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But producer Judy Cairo (of Informant Media, which also produced Gyllenhaal’s film Crazy Heart), says that the film was not inspired by the play and that they have only the Victorian-era vibrator in common. The original screenplay, written by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer, focuses on the inventor of the vibrator, rather than a doctor who administers it to patients, as Ruhl’s Pulitzer-finalist play does. The biggest difference between the two productions, says Cairo, is tone.

“It is very much a romantic comedy from beginning to end,” says Cairo. “The Vibrator Play has a serious tone. This is a comedy in the vein of Shakespeare in Love.”

In the film, Gyllenhaal plays Charlotte, the daughter of a doctor played by Jonathan Pryce. She falls for a young doctor named Mortimer Granville, played by Hugh Dancy, who administers her treatments for hysteria, a catch-all term for women’s maladies that was thought to be cured by orgasm. Cairo says they will begin to film in October, and the film will be released in 2011.

When Gyllenhaal learned about the role, “She immediately responded in a delighted way,” says Cairo. “The character Charlotte is perfect for Maggie because she is spirited and ahead of her time. Maggie is going to be phenomenal.”

As for The Vibrator Play, Cairo says she doesn’t know if Ruhl knows about the film. But Cairo has seen and enjoyed the New York run of The Vibrator Play.

“We were well into our script [then],” says Cairo. “It was developed several years ago, with [co-producer] Tracey Becker, before anyone had any knowledge of the play.”

The timing of both productions does not surprise her, Cairo says, because it was only a matter of time before this unusual and forgotten piece of history rose back to the surface.

“I think it’s such an intriguing piece of history,” says Cairo. “it is not surprising that it would inspire both [productions]. Our film is using the same kernel of history as the play, but in a different fashion.”

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It was almost a case of life imitating art for the 32-year-old actress, who told Pop Tarts she couldn’t keep up with the demands of movies and motherhood after she and husband Peter Sarsgaard had their first child together in 2006.

“Mrs. Green literally had a birds nest in her hair and children hanging from the chandelier and she kept saying she was fine. I was definitely like that. When my daughter was first born I kept saying ‘I don’t need anybody, I’m just going to do this by myself.’ I thought I could make a home, be a good wife, and do all these things. I thought ‘I’m just going to call my mom,’” Gyllenhaal told Pop Tarts at a special screening of the film in New York City last week. “But I have since realized that wasn’t realistic for me…It’s okay not to be able to do everything all the time, to fail as a parent sometimes. Now I have a wonderful nanny. I am somebody who spends every possible minute I can with my daughter – I really believe that’s important, but I do need help.”

Gyllenhaal is also convinced that the positive energy that came from Emma Thompson’s fantastical Nanny McPhee rubbed off even when she left the set.

“I believe this movie must have brought me good nanny karma because I found a lovely, lovely nanny for my daughter – I just thank god for her,” she added.

Gyllenhaal said caring for children as a single parent is a concept many relate to in 2010.

“Your husband doesn’t need to be at war [like hers is in the movie] to be up against it. Coping and not coping – it’s a very fine line,” Thompson said. “Maybe you’re away for work, or the parents are divorced, but it’s a very contemporary issue.”

As for her own magical mothering tips?

“You don’t always have to solve their (the kids) problems, just sit with them,” Thompson suggested. “Just being with them and not saying anything can do so much.”

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Jonathan Pryce will play a physician, who is also Gyllenhaal’s character’s father; Dancy plays another medic, who, along with a colleague played by Rupert Everett, stumbles upon the discovery.

Says Gyllenhaal: “I play a firecracker whose father is a doctor who is in the business of curing hysterical women. He cures them basically by getting them off and that actually happened. I end up having a sort of unexpected love affair with this guy who works for him, and who by mistake invents the vibrator.”

Hysteria will be directed by Tanya Wexler, who has just two film credits to her name, the most recent, Ball in the House, released in 2001. Production is scheduled to begin this October in London and Luxembourg, with plans for a 2011 release.

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“One thing I learned as a mother was I started out having babysitters that were young and lovely, bright, great girls, but they left,” the married mom, 32, says during the Nanny McPhee Returns special screening to benefit the Lollipop Theater Network held this week in NYC. ”When you think about it, when I was 23, there was nothing that was particularly going to keep me other than what was pulling my heart. I have a grown-up nanny now. There’s a different level of responsibility when you get to be a grown-up.”

When it comes to nannies, Maggie sees the dark side of Mary Poppins.

“Mary Poppins was a complicated lady,” she says. “Yeah, she’s hanging out with her boyfriend basically – Dick Van Dyke played her boyfriend – and she’s with the kids. She was a narcissist, but she’s also pretty great. That’s one thing I’ve realized watching Mary Poppins a lot with my daughter. Julie Andrews is pretty amazing. She’s pretty incredible.”

What movies does Maggie enjoy with her daughter?

“Right now, we’ve been watching – what she’s been liking and I’ve been liking too – are Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies. They’re really cool. There’s dancing, beautiful dresses, simple plot.”

Emma Thompson, who plays the iconic caretaker in Nanny McPhee, admits she was turned off by nannies when her au pair ate her “sweeties” at age 7.

She compares the chemistry between fictional nannies Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee.

“I love Mary Poppins, but how would they respond to each other? I think Mary Poppins would say to Nanny McPhee ‘you really need to get in touch’ and Nanny McPhee would say that Mary Poppins was a bit of a showoff.”

Director Susanna White sings Maggie’s praises in the motherhood department. Her twin daughters got to know Maggie’s Ramona during their time on the set.

“Maggie’s absolutely wonderful as a mom. Very loving and sweet, but also, like any good parent, there are boundaries for her daughter. Her daughter knows what she can and can’t do, which is a way to feel secure. I think she’s a wonderful mother.”

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Maggie Gyllenhaal shot to the top of public consciousness with her unnerving performance in Secretary. Her stellar string of film work continued with Mona Lisa Smile, SherryBaby, Stranger Than Fiction, The Dark Knight and Crazy Heart.

Maggie may we talk?

SheKnows: As the maternal influence over five children on the Nanny McPhee Returns set, what was your most memorable scene with the kids?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I like the scene, which took us five days [to shoot], which I’ve never done before, not on Dark Knight, not on Mona Lisa Smile, any of these movies, ever. Five days shooting was this scene where I come home from work and the skies are saying, “The person you need is Nanny McPhee.” I’m covered in syrup, I come home and the kids are fighting, everything’s crazy. I’m kind of hallucinating. She comes in and brings order. That whole madcap scene, that was my favorite.

SheKnows: I was told that one of the child actors cried after you set off back to America.

Maggie Gyllenhaal: They’re great kids. Also, that was part of my job to make it believable that I was a mother to them. It felt real. Also, when you’re working with kids, it’s different than grown-ups. Emma and I would be on our knees behind the camera making fart noises, or saying a line for them over and over again fifteen different ways to get different reactions from them. You get invested in them in a different way.

SheKnows: Ever get crazy like that at home for you?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Well, I have one child. I don’t know, if I had to take care of five children alone and try to make a farm run and work at a general store, I think it would be possible to get that crazy.

SheKnows: How did you keep the energy level up for scenes like that? Five days!

Maggie Gyllenhaal: It’s hard. It’s not what comes most easily to me. The crazy hard stuff, that’s my gig. I love that. Shoot it quick, that’s my thing. This technical work is more of a challenge, but I liked it. That’s what’s difficult is how do you keep it fresh and alive.

Maggie makes it work

SheKnows: The clothes of your character were so warm with bright colors, how much input into the process did you have?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I always input into the wardrobe, that’s how I like to work. Emma said at one point when we were talking about the wardrobe, that she thought that Mrs Green should feel like an English garden that you just want to lie down in. I agree. Then, Jacqueline Durran, who did the wardrobe, is the most collaborative wardrobe costume designer I’ve ever worked with, constantly interested in what I felt. I think that Mrs Green is somebody who does care about what she looks like and loves getting dressed up. She just doesn’t have the time to consider it. She strikes me as the type of person who is heading out and would grab a flower and just stick it in her hair [laughs]. You think about those things when you’re a mother and don’t have time to spend too much time on your clothes. I, personally, always have a hair band on my wrist in case I, or my daughter needs it. I think Mrs Green has those kinds of things, you know, when you reach in your pocket and pull out a bag of cheerios [laughs]. How did this get there? Oh yeah, I remember [laughs].

SheKnows: The mud looked like it was everywhere on the Nanny McPhee Returns set, was it ever simply too much [laughs]?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I’ll tell you a funny story. In the flashback scene where I’m in the wedding dress, we were shooting it and I guess someone from props was trying to be helpful and put down a yoga mat because I was going to have to step out of this horse drawn carriage into the mud. My husband was going to carry me out from the mud into the house so I wouldn’t get dirty. So, I come out of the carriage and I stepped on it and slipped. I completely bit it in this wedding dress in the mud. It was a tiny little flashback, so we only had one wedding dress.

SheKnows: Oh my…

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Yes! It was the first take with this dress and this yoga mat killed it. We made it work. I liked the mud. It was kind of a funny challenge. It makes everything funnier.

Maggie Gyllenhaal goes UK

SheKnows: Your English accent was impeccable. Where did it come from?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: At first I thought I wanted to sound like Susanna [White, the director] who has a beautiful accent. She has a beautiful English accent, which is difficult for me to hear what they hear – the class that’s in the accent. I think that Mrs Green is someone who grew up pretty wealthy in the city and moved to the country. So she shouldn’t sound really posh, but a little bit. In the end, it was just the accent that came to me. I don’t know why.

SheKnows: Working with Rhys Ifans, this was a unique role for him as your brother-in-law trying to steal the farm. How did you find Rhys?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Most of my work in the movie was with the children, five children ranging in age from five-and-a-half to 13 and animals and pretend animals [laughs] — working on real scenes that required proper acting. Emma’s script is no joke. I would be driving these huge dialogue scenes with kids and animals and that was most of my experience in the movie and it was fun. But, it was hard. Then, one day, I get to work, deep into the filming of the movie, to shoot this scene with Rhys. They were going to shoot it all in one take, us walking down a road trying to get me to sell the farm. They’re just going to follow us doing the scene. It has to be done perfectly. Like in Crazy Heart, for example, there is no such thing as perfect in that movie. If you’ve done your work and respond to the other person, anything can happen. In a movie like this, if you have to have a vase fall on your head because it’s funny and need to say this line, you need to be standing in one spot so the vase can fall on your head. So, it’s a different kind of technical work. So, I get to work to do the scene with Rhys, and I’m used to all these other scenes, not with grown-ups, and we start to do the scene and it was like awesome! It was like, “You’re a grown-up! You’re an expert.” It was super fun [laughs]. We couldn’t make a mistake.

SheKnows: Now sharing screen time with legend Maggie Smith must have been a treasure. Or, were you intimidated at all by her?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: I heard that Maggie doesn’t suffer fools gladly and could be scary. I was really scared to work with her. Thank God she likes me! She’d say amazing things. I heard her on the phone talking to her son after work one day. I could tell he said on the other line, “What time are you going to be home?” She said, “Oh, I don’t know. How long is a piece of string?” [Laughs] She literally did tell stories like the how now brown cow stories. Those were amazing.

SheKnows: Emma seemed to get a lot of her friends to join the cast. As one of the lone Americans in the film, how were you embraced by these UK acting legends?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Am I the only American? Wow.

SheKnows: Yes, you are.

Maggie Gyllenhaal: You know, it felt very English — the whole thing [laughs]. The way Emma was with Peter, my husband, she was so thankful to him for giving me to her for months. She thanked Peter for staying and taking care of Ramona. Thank you, thank you. She felt that part of her job was to take care of me and make me comfortable. I didn’t need that, but I appreciated it. I like English people. My family has shot a lot in England. We did Dark Knight in London and Peter did An Education there, then we did Nanny McPhee there for four months. We’re going back in the fall. We’re used to it in some ways, it really is different. I don’t think I realized as clearly until I was halfway through this movie how true it is, the cultural differences. I think for the most part, you do have to do some translating. The same behavior doesn’t mean the same thing as it does here. Another thing, I got much more quick witted. That’s really a muscle you work there. That’s part of being American too, part of being socially agile here. But, it’s really everywhere there and if you can’t keep up, you can’t have a conversation. I remember thinking that the back part of my brain, the witty part, got a real workout [laughs].

SheKnows: How do you see Nanny McPhee Returns? Is it solely a children’s movie?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: It’s definitely a film for children, but extremely gratifying for adults. I cried watching it. I felt it was so true. I’m interested in what entertains children’s minds. I probably wasn’t as interested until I had one [laughs]. I think that is what is so special about it is it really is appealing to anyone that is a human being.

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