'The Railway Man' filming, 2012 (Series)

St Monans has seen its share of celebrities but they don’t come much more celebrated than Nicole Kidman.

The Australian actress/producer was in the village over the weekend May 5-6, 2012, to film scenes for the Eric Lomax biopic ‘The Railway Man’ (2013), in which she co-starred with Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine, and Stellan Skarsgård.
Production unit trucks trundled along the Braehead shortly after 8am on the Saturday, taking over the car park at the Auld Kirk.
Crowds soon gathered on all vantage points overlooking the church, while some filming also took place at the end of the Alexandra Pier.
There were snappers a-plenty, but unless you really could differentiate from a distance between a star, key grip or gaffer then you were really shooting blind.
Probably the most photographed person was a woman in a beige coat whom we all assumed was Nicole, but it wasn’t.
I was taking pictures for the East Fife Mail and knew if I didn’t get a ‘star’ then we could still run a feature on ‘the movies coming to St Monans’, hence the abundance of ‘production’ shots.
As it was I never even saw Colin Firth, never mind get a picture of him. But Nicole did come out and stand at the side of the kirk for a few seconds, and there was also a chance to snap husband Keith Urban with, I assume, daughter Sunday Rose. For privacy and security, we didn’t use these.

These really are just snapshots but for those who were there it might bring back some memories, and for those who weren’t, it’s a wee bit of St Monans history.