An ambitious Pakistani Briton and his white boyfriend strive for success and hope when they open a glamorous laundromat.An ambitious Pakistani Briton and his white boyfriend strive for success and hope when they open a glamorous laundromat.An ambitious Pakistani Briton and his white boyfriend strive for success and hope when they open a glamorous laundromat.
- Nominated for 1 Oscar
- 6 wins & 6 nominations total
Daniel Day-Lewis
- Johnny
- (as Daniel Day Lewis)
Charu Bala Chokshi
- Bilquis
- (as Charu Bala Choksi)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaThis film and A Room with a View (1985) both opened in New York on the same day, March 7, 1986. Both movies featured Daniel Day-Lewis in prominent and very different roles: in A Room with a View, he played a repressed, snobbish Edwardian upperclassman, while in Laundrette, he played a lower-class gay ex-skinhead in love with an ambitious Pakistani businessman in Thatcher's London. When American critics saw Day-Lewis, who was then virtually unknown in the US, in two such different roles on the same day, many (including Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times and Sheila Benson of the LA Times) raved about the talent it must have taken him to play such vastly different characters. In his review of My Beautiful Laundrette, Roger Ebert wrote, "A movie like this lives or dies with its performances, and the actors in 'My Beautiful Laundrette' are a fascinating group of unknowns.... The character of Johnny may cause you to blink if you've just seen the wonderful 'A Room with a View.' He is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, the same actor who, in 'Room,' plays the heroine's affected fiancee, Cecil. Seeing these two performances side by side is an affirmation of the miracle of acting: That one man could play these two opposites is astonishing."
- ConnectionsFeatured in Hooray for Holyrood (1986)
Featured review
Johnny and Omar live in a world of multiple cogenerating, coexisting, modifying, negating, enforcing and enhancing forms of discrimination -- racism, sexism, groupism, homophobia, cultural elitism, snobbery, reverse colonialism, neocolonialism and fascism -- which they successfully grapple and topple in the form of their launderette with the power of economic enterprise. These squabbling goblins are left to each others excesses as economic success lifts them up and out of these, but many questions remain: will they remain; would others succeed; what does luck have to do with it? Kureshi has pissed off all groups who find themselves part of this smashing satire, prime among them the identity conscious confused second/third generation Subcontinental British kids, the same contingency that staunchly supported the Rushdie fatwa. Brilliant and stupendously enjoyable.
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Languages
- Also known as
- Mein wunderbarer Waschsalon
- Filming locations
- 245 Queenstown Road, Battersea, London, England, UK(papa's flat)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Budget
- £650,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $2,451,545
- Gross worldwide
- $2,460,977
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