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Name | Dany Robin |
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Birthname | Danielle Robin |
Birth date | April 14, 1927 |
Birth place | Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France |
Death date | May 25, 1995 |
Death place | Paris, Ile-de-France, France |
Spouse | Georges Marchal (1951–1969)Michael Sullivan (1969–1995) |
Years active | 1930–1969 |
Occupation | Actress |
Dany Robin (; born Danielle Robin, 14 April 1927 – 25 May 1995) was a French actress of the 1950s and the early 1960s who was married to fellow actor Georges Marchal.
She performed with Peter Sellers in The Waltz of the Toreadors. Robin co-starred with Connie Francis, Paula Prentiss, and Janis Paige in Follow the Boys (1963). Her last leading role was the agent's wife Nicole Devereaux in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz (1969). Hitchcock said that Robin and Claude Jade, cast as Robin's daughter, would provide the glamour in the story.
She died with her husband, Michael Sullivan, during a fire in their apartment in Paris.
Dany Robin was the female lead in the 1953 movie "Act of Love". Kirk Douglas was the star of the movie
Category:1927 births Category:1995 deaths Category:People from Hauts-de-Seine Category:French actors Category:Accidental deaths in France
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | Alfred Hitchcock |
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Birth name | Alfred Joseph Hitchcock |
Birth date | August 13, 1899 |
Birth place | Leytonstone, London, England |
Death date | April 29, 1980 |
Death place | Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, United States |
Other names | HitchThe Master of Suspense |
Occupation | Film director |
Years active | 1921–1976 |
Spouse | Alma Reville (1926–1980) (his death) |
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. Viewers are made to identify with the camera which moves in a way meant to mimic a person's gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. He framed shots to manipulate the feelings of the audience and maximise anxiety, fear, or empathy, and used innovative film editing to demonstrate the point of view of the characters. Many of Hitchcock's films have twist endings and thrilling plots featuring depictions of violence, murder, and crime, although many of the mysteries function as decoys or "MacGuffins" meant only to serve thematic elements in the film and the extremely complex psychological examinations of the characters. Hitchcock's films also borrow many themes from psychoanalysis and feature strong sexual undertones. Through his cameo appearances in his own films, interviews, film trailers, and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became a cultural icon.
Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. Often regarded as the greatest British filmmaker, he came first in a 2007 poll of film critics in Britain's Daily Telegraph, which said: "Unquestionably the greatest filmmaker to emerge from these islands, Hitchcock did more than any director to shape modern cinema, which would be utterly different without him. His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information (from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else." MovieMaker has hailed him as the most influential filmmaker of all time, and he is widely regarded as one of cinema's most significant artists.
Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in Leytonstone, London, the second son and youngest of three children of William Hitchcock (1862–1914), a greengrocer and poulterer, and Emma Jane Hitchcock (née Whelan; 1863–1942). He was named after his father's brother, Alfred. Hitchcock was raised Catholic and was sent to the Jesuit Classic school St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill, London. His mother and paternal grandmother were of Irish extraction. He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, a situation compounded by his obesity.
Hitchcock said he was sent by his father on numerous occasions to the local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him away for ten minutes as punishment for behaving badly. This idea of being harshly treated or wrongfully accused is frequently reflected in Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock's mother would often make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours. These experiences would later be used for the portrayal of the character of Norman Bates in his movie Psycho.
Hitchcock's father died when he was 14. In the same year, Hitchcock left St. Ignatius to study at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation in Poplar, London. After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company.
During this period, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film production in London, working as a title-card designer for the London branch of what would become Paramount Pictures. designing the titles for silent movies. His rise from title designer to film director took five years.
Hitchcock's first few films faced a string of bad luck. His first directing project came in 1922 with the aptly titled Number 13. However, the production was cancelled due to financial problems of Gainsborough Pictures gave Hitchcock another opportunity for a directing credit with The Pleasure Garden made at UFA Studios in Germany; unfortunately, the film was a commercial flop. Next, Hitchcock directed a drama called The Mountain Eagle (possibly released under the title Fear o' God in the United States). This film was also eventually lost. In 1926, Hitchcock's luck changed with his first thriller, . The film, released in January 1927, was a major commercial and critical success in the United Kingdom. As with many of his earlier works, this film was influenced by Expressionist techniques Hitchcock had witnessed first-hand in Germany. Some commentators regard this piece as the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man".
Following the success of The Lodger, Hitchcock hired a publicist to help enhance his growing reputation. On 2 December 1926, Hitchcock married his assistant director, Alma Reville at the Brompton Oratory in South Kensington. Their only child, daughter Patricia, was born on 7 July 1928. Alma was to become Hitchcock's closest collaborator. Alma's contribution to his films (some of which were credited on screen) had always been privately acknowledged by Hitchcock, as she was keen to avoid public attention.
In 1929, Hitchcock began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was still in production, the studio, British International Pictures (BIP), decided to convert it to sound. As an early '', the film is frequently cited by film historians as a landmark film, and is often considered to be the first British sound feature film. With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences. In the PBS series The Men Who Made The Movies, Hitchcock explained how he used early sound recording as a special element of the film, emphasising the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman suspected of murder. During this period, Hitchcock directed segments for a BIP musical film revue Elstree Calling (1930) and directed a short film featuring two Film Weekly scholarship winners, An Elastic Affair (1930). Another BIP musical revue, Harmony Heaven (1929), reportedly had minor input from Hitchcock, but his name does not appear in the credits.
In 1933, Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), was a success and his second, The 39 Steps (1935), is often considered one of the best films from his early period. This film was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the "MacGuffin", a plot device around which a whole story seems to revolve, but ultimately has nothing to do with the true meaning or ending of the story. In The 39 Steps, the Macguffin is a stolen set of design plans. Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut:
There are two men sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other, "Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?", "Oh", says the other, "that's a Macguffin.", "Well", says the first man, "what's a Macguffin?", The other answers, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.", "But", says the first man, "there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.", "Well", says the other, "then that's no Macguffin."
Hitchcock's next major success was his 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, a fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Bandrika.
By 1938, Hitchcock had become known for his alleged observation, "Actors are cattle". He once said that he first made this remark as early as the late 1920s, in connection to stage actors who were snobbish about motion pictures. However, Michael Redgrave said that Hitchcock had made the statement during the filming of The Lady Vanishes. The phrase would haunt Hitchcock for years to come and would result in an incident during the filming of his 1941 production of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, where Carole Lombard brought some heifers onto the set with name tags of Lombard, Robert Montgomery, and Gene Raymond, the stars of the film, to surprise the director. Hitchcock said he was misquoted: "I said 'Actors should be treated like cattle'."
At the end of the 1930s, David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in March 1939, when the Hitchcocks moved to the United States.
[Selznick] was the Big Producer. [...] Producer was king, The most flattering thing Mr. Selznick ever said about me — and it shows you the amount of control — he said I was the "only director" he'd "trust with a film".
Selznick loaned Hitchcock to the larger studios more often than producing Hitchcock's films himself. In addition, Selznick, as well as fellow independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, made only a few films each year, so Selznick did not always have projects for Hitchcock to direct. Goldwyn had also negotiated with Hitchcock on a possible contract, only to be outbid by Selznick. Hitchcock was quickly impressed with the superior resources of the American studios compared to the financial restrictions he had frequently encountered in England.
Hitchcock's fondness for his homeland resulted in numerous American films set in, or filmed in, the United Kingdom, including his penultimate film, Frenzy.
With the prestigious Selznick picture Rebecca in 1940, Hitchcock made his first American movie, set in England and based on a novel by English author Daphne du Maurier. The film starred Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. This Gothic melodrama explores the fears of a naive young bride who enters a great English country home and must adapt to the extreme formality and coldness she finds there. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. The statuette was given to Selznick, as the film's producer. Rebecca was the fourth longest of Hitchcock's films, at 130 minutes, exceeded only by The Paradine Case (132 minutes), North by Northwest (136 minutes), and Topaz (142 minutes).
Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), based on Vincent Sheean's Personal History and produced by Walter Wanger, was nominated for Best Picture that year. The movie was filmed in the first year of World War II and was apparently inspired by the rapidly changing events in Europe, as fictionally covered by an American newspaper reporter portrayed by Joel McCrea. The film mixed actual footage of European scenes and scenes filmed on a Hollywood back lot. In compliance with Hollywood's Production Code censorship, the film avoided direct references to Germany and Germans.
In September 1940, the Hitchcocks purchased the Cornwall Ranch, located near Scotts Valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The ranch became the primary residence of the Hitchcocks for the rest of their lives, although they kept their Bel Air home. Suspicion (1941) marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as director. Hitchcock used the north coast of Santa Cruz, California for the English coastline sequence. won Best Actress Oscar for her "outstanding performance in Suspicion". "Grant plays an irresponsible husband whose actions raise suspicion and anxiety in his wife (Fontaine)". In what critics regard as a classic scene, Hitchcock uses a light bulb to illuminate what might be a fatal glass of milk that Grant is bringing to his wife. In the book upon which the movie is based (Before the Fact by Francis Iles), the Grant character is a killer, but Hitchcock and the studio felt Grant's image would be tarnished by that ending. Though a homicide would have suited him better, as he stated to François Truffaut, Hitchcock settled for an ambiguous finale.
Saboteur (1942) was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal, a studio where he would continue his career during his later years. Hitchcock was forced to use Universal contract players Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas. Breaking with Hollywood conventions of the time, Hitchcock did extensive location filming, especially in New York City, and depicted a confrontation between a suspected saboteur (Cummings) and a real saboteur (Norman Lloyd) atop the Statue of Liberty.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock's personal favourite of all his films and the second of the early Universal films, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright), who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial murderer. Critics have said that in its use of overlapping characters, dialogue, and closeups it has provided a generation of film theorists with psychoanalytic potential, including Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. Hitchcock again filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa, California, during the summer of 1942. The director showcased his own personal fascination with crime and criminals when he had two of his characters discuss various ways of killing people, to the obvious annoyance of Charlotte.
Working at 20th Century Fox, Hitchcock adapted a script of John Steinbeck's that chronicled the experiences of the survivors of a German U-boat attack in the film Lifeboat (1944). The action sequences were shot on the small boat. The locale also posed problems for Hitchcock's traditional cameo appearance. That was solved by having Hitchcock's image appear in a newspaper that William Bendix is reading in the boat, showing the director in a before-and-after advertisement for "Reduco-Obesity Slayer". While at Fox, Hitchcock seriously considered directing the film version of A.J. Cronin's novel about a Catholic priest in China, The Keys of the Kingdom, but the plans for this fell through. John M. Stahl ended up directing the 1944 film, which was produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starred Gregory Peck, among other luminaries.
Returning to England for an extended visit in late 1943 and early 1944, Hitchcock made two short films for the Ministry of Information, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache. Made for the Free French, these were the only films Hitchcock made in the French language, and "feature typical Hitchcockian touches". In the 1990s, the two films were shown by Turner Classic Movies and released on home video.
In 1945, Hitchcock served as "treatment advisor" (in effect, a film editor) for a Holocaust documentary produced by the British Army. The film, which recorded the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, remained unreleased until 1985, when it was completed by PBS Frontline and distributed under the title Memory of the Camps.
Hitchcock worked for Selznick again when he directed Spellbound, which explored psychoanalysis and featured a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. Gregory Peck plays amnesiac Dr. Anthony Edwardes under the treatment of analyst Dr. Peterson (Ingrid Bergman), who falls in love with him while trying to unlock his repressed past. The dream sequence as it actually appears in the film is considerably shorter than was originally envisioned, which was to be several minutes long, because it proved to be too disturbing for the audience. Some of the original musical score by Miklós Rózsa (which makes use of the theremin) was later adapted by the composer into a concert piano concerto.
Notorious (1946) followed Spellbound. According to Hitchcock, in his book-length interview with François Truffaut, Selznick sold the director, the two stars (Grant and Bergman) and the screenplay (by Ben Hecht) to RKO Radio Pictures as a "package" for $500,000 due to cost overruns on Selznick's Duel in the Sun (1946). Notorious starred Hitchcock regulars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, and features a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America. It was a huge box office success and has remained one of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films. His use of uranium as a plot device led to Hitchcock's being briefly under FBI surveillance. McGilligan writes that Hitchcock consulted Dr. Robert Millikan of Caltech about the development of an atomic bomb. Selznick complained that the notion was "science fiction", only to be confronted by the news stories of the detonation of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945.
After completing his final film for Selznick, The Paradine Case (a courtroom drama that critics found lost momentum because it apparently ran too long and exhausted its resource of ideas), Hitchcock filmed his first color film, Rope, which appeared in 1948. Here Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat (1943). He also experimented with exceptionally long takes — up to ten minutes long. Featuring James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of four films Stewart would make for Hitchcock. It was based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. Somehow Hitchcock's cameraman managed to move the bulky, heavy Technicolor camera quickly around the set as it followed the continuous action of the long takes.
Under Capricorn (1949), set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used the short-lived technique of long takes, but to a more limited extent. He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to black and white films for several years. For Rope and Under Capricorn, Hitchcock formed a production company with Sidney Bernstein called Transatlantic Pictures, which became inactive after these two unsuccessful pictures. Hitchcock continued to produce his own films for the rest of his life.
In 1950, Hitchcock filmed Stage Fright on location in the UK. For the first time, Hitchcock matched one of Warner Bros.' biggest stars, Jane Wyman, with the sultry German actress Marlene Dietrich. Hitchcock used a number of prominent British actors, including Michael Wilding, Richard Todd, and Alastair Sim. This was Hitchcock's first production for Warner Bros., which had distributed Rope and Under Capricorn, because Transatlantic Pictures was experiencing financial difficulties.
With the film Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, Hitchcock combined many elements from his preceding films. Hitchcock approached Dashiell Hammett to write the dialogue but Raymond Chandler took over, then left over disagreements with the director. Two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of the men takes this banter entirely seriously. With Farley Granger reprising some elements of his role from Rope, Strangers continued the director's interest in the narrative possibilities of blackmail and murder. Robert Walker, previously known for "boy-next-door" roles, plays the villain.
MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose client list included James Stewart, Janet Leigh and other actors who would appear in Hitchcock's films, had a significant impact in packaging and marketing Hitchcock's films beginning in the 1950s.
Three very popular films starring Grace Kelly followed. Dial M for Murder (1954) was adapted from the popular stage play by Frederick Knott. Ray Milland plays the scheming villain, an ex-tennis pro who tries to murder his unfaithful wife Grace Kelly for her money. When she kills the hired assassin in self-defense, Milland manipulates the evidence to pin the death on his wife. Her lover, Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), and Police Inspector Hubbard (John Williams), work urgently to save her from execution. Hitchcock experimented with 3D cinematography, although the film was not released in this format at first. However, it was shown in 3D in the early 1980s. The film marked a return to Technicolor productions for Hitchcock.
Hitchcock then moved to Paramount Pictures and filmed Rear Window (1954), starring James Stewart and Kelly again, as well as Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Stewart's character, a photographer based on Robert Capa, must temporarily use a wheelchair; out of boredom he begins observing his neighbours across the courtyard, and becomes convinced one of them (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife. Stewart tries to sway both his glamorous model-girlfriend (Kelly) and his policeman buddy (Wendell Corey) to his theory, and eventually succeeds. Like Lifeboat and Rope, the movie was photographed almost entirely within the confines of a small space: Stewart's tiny studio apartment overlooking the massive courtyard set. Hitchcock used closeups of Stewart's face to show his character's reactions to all he sees, "from the comic voyeurism directed at his neighbors to his helpless terror watching Kelly and Burr in the villain's apartment". It was Hitchcock's last film with Kelly. She married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, and the residents of her new land were against her making any more films.
Hitchcock successfully remade his own 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956, this time starring Stewart and Doris Day, who sang the theme song, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" (which won the Oscar for "Best Original Song" and became a big hit for Day). They play a couple whose son is kidnapped to prevent them from interfering with an assassination.
and Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958)]]
The Wrong Man (1957), Hitchcock's final film for Warner Brothers, was a low-key black-and-white production based on a real-life case of mistaken identity reported in Life Magazine in 1953. This was the only film of Hitchcock's to star Henry Fonda. Fonda plays a Stork Club musician mistaken for a liquor store thief who is arrested and tried for robbery while his wife (newcomer Vera Miles) emotionally collapses under the strain. Hitchcock told Truffaut that his lifelong fear of the police attracted him to the subject and was embedded in many scenes.
Vertigo (1958) again starred Stewart, this time with Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes. Stewart plays "Scottie", a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he is shadowing (Novak). Scottie's obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock does not opt for a happy ending. Though the film is widely considered a classic today, Vertigo met with negative reviews and poor box office receipts upon its release, and marked the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. The film is ranked second (behind Citizen Kane) in the 2002 Sight & Sound decade poll. It was premiered in the San Sebastián International Film Festival, where Hitchcock won a Silver Seashell.
By this time, Hitchcock had filmed in many areas of the United States. He followed Vertigo with three more successful films. All are also recognised as among his very best films: North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963).
In North by Northwest, Cary Grant portrays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue advertising executive who is mistaken for a government secret agent. He is hotly pursued by enemy agents across America, one of them Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who turns out to really be an American double agent.
Psycho is considered by some to be Hitchcock's most famous film. Produced on a highly constrained budget of $800,000, it was shot in black-and-white on a spare set. The unprecedented violence of the shower scene, the early demise of the heroine, the innocent lives extinguished by a disturbed murderer were all hallmarks of Hitchcock, copied in many subsequent horror films. After completing Psycho, Hitchcock moved to Universal, where he made the remainder of his films.
The Birds, inspired by a Daphne Du Maurier short story and by an actual news story about a mysterious infestation of birds in California, was Hitchcock's 49th film. He signed up Tippi Hedren as his latest blonde heroine opposite Rod Taylor. The scenes of the birds attacking included hundreds of shots mixing actual and animated sequences. The cause of the birds' attack is left unanswered, "perhaps highlighting the mystery of forces unknown".
The latter two films were particularly notable for their unconventional soundtracks, both orchestrated by Bernard Herrmann: the screeching strings played in the murder scene in Psycho exceeded the limits of the time, and The Birds dispensed completely with conventional instruments, instead using an electronically produced soundtrack and an unaccompanied song by school children (just prior to the infamous attack at the historic Bodega Bay School). These films are considered his last great films, after which it is said his career started to lose pace (although some critics, such as Robin Wood and Donald Spoto, contend that Marnie, from 1964, is first-class Hitchcock, and some have argued that Frenzy is unfairly overlooked).
Failing health took its toll on Hitchcock, reducing his output during the last two decades of his career. Hitchcock filmed two spy thrillers. The first, Torn Curtain (1966), with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, was a Cold War thriller. Torn Curtain displays the bitter end of the twelve-year collaboration between Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann was fired when Hitchcock was unsatisfied with his score. In 1969, Topaz, another Cold War-themed film (based on a Leon Uris novel), was released. Both received mixed reviews from critics.
In 1972, Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy, his last major triumph. After two only moderately successful espionage films, the plot marks a return to the murder thriller genre that he made so many films out of earlier in his career. The basic story recycles his early film The Lodger. Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a volatile barkeeper with a history of explosive anger, becomes the prime suspect for the "Necktie Murders", which are actually committed by his friend Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). This time, Hitchcock makes the victim and villain twins, rather than opposites, as in Strangers on a Train. Only one of them, however, has crossed the line to murder. Biographers have noted that Hitchcock had always pushed the limits of film censorship, often managing to fool Joseph Breen, the longtime head of Hollywood's Production Code. Many times Hitchcock slipped in subtle hints of improprieties forbidden by censorship until the mid-1960s. Yet Patrick McGilligan wrote that Breen and others often realised that Hitchcock was inserting such things and were actually amused as well as alarmed by Hitchcock's "inescapable inferences". Beginning with Torn Curtain, Hitchcock was finally able to blatantly include plot elements previously forbidden in American films and this continued for the remainder of his film career.
Family Plot (1976) was Hitchcock's last film. It related the escapades of "Madam" Blanche Tyler played by Barbara Harris, a fraudulent spiritualist, and her taxi driver lover Bruce Dern making a living from her phony powers. William Devane, Karen Black and Cathleen Nesbitt co-starred. It was the only Hitchcock film scored by John Williams.
Hitchcock died on 29 April 1980, 9:17AM. He died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure in his Bel Air, Los Angeles, California home at the age of 80, survived by his wife and their daughter. His funeral service was held at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. Hitchcock's body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
Rope (1948) was another technical challenge: a film that appears to have been shot entirely in a single take. The film was actually shot in 10 takes ranging from four and a half to 10 minutes each; a 10 minute length of film being the maximum a camera's film magazine could hold. Some transitions between reels were hidden by having a dark object fill the entire screen for a moment. Hitchcock used those points to hide the cut, and began the next take with the camera in the same place.
Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo contains a camera technique developed by Irmin Roberts that has been imitated and re-used many times by filmmakers, wherein the image appears to "stretch". This is achieved by moving the camera in the opposite direction of the camera's zoom. It has become known as the Dolly zoom or "Vertigo Effect."
Hitchcock heroines tend to be lovely, cool blondes who seem proper at first but, when aroused by passion or danger, respond in a more sensual, animal, or even criminal way. The famous victims in The Lodger are all blondes. In The 39 Steps, Hitchcock's glamorous blonde star, Madeleine Carroll, is put in handcuffs. In Marnie (1964), the title character (played by Tippi Hedren) is a kleptomaniac. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Francie (Grace Kelly) offers to help a man she believes is a burglar. In Rear Window, Lisa (Grace Kelly again) risks her life by breaking into Lars Thorwald's apartment. The best known example is in Psycho where Janet Leigh's unfortunate character steals $40,000 and is murdered by a reclusive psychopath. Hitchcock's last blonde heroine was — years after Dany Robin and her "daughter" Claude Jade in Topaz — Barbara Harris as a phony psychic turned amateur sleuth in his final film, 1976's Family Plot. In the same film, the diamond smuggler played by Karen Black could also fit that role, as she wears a long blonde wig in various scenes and becomes increasingly uncomfortable about her line of work.
Some critics and Hitchcock scholars, including Donald Spoto and Roger Ebert, agree that Vertigo represents the director's most personal and revealing film, dealing with the obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Vertigo explores more frankly and at greater length his interest in the relation between sex and death than any other film in his filmography.
Hitchcock often said that his favourite film (of his own work) was Shadow of a Doubt.
In Writing with Hitchcock, a book-length study of Hitchcock's working method with his writers, author Steven DeRosa noted that "Although he rarely did any actual 'writing', especially on his Hollywood productions, Hitchcock supervised and guided his writers through every draft, insisting on a strict attention to detail and a preference for telling the story through visual rather than verbal means. While this exasperated some writers, others admitted the director inspired them to do their very best work. Hitchcock often emphasised that he took no screen credit for the writing of his films. However, over time the work of many of his writers has been attributed solely to Hitchcock’s creative genius, a misconception he rarely went out of his way to correct. Notwithstanding his technical brilliance as a director, Hitchcock relied on his writers a great deal."
However, this view of Hitchcock as a director who relied more on pre-production than on the actual production itself has been challenged by the book Hitchcock At Work, written by Bill Krohn, the American correspondent of Cahiers du cinéma. Krohn, after investigating several script revisions, notes to other production personnel written by or to Hitchcock alongside inspection of storyboards, and other production material, has observed that Hitchcock's work often deviated from how the screenplay was written or how the film was originally envisioned. He noted that the myth of storyboards in relation to Hitchcock, often regurgitated by generations of commentators on his movies was to a great degree perpetuated by Hitchcock himself or the publicity arm of the studios. A great example would be the celebrated crop spraying sequence of North by Northwest which was not storyboarded at all. After the scene was filmed, the publicity department asked Hitchcock to make storyboards to promote the film and Hitchcock in turn hired an artist to match the scenes in detail.
Even on the occasions when storyboards were made, the scene which was shot did differ from it significantly. Krohn's extensive analysis of the production of Hitchcock classics like Notorious reveals that Hitchcock was flexible enough to change a film's conception during its production. Another example Krohn notes is the American remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, whose shooting schedule commenced without a finished script and moreover went over schedule, something which, as Krohn notes, was not an uncommon occurrence on many of Hitchcock's films, including Strangers on a Train and Topaz. While Hitchcock did do a great deal of preparation for all his movies, he was fully cognizant that the actual film-making process often deviated from the best laid plans and was flexible to adapt to the changes and needs of production as his films were not free from the normal hassles faced and common routines utilised during many other film productions.
Krohn's work also sheds light on Hitchcock's practice of generally shooting in chronological order, a practice which he notes often sent many of his films over budget and over schedule and, more importantly, differed from the standard operating procedure of Hollywood in the Studio System Era. Equally important is Hitchcock's tendency to shoot alternate takes of scenes. This differed from coverage in that the films weren't necessarily shot from varying angles so as to give the editor options to shape the film how he/she chooses (often under the producer's aegis). Rather they represented Hitchcock's tendency of giving himself options in the editing room, where he would provide advice to his editors after viewing a rough cut of the work. According to Krohn, this and a great deal of other information revealed through his research of Hitchcock's personal papers, script revisions and the like refute the notion of Hitchcock as a director who was always in control of his films, whose vision of his films did not change during production, which Krohn notes has remained the central long-standing myth of Alfred Hitchcock.
His fastidiousness and attention to detail also found its way into each film poster for his films. Hitchcock preferred to work with the best talent of his day—film poster designers such as Bill Gold and Saul Bass—and kept them busy with countless rounds of revision until he felt that the single image of the poster accurately represented his entire film.
For Hitchcock, the actors, like the props, were part of the film's setting, as he said to Truffaut:
In my opinion, the chief requisite for an actor is the ability to do nothing well, which is by no means as easy as it sounds. He should be willing to be utilized and wholly integrated into the picture by the director and the camera. He must allow the camera to determine the proper emphasis and the most effective dramatic highlights.
Regarding Hitchcock's sometimes less than pleasant relationship with actors, there was a persistent rumor that he had said that actors were cattle. Hitchcock addressed this story in his interview with Francois Truffaut:
I'm not quite sure in what context I might have made such a statement. It may have been made...when we used actors who were simultaneously performing in stage plays. When they had a matinee, and I suspected they were allowing themselves plenty of time for a very leisurely lunch. And this meant that we had to shoot our scenes at breakneck speed so that the actors could get out on time. I couldn't help feeling that if they'd been really conscientious, they'd have swallowed their sandwich in the cab, on the way to the theater, and get there in time to put on their make-up and go on stage. I had no use for that kind of actor.
Carole Lombard, tweaking Hitchcock and drumming up a little publicity, brought some cows along with her when she reported to the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Sixteen films directed by Hitchcock earned Oscar nominations, though only six of those films earned Hitchcock himself a nomination. The total number of Oscar nominations (including winners) earned by films he directed is fifty. Four of those films earned Best Picture nominations. Spellbound won the Academy Award for Best Original Music Score. Actor Joan Fontaine won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Suspicion, the only Academy Award–winning performance under Hitchcock's direction.
Six of Hitchcock's films are in the National Film Registry: Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, and Psycho; all but Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious were also in 1998's AFI's 100 best American films and the AFI's 2007 update. In 2008, four of Hitchcock's films were named among the ten best mystery films of all time in the AFI's 10 Top 10. Those films are Vertigo (at No. 1); Rear Window (No. 3); North by Northwest (No. 7); and Dial M for Murder (No. 9).
Alfred Hitchcock received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979.
Hitchcock was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1980 New Year's Honours. Although he had adopted American citizenship in 1956, he was entitled to use the title "Sir" because he had remained a British subject. Hitchcock died just four months later, on 29 April, before he could be formally invested.
Hitchcock began his directing career in the United Kingdom in 1922. From 1939 onward, he worked primarily in the United States. In September 1940, Hitchcock had purchased a mountaintop estate for the sum of $40,000. Known as the 1870 Cornwall Ranch or 'Heart o' the Mountain', the property was perched high above Scotts Valley, California, at the end of Canham Road. The Hitchcocks resided there from 1940 to 1972. The Hitchcocks became close friends with the parents of Joan Fontaine, after she starred in his film, Rebecca. in Los Angeles, just across from the Bel Air Country Club.
Rebecca was the only Hitchcock film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture for lifetime achievement. He never won an Academy Award for direction of a film.
The title-theme of the show pictured a minimalist caricature of Hitchcock's profile (he drew it himself; it is composed of only nine strokes) which his real silhouette then filled. His introductions before the stories in his program always included some sort of wry humor, such as the description of a recent multi-person execution hampered by having only one electric chair, while two are now shown with a sign "Two chairs--no waiting!" He directed a few episodes of the TV series himself, and he upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on using his TV production crew to produce his motion picture Psycho. In the late 1980s, a new version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents was produced for television, making use of Hitchcock's original introductions in a colorised form.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents was parodied by Friz Freleng's 1961 cartoon The Last Hungry Cat, which contains a plot similar to Blackmail.
"Hitch" used a curious little tune by the French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893), the composer of the 1859 opera Faust, as the theme "song" for his television programs, after it was suggested to him by composer Bernard Herrmann. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra included the piece, Funeral March of a Marionette, in one of their extended play 45 rpm discs for RCA Victor during the 1950s.
Hitchcock appears as a character in the popular juvenile detective book series, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. The long-running detective series was created by Robert Arthur, who wrote the first several books, although other authors took over after he left the series. The Three Investigators—Jupiter Jones, Bob Andrews and Peter Crenshaw—were amateur detectives, slightly younger than the Hardy Boys. In the introduction to each book, "Alfred Hitchcock" introduces the mystery, and he sometimes refers a case to the boys to solve. At the end of each book, the boys report to Hitchcock, and sometimes give him a memento of their case.
When the real Hitchcock died, the fictional Hitchcock in the Three Investigators books was replaced by a retired detective named Hector Sebastian. At this time, the series title was changed from Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators to The Three Investigators.
At the height of Hitchcock's success, he was also asked to introduce a set of books with his name attached. The series was a collection of short stories by popular short-story writers, primarily focused on suspense and thrillers. These titles included Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum, Alfred Hitchcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery, Alfred Hitchcock's A Hangman's Dozen and Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful. Hitchcock himself was not actually involved in the reading, reviewing, editing or selection of the short stories; in fact, even his introductions were ghost-written. The entire extent of his involvement with the project was to lend his name and collect a check.
Some notable writers whose works were used in the collection include Shirley Jackson (Strangers in Town, The Lottery), T.H. White (The Once and Future King), Robert Bloch, H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and the creator of The Three Investigators, Robert Arthur.
Hitchcock also wrote a mystery story for Look magazine in 1943, "The Murder of Monty Woolley". This was a sequence of captioned photographs inviting the reader to inspect the pictures for clues to the murderer's identity; Hitchcock cast the performers as themselves; such as Woolley, Doris Merrick and make up man Guy Pearce, whom Hitchcock identified, in the last photo, as the murderer. The article was reprinted in Games Magazine in November/December 1980.
Category:19th-century English people Category:1899 births Category:1980 deaths Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American people of English descent Category:American Roman Catholics Category:American television directors Category:Deaths from renal failure Category:English film directors Category:English film producers Category:English immigrants to the United States Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English television directors Category:English-language film directors Category:Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:Old Ignatians Category:People from Leytonstone
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After acting school (Conservatoire des arts cinématographiques) he was discovered by Jean Cocteau and appeared in a wartime production of Les Parents terribles ("The Terrible Parents"). During World War II, he left Paris to join the French resistance.
His first feature film came in 1946 with his role in Les portes de la nuit ("The Doors of the Night"). He later went on to perform in 80 films including Casque d'or, Les Misérables (1958),Tutti a casa, Le Doulos, Il Gattopardo, La terrazza, The Pianist (1998).
In spite of never quite reaching the peak with his acting career, he did triumph in the theatre in 1959 with his performance in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les Séquestrés d'Altona. In the meantime, though, in 1965 he began a second career, that of a singer (at the age of 43), with the help of Simone Signoret and her husband Yves Montand and later with great assistance of the French diva Barbara. Reggiani became one of the most acclaimed performers of French "Chanson" ("song") and although he was in his 40s, his bad-boy rugged image made him popular with both young and older listeners.
His best known songs include Les loups sont entrés dans Paris ("The Wolves Have Entered Paris") and Sarah (La femme qui est dans mon lit) ("The Woman Who Is In My Bed"), the latter written by Georges Moustaki. However, one of his regular songwriters throughout his career was Boris Vian (Le Déserteur, Arthur où t'as mis le corps, La Java des bombes atomiques). His new young fans identified with his left-wing ideals and antimilitarism, most notably during the 1968 student revolts in France. With age he became more and more acclaimed as one of the best interpreters of the French chanson also bringing the poetry of Rimbaud, Apollinaire and Prévert closer to his audience. In 1995, he made a comeback to the singing stage, giving a few concerts despite his deteriorated health and personal distress, the last one being held as late as in the year of his death, in spring of 2004.
In later life he became a painter and gave a number of exhibitions of his artwork.
Serge Reggiani died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 82, one day after the death of another well known French singer Sacha Distel. He is interred in Montparnasse Cemetery.
Category:French stage actors Category:French film actors Category:French male singers Category:French painters Category:French people of Italian descent Category:Italian immigrants to France Category:Italian film actors Category:1922 births Category:2004 deaths Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:People from Reggio Emilia Category:Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery
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Name | Robin Trower |
---|---|
Background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
Birth name | Robin Leonard Trower |
Born | March 09, 1945Catford, South East London, England |
Occupation | Musician, songwriter, bandleader |
Instrument | Guitar |
Genre | Rock, blues, blues-rock |
Years active | 1962-present |
Label | Chrysalis, Atlantic |
Associated acts | Procol Harum, The Paramounts |
Url | www.trowerpower.com |
Notable instruments | Signature Model Stratocaster |
Robin Trower (born Robin Leonard Trower, 9 March 1945, Catford, South East London, England) is an English rock guitarist who achieved success with Procol Harum during the 1960s, and then again as the bandleader of his own power trio.
Before launching his own eponymous band, he joined singer Frankie Miller, bass player James Dewar, and former Jethro Tull drummer Clive Bunker to form the short-lived combo Jude. This outfit did not record and soon split up.
Trower retained as his bassist Dewar, who took on lead vocals as well, and recruited drummer Reg Isidore (later replaced by Bill Lordan) to form the Robin Trower Band in 1973. Other features included a custom C-shaped maple neck featuring a large headstock with a Bullet truss-rod system, locking machine heads and a maple fingerboard with narrow-spaced abalone dot position inlays and 21 frets. The Strats he plays live are an exact model of his signature guitar, which is entirely unmodified. During live performances and most of his albums, his guitar is tuned a full step down, to a DGCFAD tuning.
Trower uses between one and three 100-Watt Marshall heads with four to six cabinets on stage. While he usually uses two JCM 800s and a JCM 900, he also links 100-Watt Marshall Plexi heads. In studio sessions, Trower uses a mix of amplifiers, such as a Fender Blues Junior and Cornell Plexi Amplifers models to acquire different tonality. Recently, Trower has been using Marshall Vintage Modern 2466 heads live.
He has recently been using Fulltone pedals and effects. He favors the OCD, Distortion Pro, Fat Boost, CLYDE Deluxe Wah, Deja Vibe 2, Soul-Bender, and a BOSS Chromatic Tuner. He runs his Deja Vibe into his distortion pedal to get his famous tone. He was given his own signature Fulltone Robin Trower Overdrive in late 2008.
For his 2009 tour Robin was using his Fender Custom Shop Signature Stratocaster into a Fulltone DejaVibe 2, Fulltone Wahfull, Fulltone Clyde Standard Wah, Fulltone Full Drive, Fulltone Robin Trower Overdrive and Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner into two Marshall Vintage Modern 2466 heads.
Category:1945 births Category:Procol Harum members Category:Living people Category:English rock musicians Category:English guitarists Category:People from Catford Category:Lead guitarists
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Name | Robin Hull |
---|---|
Born | August 16, 1974 |
Birthplace | England |
Nationality | |
Professional | 1992–2008 |
High ranking | 31 |
Best finish | Quarter-finals (twice) |
Hull was a solid -builder and compiled 111 competitive during his career — as of the end of the 2007/2008 season, this is the highest amount for a player who has never featured in the elite top 16. However, he once missed the final during a 147 attempt.
A potentially-fatal viral infection kept him out of much of the 2003/2004 season. He was forced to pull out of qualifying for the 2007 World Championship, due to an irregular heartbeat thought to be linked to his past illness. After a similar problem in 2008, he decided to retire from professional competition.
Category:1974 births Category:Living people Category:Finnish snooker players
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Through 1987 he participated in Formula 3 and Formula 3000, although he was never a top 10 championship finisher in either. In 1992 he joined the March F1 team as a pay driver, getting a ninth place at the Hungarian Grand Prix, but only qualifying 4 more times before he ran out of money and was replaced by Emanuele Naspetti. Two years later he became a member of the uncompetitive Pacific Grand Prix team, where he only qualified for two races and was usually behind team-mate Bertrand Gachot. Thereafter he concentrated on GT racing, at the wheel of a Chrysler Viper GTS-R. He started his own team, Paul Belmondo Racing which raced in the FIA GT Championship and Le Mans Endurance Series championship before folding in 2007.
Category:1963 births Category:Living people Category:People from Boulogne-Billancourt Category:French racecar drivers Category:French Formula One drivers Category:French people of Italian descent Category:24 Hours of Le Mans drivers Category:International Formula 3000 drivers Category:Le Mans Series drivers
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Name | John Cleese |
---|---|
Caption | Cleese in 2008 |
Birth name | John Marwood Cleese |
Birth date | October 27, 1939 |
Birth place | Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England |
Medium | Film, television, radio,stand-up comedy |
Genre | Surreal comedy,dark comedy,physical comedy |
Active | 1961–present |
Influences | Stephen Leacock, Spike Milligan, The Goons, William Shakespeare |
Spouse | (divorced) (divorced) (divorced) |
Domesticpartner | Barbie Orr (2008–2009)Jennifer Wade (2010–present) |
Website | TheJohnCleese.com |
John Marwood Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, writer and film producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and as a scriptwriter on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s he became a member of Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films: And Now for Something Completely Different, Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life.
In the mid 1970s, Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth, co-wrote and starred in the British sitcom Fawlty Towers. Later, he co-starred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and former Python colleague Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. He also starred in Clockwise, and has appeared in many other films, including two James Bond films, two Harry Potter films, and three Shrek films.
With Yes Minister writer Antony Jay he co-founded the production company Video Arts, responsible for making entertaining training films.
Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School where he was a star pupil, receiving a prize for English studies and doing well at sport including cricket and boxing. At 13 he received an exhibition to Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol. He was tall as a child and was well over 6 ft when he arrived there. While at the school he is said to have defaced the school grounds for a prank by painting footprints to suggest that the school's statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket for the first team, and after initial indifference he did well academically, passing 8 O levels and 3 A-Levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry.
After leaving school, he went back to his prep school to teach science before taking up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied Law and joined the Cambridge Footlights Revue. There he met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was Registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962, as well as being one of the cast members for the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take!
Along with Gilliam's animations, Cleese's work with Chapman provided Python with its darkest and angriest moments, and many of his characters display the seething suppressed rage that later characterised his portrayal of Basil Fawlty.
Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman actually wrote together—in the same room; Cleese claims that their writing partnership involved him sitting with pen and paper, doing most of the work, while Chapman sat back, not speaking for long periods, then suddenly coming out with an idea that often elevated the sketch to a different level. A classic example of this is the "Dead Parrot" sketch, envisaged by Cleese as a satire on poor customer service, which was originally to have involved a broken toaster, and later a broken car (this version was actually performed and broadcast, on the pre-Python special How To Irritate People). It was Chapman's suggestion to change the faulty item into a dead parrot, and he also suggested that the parrot be specifically a Norwegian Blue, giving the sketch a surreal air which made it far more memorable.
Their humour often involved ordinary people in ordinary situations behaving absurdly for no obvious reason. Like Chapman, Cleese's poker face, clipped middle-class accent and imposing height allowed him to appear convincing as a variety of authority figures, such as policemen, detectives, Nazi officers, or government officials—which he would then proceed to undermine. Most famously, in the "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch (actually written by Palin and Jones), Cleese exploits his stature as the crane-legged civil servant performing a grotesquely elaborate walk to his office.
Chapman and Cleese also specialised in sketches where two characters would conduct highly articulate arguments over completely arbitrary subjects, such as in the "cheese shop", the "dead parrot" sketch and "The Argument Sketch", where Cleese plays a stone-faced bureaucrat employed to sit behind a desk and engage people in pointless, trivial bickering. All of these roles were opposite Palin (who Cleese often claims is his favourite Python to work with)—the comic contrast between the towering Cleese's crazed aggression and the shorter Palin's shuffling inoffensiveness is a common feature in the series. Occasionally, the typical Cleese-Palin dynamic is reversed, as in "Fish Licence", wherein Palin plays the bureaucrat with whom Cleese is trying to work.
Though the programme lasted four series, by the start of series 3, Cleese was growing tired of dealing with Chapman's alcoholism. According to Gilliam, Cleese was the "most Cambridge" of the Cambridge-educated members of the group (Cleese, Chapman and Idle), by which Gilliam meant that Cleese was the tallest (6' 5") and most aggressive of the whole group. He felt, too, that the show's scripts had declined in quality. For these reasons, he became restless and decided to move on. Though he stayed for the third series, he officially left the group before the fourth season. Despite this, he remained friendly with the group, and all six began writing Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Cleese received a credit on episodes of the fourth series which used material from these sessions, and even makes a brief appearance in one episode as the voice of a cartoon in the "Hamlet" episode, though he was officially unconnected with the fourth series. Cleese returned to the troupe to co-write and co-star in the Monty Python films Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python's Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and participated in various live performances over the years.
Cleese achieved greater prominence in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with his wife Connie Booth. The series won three BAFTA awards when produced and in 2000, it topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. The series also featured Prunella Scales as Basil's acerbic wife Sybil, Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter Manuel ("...he's from Barcelona"), and Booth as waitress Polly, the series' voice of sanity. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person, Donald Sinclair, whom he had encountered in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming inserts for their television series. Reportedly, Cleese was inspired by Sinclair's mantra "I could run this hotel just fine, if it weren't for the guests." He later described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met," although Sinclair's widow has said her husband was totally misrepresented in the series. During the Pythons' stay, Sinclair allegedly threw Idle's briefcase out of the hotel "in case it contained a bomb," complained about Gilliam's "American" table manners, and threw a bus timetable at another guest after they dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.
The first series was screened from 19 September 1975 on BBC 2, initially to poor reviews, but gained momentum when repeated on BBC 1 the following year. Despite this, a second series did not air until 1979, by which time Cleese's marriage to Booth had ended, but they revived their collaboration for the second series. Fawlty Towers consisted of only twelve episodes; Cleese and Booth both maintain that this was to avoid compromising the quality of the series.
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In December 1977, Cleese appeared as a guest star on The Muppet Show. Cleese was a fan of the show, and co-wrote much of the episode. He appears in a "Pigs in Space" segment as a pirate trying to hijack the spaceship Swinetrek, and also helps Gonzo restore his arms to "normal" size after Gonzo's cannonball catching act goes wrong. During the show's closing number, Cleese refuses to sing the famous show tune from Man of La Mancha, "The Impossible Dream". Kermit The Frog apologises and the curtain re-opens with Cleese now costumed as a Viking trying some Wagnerian opera as part of a duet with Sweetums. Once again, Cleese protests to Kermit, and gives the frog one more chance. This time, as pictured opposite this text, he is costumed as a Mexican maraca soloist. He has finally had enough and protests that he is leaving the show, saying "You were supposed to be my host. How can you do this to me? Kermit – I am your guest!". The cast joins in with their parody of "The Impossible Dream", singing "This is your guest, to follow that star...". During the crowd's applause that follows the song, he pretends to strangle Kermit until he realises the crowd loves him and accepts the accolades. During the show's finale, as Kermit thanks him, he shows up with a fictional album, his own new vocal record John Cleese: A Man & His Music, and encourages everyone to buy a copy.
This would not be Cleese's final appearance with The Muppets. In their 1981 movie The Great Muppet Caper, Cleese does a cameo appearance as Neville, a local homeowner. As part of the appearance, Miss Piggy borrows his house as a way to impress Kermit The Frog.
Cleese won the TV Times award for Funniest Man On TV – 1978 / 1979.
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Timed with the 1987 UK elections, he appeared in a video promoting proportional representation.
In 1988, he wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda, as the lead, Archie Leach, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin. Wanda was a commercial and critical success, and Cleese was nominated for an Academy Award for his script. Cynthia Cleese starred as Leach's daughter.
Chapman was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1989; Cleese, Michael Palin, Peter Cook and Chapman's partner David Sherlock, witnessed Chapman's passing. Chapman's death occurred one day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of Flying Circus, with Jones commenting, "the worst case of party-pooping in all history." Cleese's eulogy at Chapman's memorial service—in which he "became the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'fuck'"—has since become legendary.
Cleese would later play a supporting role in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein alongside Branagh himself and Robert De Niro. He also produced and acted in a number of successful business training films, including Meetings, Bloody Meetings and More Bloody Meetings. These were produced by his company Video Arts.
With Robin Skynner, the group analyst and family therapist, Cleese wrote two books on relationships: Families and How to Survive Them, and Life and How to Survive It. The books are presented as a dialogue between Skynner and Cleese.
In 1996, Cleese declined the British honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). The follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures—which again starred Cleese alongside Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Palin—was also released that year, but was greeted with mixed reception by critics and audiences. Cleese has since often stated that making the second movie had been a mistake. When asked by his friend, director and restaurant critic Michael Winner, what he would do differently if he could live his life again, Cleese responded, "I wouldn’t have married Alyce Faye Eichelberger and I wouldn’t have made Fierce Creatures."
In 1999, Cleese appeared in the James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough as Q's assistant, referred to by Bond as "R". In 2002, when Cleese reprised his role in Die Another Day, the character was promoted, making Cleese the new quartermaster (Q) of MI6. In 2004, Cleese was featured as Q in the video game , featuring his likeness and voice. Cleese did not appear in the subsequent Bond films, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.
In 2001, Cleese was cast in the comedy Rat Race as the eccentric hotel owner Donald P. Sinclair.
In a 2005 poll of comedians and comedy insiders The Comedian's Comedian, Cleese was voted second only to Peter Cook. Also in 2005, a long-standing piece of Internet humour, "The Revocation of Independence of the United States", was wrongly attributed to Cleese.
In 2006, Cleese hosted a television special of football’s greatest kicks, goals, saves, bloopers, plays and penalties, as well as football’s influence on culture (including the famous Monty Python sketch, “Philosophy Football”), featuring interviews with pop culture icons Dave Stewart, Dennis Hopper and Henry Kissinger, as well as football greats including Pelé, Mia Hamm and Thierry Henry. The Art of Soccer with John Cleese was released in North America on DVD in January 2009 by BFS Entertainment & Multimedia.
Cleese recently lent his voice to the BioWare video game Jade Empire. His role was that of an "outlander" named Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard, stranded in the Imperial City of the Jade Empire. His character is essentially a British colonialist stereotype who refers to the people of the Jade Empire as savages in need of enlightenment. His armour has the design of a fork stuck in a piece of cheese.
He also had a cameo appearance in the computer game Starship Titanic as "The Bomb" (credited as "Kim Bread"), designed by Douglas Adams. When the bomb is activated it tells the player that "The ship is now armed and preparing to explode. This will be a fairly large explosion, so you'd best keep back about ". When the player tries to disarm the bomb, it says "Well, you can try that, but it won't work because nobody likes a smart-arse!"
In 2002, Cleese made a cameo appearance in the movie The Adventures of Pluto Nash, where he played "James", a computerised chauffeur of a hover car stolen by the title character (played by Eddie Murphy). The vehicle is subsequently destroyed in a chase, leaving the chauffeur stranded in a remote place on the moon.
In 2003, Cleese also appeared as Lyle Finster on the US sitcom Will & Grace. His character's daughter, Lorraine, was played by Minnie Driver. In the series, Lyle Finster briefly marries Karen Walker (Megan Mullally).
In 2004, Cleese was credited as co-writer of a DC Comics graphic novel entitled . Part of DC's "Elseworlds" line of imaginary stories, True Brit, mostly written by Kim Howard Johnson, suggests what might have happened had Superman's rocket ship landed in Britain, not America.
From 10 November to 9 December 2005, Cleese toured New Zealand with his stage show, John Cleese—His Life, Times and Current Medical Problems. Cleese described it as "a one-man show with several people in it, which pushes the envelope of acceptable behaviour in new and disgusting ways." The show was developed in New York with William Goldman and includes Cleese's daughter Camilla as a writer and actor (the shows were directed by Australian Bille Brown). His assistant of many years, Garry Scott-Irvine, also appeared, and was listed as a co-producer. It then played in universities in California and Arizona from 10 January to 25 March 2006 under the title "Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot". His voice can be downloaded for directional guidance purposes as a downloadable option on some personal GPS-navigation device models by company TomTom.
In June 2006, while promoting a football (soccer) song in which he was featured, entitled Don't Mention the World Cup, Cleese appears to have claimed that he decided to retire from performing in sitcoms, instead opting to writing a book on the history of comedy and to tutor young comedians. This was an erroneous story, the result of an interview with The Times of London (the piece was not fact checked before printing).
In 2007, Cleese appeared in ads for Titleist as a golf course designer named "Ian MacCallister", who represents "Golf Designers Against Distance".
In 2007, he started filming the sequel to The Pink Panther, titled The Pink Panther 2 with Steve Martin and Aishwarya Rai.
On 27 September 2007, The Podcast Network announced it had signed a deal with Cleese to produce a series of video podcasts called HEADCAST to be published on TPN's website. Cleese released the first episode of this series in April 2008 on his own website, headcast.co.uk
In 2008, Cleese collaborated with Los Angeles Guitar Quartet member William Kanengiser on the text to the performance piece "The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha". Cleese, as narrator, and the LAGQ premiered the work in Santa Barbara.
According to recent reports, Cleese is currently working on a musical version of A Fish Called Wanda with his daughter Camilla. He also said that he is working on a new film screenplay for the first time since 1996's Fierce Creatures. Cleese collaborates on it with writer Lisa Hogan, under the current working title "A Taxing Time". According to him, it is "about the lengths to which people will go to avoid tax. [...] It's based on what happened to me when I cashed in my UK pension and moved to Santa Barbara."
At the end of March 2009, Cleese published his first article as 'Contributing Editor' to The Spectator: "The real reason I had to join The Spectator".
On 6 May 2009, he appeared on The Paul O'Grady Show. Cleese has also hosted comedy galas at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2006, and again in 2009. He had to cancel the 2009 appearance due to prostatitis, but hosted it a few days later.
Towards the end of 2009 and into 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of television adverts for the Norwegian electric goods shop chain, Elkjøp.
In March 2010 it was announced that John Cleese would be playing Jasper in the video game "Fable III".
In 2009 and 2010, Cleese toured Scandinavia and the US with his Alimony Tour Year One and Year Two. In May 2010, it was announced that this tour would extend to the UK (his first tour in UK), set for May 2011 – The show is dubbed the 'Alimony Tour' in reference to the financial implications of Cleese's recent divorce. The UK tour starts in Cambridge on 3 May visiting Birmingham, Salford, Liverpool, Oxford, Leeds, Edinburgh and finishing in Bristol.
Cleese remarried in 1981, to American actress Barbara Trentham. Their daughter Camilla, Cleese's second child, was born in 1984. He and Trentham divorced in 1990. It was also during this time that Cleese moved from the United Kingdom to California.
He had begun to date American comedienne Barbie Orr in November 2008 but they split up in January 2009.
In April 2010, Cleese revealed on The Graham Norton Show on BBC One that he had started a new relationship with a woman 31 years his junior, Jennifer Wade.
He is a vegetarian.
During the disruption caused by the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 Cleese became stranded in Oslo and decided to take a taxi to Brussels. The 1500 km journey cost £3,300 and was completed with the help of three drivers who took shifts in driving Cleese to his destination where he planned to take a Eurostar passenger train to the UK.
Cleese expressed support for Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, donating US$2,300 to his campaign and offering his services as a speech writer. He also criticised Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin—saying that "Michael Palin is no longer the funniest Palin"— and wrote a satirical poem about Fox News commentator Sean Hannity for Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
|- |2010 | Spud | The Guv | Awaiting release |- | 2010 | | Ghost | Voice Only |- | 2010 | Shrek Forever After | King Harold | Voice Only |- | 2011 | Happy Feet 2 | Himself | Voice Onlypost-production |- |2011 |Winnie the Pooh |Narrator |Voice Only |- |}
Category:Alumni of Downing College, Cambridge Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Actor BAFTA Award winners Category:English expatriates in the United States Category:Cornell University faculty Category:Emmy Award winners Category:English comedians Category:English comedy writers Category:English film actors Category:English musical theatre actors Category:English radio actors Category:English radio writers Category:English stage actors Category:English television actors Category:English television personalities Category:English television writers Category:English vegetarians Category:English voice actors Category:Monty Python members Category:Old Cliftonians Category:People from Weston-super-Mare Category:Rectors of the University of St Andrews Category:1939 births Category:Living people
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Caption | at the San Sebastian International Film Festival (2006) |
---|---|
Birth date | January 23, 1928 |
Birth place | Paris, France |
Yearsactive | 1947–present |
Occupation | Actress, screenwriter, film director |
Spouse | Jean-Louis Richard (1949–separated 1951; divorced 1964) 1 son Jérôme Moreau's father was Catholic and her mother, originally a Protestant, converted to Catholicism upon marriage. When a young girl, "the family moved south to Vichy, spending vacations at the ancestral village of Mazirat, a town of 30 houses in a valley in the Allier. 'It was wonderful there,' Jeanne says. 'Every tombstone in the cemetery was for a Moreau.'" During the war, the family was split and Moreau lived with her mother in Paris. Moreau ultimately lost interest in school at age 16 and, after attending Jean Anouilh's Antigone, found her calling as an actor. She later studied at the Conservatoire de Paris. Her parents separated permanently while Moreau was at the conservatory and her mother, "after 24 difficult years in France, returned to England with Jeanne's younger sister, Michelle." |
1992 || césar awards || best actress || the old lady who walked in the sea || style | "background: #ddffdd" | Won |
1987 || césar awards || best actress || le paltoquet || style | "background: #ffdddd" | Nominated |
1988 || césar awards || best actress || le miraculé || style | "background: #ffdddd" | Nominated |
1988 || molière awards || best actress || le récit de la servante zerline || style | "background: #ddffdd" | Won |
Name | Moreau, Jeanne |
Short description | Actress, screenwriter, film director |
Date of birth | 23 January 1928 |
Place of birth | Paris, France |
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Name | Johann Paul Friedrich Richter |
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Pseudonym | Jean Paul |
Birthdate | March 21, 1763 |
Birthplace | Wunsiedel, Germany |
Deathdate | November 14, 1825 |
Deathplace | Bayreuth, Germany |
Occupation | novelist |
Nationality | German |
Period | 1783-1825 |
Genre | humour |
Subject | education, politics |
Jean Paul (21 March 1763 – 14 November 1825), born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.
Jean Paul began his career as a man of letters with Grönländische Prozesse ("Greenland Lawsuits", published anonymously in Berlin) and Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren ("Selections from the Devil's Papers", signed J. P. F. Hasus), the former of which was issued in 1783-84, the latter in 1789. These works were not received with much favour, and in later life Richter himself had little sympathy for their satirical tone. A spiritual crisis he suffered on 15 November 1790, in which he had a vision of his own death, altered his outlook profoundly. His next book, Die unsichtbare Loge ("The Invisible Lodge"), a romance published in 1793 under the pen-name Jean Paul (in honour of Jean Jacques Rousseau), had all the qualities that were soon to make him famous, and its power was immediately recognized by some of the best critics of the day.
Encouraged by the reception of Die unsichtbare Loge, Richter composed a number of books in rapid succession: Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterleins Maria Wutz in Auenthal ("Life of the Cheerful Schoolmaster Maria Wutz", 1793), the best-selling Hesperus (1795), which made him famous, Biographische Belustigungen unter der Gehirnschale einer Riesin ("Biographical Recreations under the Brainpan of a Giantess", 1796), Leben des Quintus Fixlein ("Life of Quintus Fixlein", 1796), Der Jubelsenior ("The Parson in Jubilee", 1797), and Das Kampaner Tal ("The Valley of Campan", 1797). Also among these was the novel Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs ("Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man's Lawyer") in 1796-97. The book's slightly supernatural theme, involving a Doppelgänger and pseudocide, stirred some controversy over its interpretation of the Resurrection, but these criticisms served only to draw awareness to the author. This series of writings assured Richter a place in German literature, and during the rest of his life every work he produced was welcomed by a wide circle of admirers.
After his mother's death in 1797, Richter went to Leipzig, and in the following year to Weimar, where he started work on his most ambitious novel, Titan, published between 1801-02. Richter became friends with such Weimar notables as Herder, by whom he was warmly appreciated, but despite their close proximity, Richter never become close to Goethe and Schiller, both of whom found his literary methods repugnant; but in Weimar, as elsewhere, his remarkable conversational powers and his genial manners made him a favorite in general society. The English writers Thomas Carlyle and Thomas de Quincy took an interest in Jean Paul's work.
In 1801 he married Caroline Meyer, whom he had met in Berlin the year before. They lived first at Meiningen, then at Coburg; and finally, in 1804, they settled at Bayreuth. Here Richter spent a quiet, simple and happy life, constantly occupied with his work as a writer. In 1808 he was fortunately delivered from anxiety about outward necessities by Prince Primate Karl Theodor von Dalberg, who gave him an annual pension of 1,000 florins which was later continued by the king of Bavaria.
Jean Paul's Titan was followed by Flegeljahre ("The Awkward Age", 1804-5). His later imaginative works were Dr Katzenbergers Badereise ("Dr Katzenberger's Trip to the Medicinal Springs", 1809), Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz ("Army Chaplain Schmelzle's Voyage to Flätz", 1809), Leben Fibels ("Life of Fibel", 1812), and Der Komet, oder Nikolaus Marggraf ("The Comet, or, Nikolaus Markgraf", 1820-22). In Vorschule der Aesthetik ("Introduction to Aesthetics", 1804) he expounded his ideas on art; he discussed the principles of education in Levana, oder Erziehungslehre ("Levana, or, Pedagogy", 1807); and the opinions suggested by current events he set forth in Friedenspredigt ("Peace Sermon", 1808), Dämmerungen für Deutschland ("Twilights for Germany", 1809), Mars und Phöbus Thronwechsel im Jahre 1814 ("Mars and Phoebus Exchange Thrones in the Year 1814", 1814), and Politische Fastenpredigten ("Political Lenten Sermons", 1817). In his last years he began Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben ("The Truth from Jean Paul's Life"), to which additions from his papers and other sources were made after his death by C. Otto and E. Förster.
Also during this time he supported the younger writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who long counted Richter among his influences. Richter wrote the preface to Fantasy Pieces, a collection of Hoffmann's short stories published in 1814.
In September 1821 Jean Paul lost his only son, Max, a youth of the highest promise; and he never quite recovered from this shock. He lost his sight in 1824, and died of dropsy at Bayreuth, on 14 November 1825.
But in working out his conceptions, Jean Paul found it appropriate to express any powerful feeling by which he might happen to be moved. He made it his style to use seemingly out-of-the-way facts or psychological notions which occurred to him. Hence every one of his works is irregular in structure and his style lacks directness, though never grace. His imagination was one of extraordinary fertility, and he had a surprising power of suggesting great thoughts by means of the simplest incidents and relations.
The love of nature was one of Jean Paul's deepest pleasures; his expressions of religious feelings are also marked by a truly poetic spirit, for to him visible things were but the symbols of the invisible, and in the unseen realities alone he found elements which seemed to him to give significance and dignity to human life. His humour, the most distinctive of his qualities, cannot be dissociated from the other characteristics of his writings. It mingled with all his thoughts, and to some extent determined the form in which he embodied even his most serious reflections. That it is sometimes extravagant and grotesque cannot be disputed, but it is never harsh nor vulgar, and generally it springs naturally from the perception of the incongruity between ordinary facts and ideal laws.
Jean Paul's personality was deep and many-sided; with all his willfulness and eccentricity he was a man of a pure and sensitive spirit, with a passionate scorn for pretence and an ardent enthusiasm for truth and goodness.
The last scene of Jean Paul's Flegeljahre was the inspiration behind Robert Schumann's composition "Papillons" Op. 2.
See further:
Category:1763 births Category:1825 deaths Category:People from the District of Wunsiedel Category:German novelists Category:German short story writers Category:People from the Principality of Bayreuth Category:Deaths from edema Category:German opinion journalists Category:Blind people
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Name | Jean Marais |
---|---|
Caption | photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1947 |
Birth name | Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais |
Birth date | December 11, 1913 |
Birth place | Cherbourg, France |
Death date | |
Death place | Cannes, France |
Occupation | Actor, director |
Years active | 1933 - 1996 |
Spouse | Mila Parély (1942-1944) |
Partner | Jean Cocteau (1937-1963) |
In the 1950s, Marais became a star of swashbuckling pictures, enjoying great box office popularity in France. He performed his own stunts. In the 1960s, he played the famed villain of the Fantômas trilogy. After 1970, Marais's on-screen performances became few and far between, as he preferred concentrating on his stage work. He kept performing on stage until his eighties, also working as a sculptor. In 1985, he was the head of the jury at the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.
He was featured in the 1995 documentary "Screening at the Majestic", which is included on the 2003 DVD release of the restored print of Beauty and the Beast. Marais appears on the cover sleeve of The Smiths single This Charming Man.
Marais died from cardiovascular disease in Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes. He is interred there at Vallauris cemetery.
Category:1913 births Category:1998 deaths Category:Burials in France Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in France Category:French film actors Category:French stage actors Category:Gay actors Category:LGBT people from France Category:People from Manche Category:French military personnel of World War II
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Name | George Sanders |
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Caption | in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) |
Birth date | July 03, 1906 |
Birth name | George Henry Sanders |
Birth place | Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
Death date | April 25, 1972 |
Death place | Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain |
Occupation | Actor, author, singer |
Years active | 1929–1972 |
Spouse | Susan Larson (1940–1949) (divorced)Zsa Zsa Gabor (1949–1954) (divorced)Benita Hume (1959–1967) (her death)Magda Gabor (1970–1971) (divorced) |
Partner | Lorraine Chanel(1968-1972) |
George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was an English film and television actor widely known for his roles playing cads and other darkly drawn characters in many successful films, such as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950) and the villainous tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967). His career spanned over 40 years.
Sanders played Lord Henry Wotton in the 1945 film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1947 he co-starred with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. That same year he gave one of his most critically noted performances starring with Angela Lansbury in director Albert Lewin's little-known film taken from an 1885 novel by Guy de Maupassant, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. He and Lansbury also featured in Cecil B. deMille's biblical epic Samson and Delilah in 1949.
(1950)]] In 1950 Sanders drew his greatest popular and commercial success as the acerbic, cold-blooded theatre critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He then starred as Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert in the 1952 film Ivanhoe, dying in a duel with Robert Taylor while professing his love for Jewish maiden Rebecca, played by Elizabeth Taylor.
Sanders went into television with the successful series The George Sanders Mystery Theater. He played an upper crust English villain, G. Emory Partridge, in the 1965 The Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode "The Gazebo in the Maze Affair" and reprised the role later in that same year in "The Yukon Affair." He also portrayed Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the widely seen 1960s live-action Batman TV series.
In 1967 Sanders voiced the malevolent Shere Khan in the Walt Disney production of The Jungle Book. In 1969 Sanders had a supporting role in John Huston's The Kremlin Letter, in which his rather notorious first scene showed him dressed in drag and playing piano in a snooty San Francisco gay bar. One of Sanders' final screen roles was in a 1972 feature film version of the popular television series Doomwatch.
Sanders' distinctive smooth voice, urbane manner and upper-class British accent inspired Peter Sellers' character "Hercules Grytpype-Thynne" in the famous 1950s BBC radio comedy series The Goon Show. In 1964 Sellers and Sanders appeared together in the Pink Panther sequel A Shot in the Dark.
Sanders garnered two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for motion pictures at 1636 Vine Street and for television at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard. He is mentioned in The Kinks' song "Celluloid Heroes" and his ghost makes an appearance in Clive Barker's 2001 novel Coldheart Canyon as well as the animated feature from 2007 Dante's Inferno.
His autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad was published in 1960 and gathered critical praise for its wit. Sanders suggested the title A Dreadful Man for his biography, which was later written by Sanders' friend Brian Aherne and published in 1979.
Sanders' last marriage was on 4 December 1970 to Magda Gabor, the elder sister of his second wife. This marriage lasted only six weeks, after which he began drinking heavily.
In his later years Sanders suffered from bewilderment and bouts of anger, worsened by waning health. He can be seen teetering in his last films, owing to a loss of balance. According to the biography written by Aherne he also had a minor stroke, which is likely why Sanders' speech sounds impaired in the low-budget film Psychomania, his last film performance. Sanders couldn't bear the notion of losing his health or needing help from someone else, and he became deeply depressed. At about this time, Sanders found he could no longer play his grand piano, which he dragged outside and smashed with an axe. His last girlfriend, who was Mexican and much younger than he, persuaded Sanders to sell his beloved house in Majorca, Spain, and he felt bitter regrets after having done so. From then on he drifted.
On 23 April 1972, Sanders checked into a hotel in Castelldefels, a coastal town near Barcelona. He was found dead two days later, having taken five bottles of Nembutal. Sanders was 65 years old. He left behind a suicide note which read:
Sanders' body was cremated and the ashes were scattered in the English Channel.
David Niven wrote in his autobiography The Moon's a Balloon that in 1937 his friend Sanders had predicted he would commit suicide when he was 65.
Category:1906 births Category:1972 deaths Category:20th-century actors Category:Actors from Saint Petersburg Category:Actors who committed suicide Category:Alumni of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology Category:Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winners Category:Drug-related suicides in Spain Category:English autobiographers Category:English film actors Category:English male singers Category:English television actors Category:English voice actors Category:Old Brightonians Category:People from Brighton
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Playername | Danny Tickle |
---|---|
Fullname | Daniel Tickle |
Position | |
Dateofbirth | April 08, 1983 |
Placeofbirth | Golborne, Greater Manchester |
Countryofbirth | England |
Height | 6 ft 2 in (190 cm) |
Weight | 16 st 0 lb (102 kg) |
Club1 | Halifax |
Year1start | 2000 |
Year1end | 02 |
Appearances1 | 56 |
Tries1 | 11 |
Goals1 | 97 |
Fieldgoals1 | 2 |
Points1 | 240 |
Club2 | Wigan |
Year2start | 2002 |
Year2end | 06 |
Appearances2 | 106 |
Tries2 | 29 |
Goals2 | 188 |
Fieldgoals2 | 1 |
Points2 | 493 |
Club3 | Hull FC |
Year3start | 2007 |
Year3end | present |
Appearances3 | 109 |
Tries3 | 26 |
Goals3 | 346 |
Fieldgoals3 | 1 |
Points3 | 795 |
Teama | England |
Yearastart | 2002 |
Yearaend | 0? |
Previously, he played three years for the Halifax RLFC club in Super League. Tickle signed for Wigan despite interest from other Super League sides, including St Helens.
He performed well enough to earn a new two-year contract in July 2004. The following season, Danny was outstanding in an injury-hit Warriors squad and picked up the Wigan Supporters' Association Player of the Season award.
Category:1983 births Category:People from Golborne Category:English rugby league players Category:Halifax RLFC players Category:Wigan Warriors players Category:Hull FC players Category:Living people
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Name | Claude Jade |
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Birth name | Claude Marcelle Jorré |
Caption | Claude Jade in Domicile conjugal (1970) |
Birth date | October 08, 1948 |
Birth place | Dijon, France |
Death date | December 01, 2006 |
Death place | Boulogne-Billancourt, France |
Spouse | Bernard Coste (1972–2006) |
Years active | 1967–2006 |
Occupation | Actress |
Claude Marcelle Jorré, better known as Claude Jade (; 8 October 1948 – 1 December 2006), was a French actress, known for starring as Christine in François Truffaut's three films Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and Love on the Run (1979). Jade acted in theatre, film and television. Her film work outside of France included the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy and Japan.
Topaz was Jade's only Hollywood film. Universal Pictures offered her a seven-year contract, which she turned down because she preferred to work in French. Director Tony Richardson's film Nijinsky (1970), based on a screenplay by Edward Albee, was canceled in its early stages by producer Albert Broccoli. It had starred Jade as Vaslav Nijinsky's wife, alongside Rudolf Nureyev as Nijinsky and Paul Scofield as his lover Sergei Diaghilev. Truffaut's later Bed and Board contains a reference to Nureyev.
Jade planned to play Anne Boleyn in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), with Richard Burton, but instead she starred in Édouard Molinaro's My Uncle Benjamin (Mon oncle Benjamin, 1969). Geneviève Bujold replaced her as Anne.
Jade's career continued in Belgium, where she played a young English teacher who is fatally intrigued by a murderer in the 1969 film The Witness.
On 1 December 2006, Jade died of eye cancer, which had spread to liver cancer. She wore a prostetic eye in her last stage performance, Celimene and the Cardinal, in August 2006. She is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Category:French autobiographers Category:French film actors Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery Category:Cancer deaths in France Category:People from Dijon Category:1948 births Category:2006 deaths
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Name | Brigitte Bardot |
---|---|
Caption | Bardot in 1968 |
Birth name | Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot |
Birth date | September 28, 1934 |
Birth place | Paris, France |
Other names | BB |
Occupation | Actress, model, singer, animal rights activist |
Years active | 1952–1973 |
Spouse |
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot (, ; born 28 September 1934) is a French former fashion model, actress and singer, and animal rights activist.
In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer. She started her acting career in 1952 and, after appearing in 16 films, became world-famous due to her role in her then-husband Roger Vadim's controversial film And God Created Woman. She later starred in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 cult film, Contempt. She was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress for her role in Louis Malle's 1965 film, Viva Maria!.
She caught the attention of French intellectuals. She was the subject of Simone de Beauvoir's 1959 essay, The Lolita Syndrome, which described Bardot as a "locomotive of women's history" and built upon existentialist themes to declare her the first and most liberated woman of post-war France.
After her retirement, Bardot established herself as an animal rights activist. During the 1990s, she became controversial due to her criticism of immigration, race-mixing, some aspects of homosexuality and Islam in France, and has been fined five times for "inciting racial hatred".
Soon afterwards, Bardot withdrew to the seclusion of Southern France where she had bought the house La Madrague in Saint-Tropez in May 1958.
In 1963, she starred in Jean-Luc Godard's critically acclaimed film Contempt.
Brigitte Bardot was featured in many other films along with notable actors such as Alain Delon (Famous Love Affairs, Spirits of the Dead), Jean Gabin (In Case of Adversity), Sean Connery (Shalako), Jean Marais (Royal Affairs in Versailles, School for Love), Lino Ventura (Rum Runners), Annie Girardot (The Novices), Claudia Cardinale (The Legend of Frenchie King), Jeanne Moreau (Viva Maria!), Jane Birkin (Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman).
In 1973, Bardot announced that she was retiring from acting at the age of 39 as "a way to get out elegantly".
She participated in various musical shows and recorded many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Zagury and Sacha Distel, including "Harley Davidson", "Je Me Donne A Qui Me Plait", "Bubble gum", "Contact", "Je Reviendrais Toujours Vers Toi", "L'Appareil A Sous", "La Madrague", "On Demenage", "Sidonie", "Tu Veux, Ou Tu Veux Pas?", "Le Soleil De Ma Vie" (the cover of Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life") and the notorious "Je t'aime... moi non plus". Bardot pleaded with Gainsbourg not to release this duet and he complied with her wishes; the following year he re-recorded a version with British-born model and actress Jane Birkin, which became a massive hit all over Europe. The version with Bardot was issued in 1986 and became a popular download hit in 2006 when Universal Records made their back catalogue available to purchase online, with this version of the song ranking as the third most popular download.
On 18 June 1959, she married actor Jacques Charrier, by whom she had her only child, a son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier (born 11 January 1960). After she and Charrier divorced in 1962, Nicolas was raised in the Charrier family and did not maintain close contact with Bardot until his adulthood. She became a vegetarian and raised three million French francs to fund the foundation by auctioning off jewelry and many personal belongings. She sought to discuss the issue with Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada, though her request for a meeting was denied.
She once had a neighbor's donkey castrated while looking after it, on the grounds of its "sexual harassment" of her own donkey and mare, for which she was taken to court by the donkey's owner in 1989. In 1999, Bardot wrote a letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin, published in French magazine VSD, in which she accused the Chinese of "torturing bears and killing the world's last tigers and rhinos to make aphrodisiacs".
She has donated more than $140,000 over two years for a mass sterilization and adoption program for Bucharest's stray dogs, estimated to number 300,000. She is planning to house many of these stray animals in a new animal rescue facility that she is having built on her property.
In August 2010, she addressed a letter to the Danish Queen, Margrethe II of Denmark appealing for the sovereign to halt the killing of dolphins in the Faroe Islands. In the letter, Bardot describes the activity as a "macabre spectacle" that "is a shame for Denmark and the Faroe Islands." She continued: "This is not a hunt but a mass slaughter" and also described it as an "outmoded tradition that has no acceptable justification in today's world".
Bardot expressed support for President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. Despite this association, Bardot has never joined the party and is not a known sympathiser.
In a book she wrote in 1999, called "Le Carré de Pluton" (Pluto's Square), Bardot criticizes the procedure used in the ritual slaughter of sheep during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. Additionally, in a section in the book entitled, Open Letter to My Lost France, Bardot writes: "...my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.". For this comment, a French court fined her 30,000 francs in June 2000. She had previously been fined in 1997 for the original publication of this open letter in Le Figaro and again 1998 for making similar remarks.
In her 2003 book, Un cri dans le silence ("A Scream in the Silence"), she warned of an “Islamicization of France”, and said of Muslim immigration: }} In May 2003, the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples (MRAP) announced they were going to sue Bardot for the comments. The "Ligue des droits de l'homme" (Human Rights League) announced they were considering similar legal proceedings. In her own defence, Bardot wrote in a letter to a French gay magazine, saying, "Apart from my husband—who maybe will cross over one day as well—I am entirely surrounded by homos. For years, they have been my support, my friends, my adopted children, my confidants." Bardot's book was also against "the mixing of genes"; made attacks on modern art, which Bardot equated with "shit"; drew similarities between French politicians and weather vanes; and compared her own beliefs with previous generations who had "given their lives to push out invaders".
On 10 June 2004, Bardot was again convicted by a French court for "inciting racial hatred" and fined €5,000, the fourth such conviction/fine the French courts gave her. Bardot denied the racial hatred charge and apologized in court, saying: "I never knowingly wanted to hurt anybody. It is not in my character."
In 2008, she was once more convicted of inciting racial/religious hatred in relation to a letter she wrote, a copy of which she sent to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was Interior Minister of France. The letter stated her objections to Muslims in France ritually slaughtering sheep by slitting their throats without anesthetizing them first but also expressed that she was "fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its habits" in reference to Muslims. The trial concluded on 3 June 2008, with a conviction and fine of 15,000 Euros, the largest of her fines to date. The prosecutor stated that she was tired of charging Bardot with offences related to racial hatred.
On August 13, 2010, she lashed out at director Kyle Newman regarding his plans on making a biographical film on her life. Her response was, "Wait until I'm dead before you make a movie about my life!". Bardot even warned Newman that if the project progresses "sparks will fly."
Bardot is recognized for popularizing bikini swimwear in early films such as Manina (Woman without a Veil, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots.
Bardot also brought into fashion the choucroute ("Sauerkraut") hairstyle (a sort of beehive hair style) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel, at her wedding to Charrier. She was the subject for an Andy Warhol painting.
In addition to popularizing the bikini swimming suit, Bardot has also been credited with popularizing the city of St. Tropez and the town of Buzios, Brazil, which she visited in 1964 with her boyfriend at the time, Brazilian musician Bob Zagury. A statue by Christina Motta honours Brigitte Bardot in Buzios, Brazil.
Bardot was idolized by young John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They made plans to shoot a film featuring The Beatles and Bardot, similar to A Hard Day's Night, but the plans were never fulfilled.
According to the liner notes of his first (self-titled) album, musician Bob Dylan dedicated the first song he ever wrote to Bardot. He also mentioned her by name in "I Shall Be Free", which appeared on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
She dabbled in pop music and played the role of a glamour model. In 1965, she appeared as herself in the Hollywood production Dear Brigitte (1965) starring James Stewart.
In 1970, the sculptor Alain Gourdon used Bardot as the model for a bust of Marianne, the French national emblem.
In 2007, she was named among Empire magazine's 100 Sexiest Film Stars.
The first-ever official exhibition looking at Bardot's influence and legacy opened in Paris on 29 September 2009 - a day after her 75th birthday.
Category:1934 births Category:Actors who attempted suicide Category:Animal rights advocates Category:Breast cancer survivors Category:French activists Category:French female models Category:French female singers Category:French film actors Category:French-language singers Category:French vegetarians Category:Légion d'honneur refusals Category:Living people Category:MGM Records artists Category:Opposition against Islam in Europe Category:People from Paris
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