TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
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| DJ 'tortured' by own music in 'Big Brother' punishment 'Celebrity Big Brother' housemate Jonas Altberg described his own music as “torture” last night after he was forced to listen to it on a loop for more than six hours. breakingnews.ie |
Film star food The actor who played Paulie in Goodfellas is launching a range of pasta sauces. Which other film stars' famous roles should be reprised in the catering business, and what should they be making?The news that US consumers are finally going to be able to buy the much-trailed pasta sauces of American-Italian actor Paul Sorvino, who appeared as a cookery-loving mob boss in Goodfellas, presents the opportunity for a fabulous new game. Clearly if Sorvino can go from slicing garlic with a razor blade on camera to getting people to buy the finished product, there are any number of other actors we could imagine taking the lead from their films and entering the catering business.Why shouldn't Juliette Binoche put her name to a high-end range of chocolates, aimed solely at the frigid middle aged woman, in need of something dark, sweet and sticky which will without doubt unlock their buried but volcanic sexuality? Surely Meg Ryan should finally capitalise on the success of When Harry Met Sally and open a delicatessen serving huge pastrami sandwiches so that everyone can have what she had.In this new, if curiously literal world, Samuel L Jackson finally recognises what his role in Pulp Fiction was about and becomes a McDonald's franchisee, Stanley Tucci makes the fictional real by lifting Big Night off the big screen and opening an Italian restaurant as does Joe Pesci, who was also in Goodfellas. The Leaning Tower would doubtless be a huge success, though only if somebody was whacked at the table with a baseball bat every night.And then, of course, there's the killer business opportunity: Anthony Hopkins' restaurant which serves mostly offal, and where the specialities are crispy brains in beurre noisette, or grilled liver with a side of fava beans washed down with a nice Chianti. The queues would be out the door. Tell us what other openings in the food industry are there for those of our most beloved actors who are willing to follow the brave, if rather literal, Paul Sorvino.Food & drinkJay Raynerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Julie Walters: 'To hell with it… Fetch the razor' From singing in Mamma Mia! to shaving her head to play Mo Mowlam in a new TV drama, Julie Walters is anything but vainJulie Walters said yes! when asked to play Mo Mowlam in a Channel 4 biopic, and then, after watching archive footage of the late secretary of state, rang her agent and said get me out of it. They were too Âphysically different, she thought, Mowlam with her "big, broad shoulders" and general swagger, Walters, as she describes herself, so Âunfailingly "weedy". And then there was the voice. "It was kind of prissy. The last thing you would describe her as is prissy, but her mouth was sort of..." Walters puckers up and squeaks. "I thought, oh shit, I don't think I can play her."Walters, 5ft 3in, seems at times too fiercely good an actor for the roles she is cast in. As well as all those classy Alans Bennett and Bleasdale dramas, she has been in two of the biggest films of the decade, Mamma Mia! and the Harry Potter franchise, in parts that sometimes seem ÂimperÂtiÂnently small. Since her days on Victoria Wood's show, she has been identified with a generation of fine TV actors, but there remains a sense of powers unused, of Walters as belonging to a different league entirely, a star in sheep's clothing. Not that she's bothered. At 59, she says, she is finally at the stage where she feels she has nothing to prove.It's the unerasable image of Mrs Overall, Âstaggering about with her tray of macaroons, that overshadows the memory of Walters the Best ÂActress Oscar nominee, on the shortlist for ÂEducating Rita in 1984 against Debra Winger, Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. MacLaine won for Terms Of Endearment, but the nomination put Walters on the Hollywood transfer list for a while. The projects that came her way were bad rip-offs of the film that got her there – "A lot of terrible scripts of what they thought working-class English was" – and after the fuss died down she decided to stay in England. "Obviously there are good scripts in Hollywood, but they weren't being offered to me." She says this matter-of-factly; Walters isn't an actor who prides herself on lack of vanity as a sly means of further self-promotion. She sends herself up – her "hump", her small stature, her Brummie accent – with an unpretentiousness that has defined her work.She agreed to play Mowlam in the end because, she says, "I thought there are so few single dramas of any worth, I've got to do it. I have to get my head round the fear of doing it." In the pub in north London, she leans back in her chair. Â"Blood-y hell!" (standard Walters punctuation). The drama covers the political rise and physical decline of Mowlam during her years as secretary of state for Northern Ireland and beyond, to her death in 2005, aged 55, from a brain tumour. It is also the portrait of a marriage, drawn largely from Mowlam's memoir, and although it tips here and there into schmaltz (it could be sold in cinemas as A Film About Life, Love And Learning To Dance), it is a riveting account of a complicated woman.The physical transformation is extraordinary. Walters' make-up team thought at first they could get away with not shaving her head for the post-chemo scenes and had her in a chair for hours, fitting the bald cap. But they were filming in high-definition ("You can always tell, because the women look like they've got facial hair") and the seam was visible. To hell with it, said Walters, fetch the razor. "Oooh, God, I wouldn't go into it as easily again. My hair is so tough, I put the men to shame. Never mind five o'clock shadow, by lunchtime they were like, we're going to have to shave you again. I looked like a strange monk. I was dreading my husband seeing it."In Walters's hands, Mowlam is, as most people remember her, charming, erratic, at odds with the buttoned-down ministerial average. The famous wig-removing episode, in which she wrong-footed her Irish counterparts during a pre-Good Friday Agreement meeting by whipping off her hairpiece, is recreated, along with her dramatic visit to the Maze prison. The most controversial scenes, however, are those depicting her descent into Âalcoholism after she was replaced in Northern ÂIreland by Peter Mandelson. Walters studied the footage – "There was a great interview right Âtowards the end. She was probably pissed, but as well as that, it was a bit slow and distracted, loud and slurred" – to nail the line between the effects of the tumour and those of the alcohol. Walters's performance is spot-on (she got the voice, Âeventually, by focusing on the drama: "You start to play the feelings and the voice takes a back seat"), but is braced for every know-all in Westminster to pop up and say it wasn't like that. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are presented as an Âalmost comically recalcitrant pair, like Seasame Street's Bert and Ernie, while a snake-hipped ÂMandelson is just this side of parody. Walters had lots of friends in the cast; Billy Elliot's "dad", Gary Lewis, plays Mo's adviser, and Tony ÂMaudsley is… She grimaces. "Ugh, this is the menopause. I've forgotten his name. The scouse git."Peter Kilfoyle? "Yesssss."The thing that surprised her most about ÂMowlam was the sex – "Mad about it. Everyone says so" – and the celebrity. Walters makes a face. "She wasn't a saint. She was hugely ambitious, she had celebrity. There was a reference in the script to Lenny and Dawn coming for a visit, and I thought, 'God, was she like that?' That shocked me. Having them all over."Walters is famously not "like that". She lives on a farm in Suffolk with her husband, Grant Roffey, whom she met in a pub and on whom, it never ceases to amaze people, she's quite keen, even though he's not famous. He is Âsupportive in the proper way, she says, in that he's not too Âimpressed by her job. "He'll say, 'Look, it's a Âtelevision programme. Most of the world isn't Âgoing to see it, and the scene you're worried about they'll probably cut.' Not in a nasty way. Some people have an Âunhealthy Âinterest in the business, and he hasn't. He was kind of solid, and I felt that's what I needed."When they met, she was still high on the Âsuccess of Educating Rita, drinking a lot, Âricocheting around town. She had lived with the actor Pete Postlethwaite for five years and was ready to Âsettle down. It was "an animal thing", she says; she took one look at Grant and knew Âinstantly. "Hello, would you like to have my Âchildren?!" He has been very good for her, she says. Where she is anxious, he is calm. "He's grounded in a different way from me. He doesn't worry in the same way."Their daughter, Maisie, who as a baby had Âleukaemia, is college-age now and Walters is very protective of her. There are films she's been in that she won't let Maisie see, but although the Âfinal scenes in Mo are terribly sad, she doesn't worry about Maisie watching it, she says, Â"because it wasn't just about her death, it was about her life, too. It was everyone else who was sad. She railed against it."Mamma Mia! and Harry Potter, of course, are a different matter. Of the two juggernauts, the Âmusical has had the bigger Âimpact on her life. Â"Because I'm quite small in Harry Potter. And Mamma Mia! was such a shock, the response to it. Everyone where I live had seen it – bloody hell." She looks mystified. "It was selling 15 DVDs a second in Tesco or Âsomething. It's weird. I mean, great. But weird."The film was directed by Phyllida Lloyd, a first-timer who garnered many snooty reviews from more seasoned directors, pointing out her Âschoolgirl errors and the unflattering effect they had on her actors. Walters, especially, was bizarrely styled in the film, and in scenes so cringeworthy you had to look away. No, she says, she didn't feel badly served, nor was she Âmortified by the singing. "It's just daft, anyway, and everybody knows it's daft."It feels invidious to ask what it was like working with Queen Meryl, with it's implied little-meism, but, as all actors who are not Meryl Streep are obliged to, Walters says dutifully, "When I first met her, I thought, 'Huh! Meryl Streep!' That was really hard. I'd grown up watching her. And she was talking about her kid with a cold and I couldn't quite get my head around it. I know that sounds stupid, but." Without Streep's Âsupport, says Walters, Lloyd could have been sunk. "It's so male, film. A very male atmosphere. And you can have your film taken off you so easily by everybody around you. The first assistant who's doing the schedule, or the lighting bloke, or the camera operator, all nice blokes, but they've got a history of years of film-making. You have to know what you're doing in order to battle that. Meryl Âreally stood up for her, she was totally Âsupportive. No one would dare bully her."Out of working hours, Walters says, "[Streep is] very much one of the girls. She wants to party and have a few drinks. Yes. But she's a perfectionist. I felt very lazy and weedy around her."Isn't she terribly grand? Walters smiles. "She's very much an actor." • Mo is broadcast on 31 January at 9pm on Channel 4.Julie WaltersDramaTelevisionDramaMo MowlamTheatreEmma Brockesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Clip joint: the best film clips featuring chat-up lines This week on Clip joint, let solidchris freshen your drink, compliment your frock and invite you upstairs to see his selection of the best stranger wooing on celluloidChat-up lines can be the start of a great journey. When that little snippet of dialogue works, when something you say sparks a connection with that person you desperately want to impress, it can seem like the stars have aligned just for you. Screenwriters have been trying to cook up moments like this for years, but the alchemy of film production often means that by the time the actors are actually delivering the zingers, the results fizz less than warm champagne. Onscreen chemistry isn't an exact science – but that's the beauty of it. When it works, it's magic. And it informs the way we behave, too. Those captured moments of bubbling romance afford us dreams of emulating the cocksure swagger and razor sharp wit. Dreams you can always attempt to turn into a reality – maybe even tonight.So, what are your best bets for guaranteed success? Well, if you're brave enough you could make like James Bond and go straight for the kill. More ballsy still? Try the American Pie approach. Succeed, and watch the sparks fly like George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, proving that no matter how big a pickle you find yourself in, there's always time for a bit of opportunistic banter. Fall flat on your face? Move on to the next target and give the trusty "Come here often?" a whirl.1) Andy Garcia is smooth personified, even when on a naked charm offensive. His lines in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead are as familiar to him as they are to his target. But she's enjoying them anyway. 2) It's been rehashed in pubs repeatedly, but surely never as successfully as this. Lucky Top Gun Tom Cruise even got the crowd to drown out his own vocal shortcomings.3) In the battle of who could care least, Cary Grant is nigh on unbeatable. In Charade he even manages to make Audrey Hepburn chat him up.4) Swingers is a film built around the concept of the pick-up. Jon Favreau's Mike needs a whole lot of help, and he picks up tips from two stone-cold ladykillers in this corking little pep talk.5) Anchorman's Ron Burgundy gives a sterling lesson in how to botch your approach before attempting to use your own ego as a life raft.Last week, Phil Hoad went in search of the holy grail – clips pointing the way to immortality. Here are the top five ingredients in his cinematic elixir:1) "And then inside of you I'll be reborn." Most rappers have a thing for self-eulogising, so why let death stop you? Tupac posthumously narrates his own demise in Resurrection.2) Madame Tussauds could spearhead a much-needed celebrity cull if it asked its sitters to fulfil the Vincent Price criteria for immortalisation in 1953's House of Wax.3) The punishment for reaching for everlasting life in both 1965's She and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is akin to the effects of an afternoon in conversation with Victoria Beckham.4) Meanwhile, supping a few drops of the good stuff in Darren Aronofsky's ambitious The Fountain has the effect of drinking an entire bottle of Miracle-Gro Liquafeed – a missed product placement opportunity here, surely?5) And this week's winner is swanstep for reminding us that while the exceptional dare reach for the stars, most of us have to be content to borrow a pair of binoculars. Antonio Salieri, in Milos Forman's Amadeus, comes to the embittered realisation that, having worked in the shadow of a genius whose name will blaze down the generations, he just didn't cut it. Judging by the sublime symphony of sarcasm that follows ("I speak for all mediocrities!"), he might have had a better shot as a standup comedian.Thanks to AJBee, greatpoochini, MrWormold and Tanarus for the rest of this week's picks.Fancy writing Clip joint? Email Catherine Shoard for more details.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Hornby enjoys strong Christmas trade • Orders stay high in January as toy shops replenish shelves• Toy Story 3 to give Scalextric owner a summer sales boostToy maker Hornby has reported strong demand for its trains, planes and automobiles over Christmas and is looking forward to a fresh sales boost this summer from a Toy Story 3 tie-up.The company – home to its eponymous model railways as well as Airfix, Scalextric, Corgi and Humbrol paints – has reported a significant improvement in shipments to UK toy-sellers in the run-up to the key Christmas season as retailers became more confident over high street spending. Hornby's mainland European business enjoyed such strong demand on the back of new products that it now expects to finish the financial year with sales and profits "significantly ahead" of a year earlier.Retailers' depleted stocks after a buoyant Christmas gift market meant orders had remained strong in January and Hornby is now gearing up for the annual round of global toy and hobby trade fairs. After Hornby suffered last year from rising material costs, a weak pound, supply chain headaches and recession-hit retailers trimming orders, chairman Neil Johnson said the company had entered 2010 in a strong position."Sales were encouraging in the important pre-Christmas period and indeed in the early weeks of 2010. This should ensure a positive final quarter to the financial year as retailers replenish their stocks," he said in a trading update."We are excited about the future prospects for the company and I look forward to updating investors on future progress."The company also sought to reassure investors that it was resolving the supply chain issues, that last summer contributed to its decision to scrap its dividend. In June, Hornby reported it had not been able to get enough stock because of problems at Sanda Kan, its largest supplier in China, but today stressed that its principal supplier was "now benefitting from significant capacity and volume increases"."At the same time, as reported previously, we have diversified our supply base to reduce our overall exposure to an individual major supplier. We therefore look forward with renewed confidence in respect of our ability to service the growing demand for our products, particularly in continental Europe," it added.Hornby, which has benefited in the past from worldwide licences to produce toys featuring racing drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, was encouraged by recent tie-ups and new ones this year.Recent bestsellers included Scalextric products associated with the motoring show Top Gear, Disney/Pixar's Cars franchise and the Formula 1 Grand Prix teams. For 2010, the toy maker has secured licences with Disney/Pixar for Hornby and Micro Scalextric brands inspired by the forthcoming summer release of Toy Story 3.It has already launched the first products in a London 2012 Olympic Games range and today reports "positive" market feedback.HornbyToysRetail industryChinaFormula OneJenson ButtonLewis HamiltonKatie Allenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |