Terri Garber's horrible acting!
She makes Ashton camp, not convincing. Did she prepare for her role by watching Gone With The Wind dozen times and decided to imitate Vivien Leigh's early scenes times two thousand?
shareWell I think the movie did try to make Ashton more of a comedic character, even the music they play at certain scenes she's in is a tone of amusement.
Ashton is a darker character in the books imo, and the things she does are not funny as the movie tried to make it. I think they tried to lighten her up a bit. For instance, Ashton would never have said "I care about James", she despised him and treated him like garbage. That scene, and her final scene in the second movie, the confession, and that scene where she cries in front of the mirror, all that shows me that the movie didn't recognize what a dark person Ashton really was and was trying to make her nicer than she really was. Never did Ashton express a lick of remorse for anything in the books, so that confession scene was completely out of character, as was her asking James to forgive. It does make me wonder, did they really have a grasp on who Ashton was.
As for Terri, it has been said in articles that part of the reason she was chosen was that she hadn't seen GWTW. However, they have also stated they saw Ashton as their "Scarlett character". The truth is, Jakes did seem to borrow a lot of aspects of Scarlett's character for his character of Ashton, so I wouldn't blame the movie producers for seeing her as another Scarlett.
I wouldn't say that Terri played Ashton any differently from how she is in the book, only as I said, I think the directors saw Ashton's behavior as amusing rather than rotten, and played it lighter than it was in the book.