TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Film to immortalise lords of Creation records Upside Down charts drink and drug-fuelled years of label that signed Oasis, Primal Scream and My Bloody ValentineWhen an unsigned Noel Gallagher took the train from Manchester to meet the bosses of Creation records in 1993, he had little idea what to expect.In a room above a sweatshop in the back streets of east London, surrounded by self-confessed "misfits, drug addicts and sociopaths", the Oasis songwriter found his spiritual home."He came to the Creation office and saw the words Northern Ignorance scrawled in magic marker across the roof of the reception," said Tim Abbott, the label's former managing director. "I'd done it the week before, when I was off my head on ecstasy, walking on the tables and drinking champagne. Noel saw it and went: 'Fucking 'ell, I'm having that. I like it here.'"The full extent of the debauchery, precarious nature and genius of the independent label is to be laid bare in the most revealing rock'n'roll film since 24 Hour Party People, the story of the "Madchester" scene. Upside Down, due out in spring, reveals the label's unusual method of making sure new bands came on board, according to Abbot. "We often used to drink and drug the bands into submission," he said.After the initial bond formed, Abbott said, Gallagher was frog-marched to the pub where, unsurprisingly, all involved got "stuck into a session".A decade after Creation closed, and 25 years since the release of its first single, Upside Down charts the heady 15-year existence of the label that launched Primal Scream, Ride and My Bloody Valentine, as well as Oasis.The label veered from one financial precipice to another, he said. Even after Primal Scream won the Mercury music prize in 1992, the resulting visibility did not translate into financial viability."We were always skint. It was like spinning plates, we were always trying to dodge the bailiffs," he said. "It was my job to go out and see them, probably because I was the smallest. Dick [co-founder Dick Green] would see to the manufacturers who we couldn't pay and Alan [co-founder Alan McGee] would just try to blag it. It couldn't go on like that."Upside Down's director, Danny O'Connor, who admitted to going through "near bankruptcy and dementia and all the other things that come with Creation" during the making of the film, said he was drawn to telling the story of the label that had provided the soundtrack to his life."No one does excess like Creation, no one does great records like Creation," he said. "Creation was an indie, but it didn't wear a cardigan, it didn't apologise. There was a real power in its punch. If you think that rock'n'roll is all about swagger — this is your film."And few do swagger like McGee. In a trailer for the film he admits: "I was absolutely delusional. I actually thought I was up there with Beethoven and Shakespeare, creating metaphysical history by running Creation."The company behaved like the "ultimate dysfunctional family" but still managed to make great and intelligent records, said O'Connor.Abbot agreed: "We were dysfunctional people working with dysfunctional bands but somehow we still managed to function — we got results. There were a whole cast of characters at Creation and the sum was greater than its parts."For Abbot, when Sony bought 49% of the label in 1992, it spelled the end of its glory days. "When McGee sold creation to Sony, it was a curse," he said. "It took the pressure off financially but it changed everything. Sony brought in accountants and a major label culture. The offices moved from Hackney to Primrose Hill and it got stupid.Knebworth [Oasis's 2005 Knebworth concert] was a gig too far. It signed off the old culture."He holds few regrets about the eventual closure of the label in 1999. "When the label folded it was sad, but it had been consumed by a monster. It stopped being a vehicle for music and started being a vehicle for egos. Alan and Dick sold the soul of Creation to the devil, and the devil wanted it back with interest."He added: "I have no regrets. In its heyday Creation produced fantastic music and art, and I was lucky enough to be there. It's like asking Ronaldo if he regrets playing for United. If you get to play for the best team in the world, you can't ask for anything else."Muso moviesNowhere Boy Biopic of early life of John Lennon that concentrates on his complicated relationship with his mother and aunt. Starting in Liverpool in 1955, Nowhere Boy looks at John Lennon's early life and his complicated relationship with the two women in his life, his mother and aunt Mimi, as well as portraying his first meeting with Paul McCartney. The film received permission from Sir Paul McCartney to use In Spite of All the Danger, one of the Quarrymen's first songs, while Yoko Ono allowed them to buy the rights to some of Lennon's little-known later work.Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll Biopic of post-punk pioneer Ian Dury, starring Andy Serkis, and the latest offering from director Mat Whitecross. It charts Dury's rise from dodgy pub performer to godfather of the new wave through his time at Stiff Records.No Distance Left to RunStory of Britpop's finest, Blur, including footage from their Glastonbury performance last year. For the millions of 30-something Blur fans, suffering from a post-reunion slump after the band's summer gigs and Glastonbury performance, the new year brings welcome respite. No Distance Left to Run looks at the history of the Britpop idols, and includes previously unseen archive material, rehearsal footage, and interviews. Emotional footage from that legendary Glastonbury performance will leave die-hard fans with goosebumps, said Stefan Demetriou, of EMI Music.Pop and rockOasisPrimal ScreamAlexandra Toppingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
French film-maker Eric Rohmer dies aged 89 Arthouse director of Tales of Four Seasons and My Night At Maud's was key figure in postwar French New Wave sceneEric Rohmer, the French New Wave director known for Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night With Maud), Le genou de Claire (Claire's Knee), and other films about the intricacies of romantic relationships and the dilemmas of modern love, has died. He was 89.Rohmer, also an influential film critic early in his career, died in Paris, said Les Films du Losange, the production company he co-founded. The cause of death was not immediately given.The director internationally known for his films' long, philosophical conversations continued to work until recently. His latest film, the 17th-century costume tale Les amours d'AstrĂ©e et de CĂ©ladon (Romance of Astree and Celadon), appeared in 2007.In 2001, Rohmer was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice film festival for his body of work, made over a five-decade career.Rohmer's movies sought to portray romantic temptation and love triangles, pretty girls and handsome youths. Often they took a lighthearted, chatty form, with serious themes hidden under the surface.French president Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to a "great auteur who will continue to speak to us and inspire us for years to come"."Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the 'Rohmer' style, which will outlive him," Sarkozy said in a statement.Six of Rohmer's films comprised an influential cycle of moral tales that addressed questions of modern love: whether to compromise your beliefs in the face of passion, for example, or how to maintain a sense of individual freedom in a relationship.In 1969's Ma nuit chez Maud, a churchgoing engineer, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, must choose between a seductive divorcee and a woman who meets his ideals. The film's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.Le Genou de Claire (1970), tells of a diplomat overwhelmed by his desire to stroke the knee of a teenage girl he meets.France's culture minister, FrĂ©dĂ©ric Mitterrand, said Rohmer's "very personal, very original" movies appealed to cinephiles and ordinary filmgoers alike.Serge Toubiana, head of the Cinematheque, France's famous film preservation society, said Rohmer worked closely with his crews and described his creative process as a collaborative effort with the actors."He knew that he needed them and because of that he showered them with love," Toubiana told France Info radio. "Each film was a kind of shared game, with its own rules in which each person played his role."Born in 1920 in the city of Tulle, Rohmer got his start as a literature professor and a film critic for the influential Cahiers du CinĂ©ma magazine, becoming its editor.Though his name at birth was Maurice Scherer, he created his artistic pseudonym by rearranging the sounds in his first and last name to come up with Rohmer, he told Le Monde newspaper in 2007.As a director, Rohmer became a leading force in France's convention-smashing New Wave cinema, alongside directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, his colleagues at the Cahiers. With Claude Chabrol, another director, Rohmer published a classic study on one of their heroes, Alfred Hitchcock.Along with his series of moral tales, Rohmer produced a cycle of modern-day relationship fables for each season of the year, and another dubbed the cycle of "comedies and proverbs", with each film taking its inspiration from a proverb. One popular film in that series was Pauline a la plage (Pauline at the Beach), focusing on a teenager on a seaside holiday.Thierry Fremaux, who runs the Cannes Film Festival, told BFM television that though Rohmer's films weren't "trendy", they were timeless."He proved that you can make great movies with small budgets," Fremaux said. "And that's good to keep in mind in the times we live in."Rohmer was a very private person, but his survivors are believed to include his younger brother Rene, and his son, also named Rene.World cinemaFranceEric Rohmerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Inspiration for a 'wavering and fearful heart' Both Gordon Brown and Nelson Mandela name the poem Invictus as a favourite – and no wonderInvictus, meaning unconquered, is the name of Clint Eastwood's new film about Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa that was won by the Springboks; a victory celebrated by black people as well as white and generally recognised as the country's first important symbol of national unification. Eastwood directs, Morgan Freeman is Mandela, Matt Damon plays the Springboks' captain, Francois Pienaar. At their first meeting, when success on the field is still far from certain, the president tells the captain of a favourite poem that inspired him during his 18 years of imprisonment on Robben Island. The poem is Invictus by WE (William Ernest) Henley, which had helped him "stand up when all I wanted to do was lie down".British audiences will get the chance to see Invictus early next month, but one of us who has already seen it is ÂGordon Brown. According to an interview in the News of the World, he watched the film with his wife over the Christmas break. "The poem certainly had an impact on me," he said. "It is about determination. It summarises my view." His words were contextualised by the Hoon-Hewitt plot and his fearsome will to carry on come what may. But it happens that there are much more personal reasons why the poem might speak directly to the prime minister, to do with the circumstances of its Âcreation. Brown didn't hint at them and may not know them. If he had, he might have punctured the weary media hostility to his mention of a poem that, according to a writer in London's Evening Standard this week, will soon be quoted "by every teary-eyed pub bore" who has the seen the film.To anyone over a certain age or interested in popular literature, the words will be familiar. Generations of men knew them. My father could and sometimes would recite them – yours too, probably. Less enchantingly, they formed the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh's last message to the world from his condemned cell, before he ate his two pints of chocolate chip ice cream and lay down for his lethal injections. The first verse goes:Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul.But the fourth and last verse is the one that people tend to remember:It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.Henley wrote these words when he was lying in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1875 as one of a series of poems, the In Hospital sequence, that wasn't published for 13 years. In his first collection of 1888 the poem carried no title. Later he dedicated it to "IMRT Hamilton Bruce (1846-1899)" in memory of a wealthy Scottish businessman who'd made his money from a chain of Glasgow bakeries and kept Henley in funds. Only when the poem was collected in the 1900 edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse did the word Invictus appear, supplied by that anthology's first editor, Arthur Quiller-Couch (a later editor removed it). Even aside from this queer titular history, many things told against it. In a Christian age, its sentiments were unchristian ("whatever gods may be"), which may explain why it was new to Brown and not part of his childhood in a Kirkcaldy manse. In a less Christian age, it had literary modernism to contend with. By the 1940s, according to a Henley biographer writing in 1949, the poem could be "calculated to raise a snigger in almost any literary assemblage but the most unsophisticated". Today, to the religious or otherwise, its philosophy seems bombastic and delusional: human biology dictates that suicides can be the only proper masters of their fates (McVeigh saw his execution as a form of suicide).And yet, as Henley's biographer, John Connell, also wrote 60 years ago, the poem sustained "many a wavering and fearful heart" long after other comforts by once popular poets such as Tennyson had passed away. An easy rhyme scheme partly explains this, but the greater reason may be Henley's obvious sincerity in expressing his own need to defy a particular doom. He meant what he wrote. At the age of 25, he faced a future without legs.He lost the first in his birthplace, Gloucester, when he was 16. Tuberculosis of the bone was the problem. Several ancient cures were tried, including sticking his naked foot into the bloody innards of a recently killed animal at the Gloucester slaughterhouse, but in the end surgeons amputated his left leg an inch or two below the knee. A year later he went to London to live precariously as a freelance journalist – he came from a poor family, he was always cadging money, he drank and smoked too much. When his right foot began to play up he sought treatment at the Royal Sea Bathing Infirmary at Margate, but after a year doctors there too recommended amputation. Learning of the new "antiseptic" surgery practised by Joseph Lister in Edinburgh, Henley took a steamship north and persuaded Lister to take him as an experimental patient. For somebody lacking wealth and social connection, it was a remarkable act of willpower. He spent two years at the city's Royal Infirmary under Lister's care. The diseased parts of his foot bones were scooped out with gouges and pliers and the cavity filled with lint steeped in carbolic oil. Eventually, after other operations, Henley left hospital with his right leg intact – he was "bloody but unbowed" as his poem says – though he used crutches and sticks for the rest of his life.Two enduring things came out of his hospital stay. The first is the In Hospital sequence; Henley never wrote such intimate and original poetry again, though in his subsequent career as a literary editor he pushed Kipling's Gunga Din and Yeats's Innisfree into print. The second is one of the most celebrated characters in fiction. A budding young Edinburgh writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, often visited Henley in his ward and the two became close friends. Henley was a large uproarious figure who swung around the beds on his crutch, shouting about French novelists. Stevenson wrote of Treasure Island that Henley's "maimed masterfulness gave me the germ from which [Long] John Silver grew".Now move the scene at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary forward by nearly a hundred years. An incident during a rugby game has left a young Kirkcaldy student with detached retinas in both eyes. He undergoes four operations over two years and spends six months lying flat in a darkened hospital room. The left eye can't be saved, but the other can – just. Same hospital, same duration of treatment, a similarly uncertain outcome."Out of the night that covers me …" It really is a wonder that he first read Invictus last month.PoetryGordon BrownSouth AfricaIan Jackguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Dying Dennis Hopper cutting wife from will CANCER-STRICKEN Dennis Hopper is determined not to die until he officially splits from his fifth wife. news.com.au |
Jean Simmons obituary British-born film star known for her roles in Great Expectations and SpartacusJean Simmons, who has died aged 80, had a bounteous moment, early in her career, when she seemed the likely casting for every exotic or magical female role. It passed, as she got out of her teens, but then for the best part of 15 years, in Britain and America, she was a valued actress whose generally proper, if not patrician, manner had an intriguing way of conflicting with her large, saucy eyes and a mouth that began to turn up at the corners as she imagined mischief – or more than her movies had in their scripts. Even in the age of Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, she was an authentic beauty. And there were always hints that the lady might be very sexy. But nothing worked out smoothly, and it is somehow typical of Simmons that her most astonishing work – in Angel Face (1952) – is not very well known.At first, she was a schoolgirl given her dream. Born in north London, she grew up in the suburb of Cricklewood, and was swept from dancing classes to the studio to be Margaret Lockwood's younger sister in Give Us the Moon (1944). Several other films followed, with modest roles: Mr Emmanuel; Kiss the Bride Goodbye; Meet Sexton Blake; a singer in The Way to the Stars; and a slave girl for Leigh in Caesar and Cleopatra.But then David Lean cast her as Estella in Great Expectations (1946); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger chose her to be the temple dancer with a jewel in her nose for Black Narcissus (1947); and Laurence Olivier borrowed her away from her J Arthur Rank contract so that she could be a blonde Ophelia in his Hamlet (1948). It was noted at the time that an anxious Leigh, Olivier's wife, chose to be on set whenever Simmons was working – just in case.Hamlet won the Oscar for best picture, and Simmons was nominated for best supporting actress; in fact, she lost to Claire Trevor in Key Largo. However, she was by then an expert at the Oscars, for she attended the previous year and four times was on stage to accept awards on behalf of Great Expectations and Black Narcissus. Cecil B DeMille, in the audience, was so impressed that he offered her the female lead in his upcoming Samson and Delilah (the Hedy Lamarr role). She had to decline – for Hamlet's sake – but no young actress was being talked about more.For a while she remained in Britain. She was also in the Daphne du Maurier tale of an Irish feud, Hungry Hill (1947); and she was suitably preyed upon by Derrick DeMarney in Uncle Silas, adapted from the Sheridan Le Fanu novel. Then, in 1949, with Donald Houston, she was one of two young people shipwrecked on a desert island in The Blue Lagoon. Showing a good deal of flesh for its day (Brooke Shields took her role in the 1980 remake), this was reckoned as a rather daring film – and it was almost certainly viewed, and re-viewed, by Howard Hughes. Then, in the same year, she played the adopted daughter of Stewart Granger in Adam and Evelyne. In fact, the handsome Granger was 16 years her senior, and married once, having divorced Elspeth March in 1948. But the couple fell deeply in love, married and would soon set out together for Hollywood as a kind of middleweight Olivier and Leigh.But that was not before three 1950 films - So Long at the Fair, a period thriller in which she was romantically paired with Dirk Bogarde; Cage of Gold; and The Clouded Yellow, in which she established a fascinating mood with Trevor Howard. And so, aged only 21, she went to Hollywood. But whereas Granger was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and would play Allan Quartermain, the Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche), she was the oblivious dream child of Hughes at RKO, which had bought her contract from Rank. The strange tycoon was obsessed with her personally, and he laid siege to her romantically and professionally so that she did not work for over a year. Only one thing emerged from the stand-off, Angel Face, in which she is a spoiled child and lethal temptress who seduces nearly everyone she meets (most notably Robert Mitchum). The brilliant picture was directed by Otto Preminger and photographed by the great veteran Harry Stradling. Thus it contains – and she sustains – some of the most luminous close-ups ever given to a femme fatale. How far she understood the picture is unclear. One can only say that it is a rare tribute to unrequited love.Hughes yielded in the courts in 1952, and Simmons was able to begin a run of costume films, some of them important productions (such as The Robe), but many of them giving her too little to do: in Androcles and the Lion; as Elizabeth I in Young Bess (with Granger, Deborah Kerr and Charles Laughton); very good, though too pretty, as the young Ruth Gordon in George Cukor's The Actress – she worked especially well with Spencer Tracy. But then the films grew more routine: Affair With a Stranger (with Victor Mature); with Richard Burton and CinemaScope in The Robe – there may have been a fling with Burton; She Couldn't Say No – she should have; the dreary The Egyptian; A Bullet Is Waiting, in which she was expected to take Rory Calhoun as co-star; DĂ©sirĂ©e – ruined by the languid mockery of co-star Marlon Brando; and Footsteps in the Fog (with Granger).She took a risk, singing If I Were a Bell and The Eyes of a Woman in Love, to be Sister Sarah in the movie of Guys and Dolls (1955). The producer, Sam Goldwyn, had wanted Grace Kelly for the part. But director Joseph L Mankiewicz was more than happy with Simmons: "An enormously underrated girl. In terms of talent, Jean Simmons is so many heads and shoulders above most of her contemporaries, one wonders why she didn't become the great star she could have been." No one argued, though many observers noted that Mankiewicz was also deeply in love with his actress. Still, it is worth speculating, and noting that nothing sounds wrong or unpromising about this schedule – Jean Simmons in Roman Holiday, in Vertigo, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?When one considers that she was barely past 25 in 1955, it is all the stranger that her films slipped so far in quality: Hilda Crane; as secretary to gangster Paul Douglas in This Could Be the Night; with Paul Newman in Until They Sail; with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston in the big western, The Big Country; This Earth is Mine. One notable exception to this trend was Home Before Dark (1958), where Simmons was outstanding as a woman who has had a nervous breakdown.By then, her marriage to Granger had come apart. But in 1960, she married again, the writer-director Richard Brooks, and he immediately raised her horizons by casting her as the evangelist opposite Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. Lancaster and Shirley Jones won Oscars in that film, but Simmons was not even nominated. Thereafter, she sportingly played the female lead in Spartacus, and had some overlong, giggle-making love scenes with its star, Kirk Douglas – "Put me down, Spartacus, I'm having a baby!"That would prove to be her last big picture, for the slide was now evident: The Grass is Greener (1960, a rather middle-aged comedy); All the Way Home, adapted from James Agee's novel, in which she was very good, but which went unnoticed; Life at the Top (done back in Britain); Mister Budd- wing; Divorce American Style and Rough Night in Jericho. Then Brooks did all he could to revive her fortunes in The Happy Ending (1969), about a miserable wife whose dreams of marriage, based on the movie Father of the Bride, have turned to disillusion. She got an Oscar nomination for it (she lost to Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), but rather more out of respect than conviction. In truth, she always seemed too strong-willed and amused for weepy material. Indeed, she might have done Jean Brodie.More or less, in the early 1970s, she seemed to retire. The marriage to Brooks came to an end in 1977, and there were stories that she was drinking too much. In the early 1980s she checked herself in to the Betty Ford clinic and spoke publicly about her addiction.Then she started to work in television, and sometimes it was only the end credits that told one that that had been Jean Simmons. She was in The Thorn Birds (1983); she did a TV version of Great Expectations where she was Miss Havisham (1989); was an admiral called in for an investigation in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991); and was in How to Make an American Quilt (1995). She went into semi-retirement and was often too shy to accept invitations to film festivals. But around 75, she changed: she did a wonderful voice performance in Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle (2004), and she was deeply touching as a dying poet in Shadows in the Sun (2009). She attended the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado, in 2008 and she was interviewed at a Lean centenary celebration in Los Angeles where she was still as pretty, seductive and mischievous as she had been as Estella in Great Expectations.The recollection of those early years brings out the paradox of her career, for if she had made only one film – Angel Face – she might now be spoken of with the awe given to Louise Brooks. She is survived by her daughters Tracy, from her marriage to Granger, and Kate, from her marriage to Brooks.• Jean Merilyn Simmons, actor, born 31 January 1929; died 22 January 2010United StatesElizabeth TaylorLaurence OlivierKirk DouglasJean SimmonsDavid Thomsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |