol, imagining a blonde Molly Weasley with her hair in a bun
kneeling at Snape's feet and thinking that the appeal wouldn't work
nearly so well (sorry, Steve!)