| Name | Freddie Jones |
|---|---|
| Birth date | September 12, 1927 |
| Birth place | Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, United Kingdom |
Freddie Jones (born 12 September 1927) is an English character actor.
Jones was born in the town of Longton in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. He became an actor after ten years of working as a laboratory assistant with a firm making ceramic products, when his hobby of acting took over. He was trained at the prestigious Rose Bruford College and became famous for his role as Claudius in the 1968 British television series The Caesars. He tends to play eccentric characters.
He narrated the award-winning video Sexual Encounters of the Floral Kind: Pollination. He plays the character Sandy Thomas in ITV’s soap opera Emmerdale.
He was also something of a David Lynch regular, appearing in The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Wild At Heart (1990), his short-lived TV series On The Air (1992) and the short film Hotel Room (1993).
Jones is the father of actor Toby Jones.
Category:Alumni of Rose Bruford College Category:English film actors Category:English television actors Category:People from Stoke-on-Trent Category:1927 births Category:Living people
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| Name | David Lynch |
|---|---|
| Imagesize | 200px |
| Caption | Lynch in Washington D.C., January 23, 2007 |
| Birth place | Missoula, Montana, U.S. |
| Birth name | David Keith Lynch January 20, 1946 |
| Years active | Since 1966 |
| Spouse | Peggy Lynch (1967–1974)Mary Fisk (1977–1987)Mary Sweeney (2006) Emily Stofle (2009-present) |
| Partner | Isabella Rossellini (1986–1991) |
David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director and visual artist. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. Indeed, the surreal and in many cases violent elements to his films have gained them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences. and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as a Chevalier in 2002 and then an Officier in 2007, whose grandfather's parents had immigrated to the United States from Finland in the nineteenth century. Lynch was raised a Presbyterian. Lynch found this transitory early life relatively easy to adjust to, noting that he found it fairly easy to meet new friends whenever he started attending a new school. and was later described as one of the most important midnight movies of the seventies along with El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Harder They Come and Night of the Living Dead. In December 2006, the New York Times reported that he continued to have that goal.
Lynch's book, Catching the Big Fish (Tarcher/Penguin 2006), discusses the impact of the Transcendental Meditation technique on his creative process. He is donating all author's royalties to the David Lynch Foundation.
Lynch attended the funeral of the Maharishi in India in 2008. He told a reporter, "In life, he revolutionised the lives of millions of people. ... In 20, 50, 500 years there will be millions of people who will know and understand what the Maharishi has done." In 2009, he went to India to film interviews with people who knew the Maharishi as part of a biographical documentary.
David Wants to Fly, released in May 2010, is a documentary by German filmmaker David Sieveking "that follows the path of his professional idol, David Lynch, into the world of Transcendental Meditation (TM)."
An independent project starring Lynch is called Beyond The Noise: My Transcendental Meditation Journey. It is directed by young film student Dana Farley, who has severe Dyslexia and Attention deficit disorder. Farley started Transcendental Meditation when she was sixteen and it enabled her to overcome the stresses of getting through the her last years of high school and into college. Filmmaker Kevin Sean Michaels is one of the producers and the film will be at film festivals in 2011.
Lynch is an avid coffee drinker and even has his own line of special organic blends available for purchase on his website. Called "David Lynch Signature Cup", the coffee has been advertised via flyers included with several recent Lynch-related DVD releases, including Inland Empire and the Gold Box edition of Twin Peaks. The possibly self-mocking tag-line for the brand is "It's all in the beans ... and I'm just full of beans." This is also a quote of a line said by Justin Theroux's character in Inland Empire.
ceremony.]]
In June 2009, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse released an album called (named after a Slate.com article of the same name, "Dark Night of the Soul; David Lynch's Inland Empire"), with a 100+ page booklet with visuals by Lynch. The album contained complete packaging and a blank CD because of a dispute with the record label. The artists involved implied that consumers can get the music online and just burn the blank CD provided.
'''BAFTA Awards:
'''DGA Award:
'''Emmy Awards:
'''Golden Globes:
'''Saturn Awards:
'''WGA Award:
;Footnotes
;Bibliography }}
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| Name | Natasha Richardson |
|---|---|
| Caption | Richardson at the UK premiere of in 2008 |
| Birth name | Natasha Jane Richardson |
| Birth date | May 11, 1963 |
| Birth place | London, England, |
| Death date | March 18, 2009 |
| Death place | New York City, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Spouse | Robert Fox (1990–1992)Liam Neeson (1994–2009) |
| Years active | 1984–2009 |
Her first marriage to filmmaker Robert Fox ended in divorce in 1992. In 1994, she married Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson, whom she had met when the two appeared in Anna Christie. The couple had two sons, Micheál and Daniel. Richardson's father died of AIDS-related causes in 1991. She helped raise millions of dollars in the fight against AIDS through the charity amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Richardson died in 2009 following a head injury sustained when she fell during a skiing lesson in Quebec. and cousin of Jemma Redgrave.
Richardson's parents divorced in 1967.
Richardson was educated in London at two leading independent schools, the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington, London and St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, London, opposite John C. Reilly as Stanley Kowalski.
On 19 March, theatre lights were dimmed on Broadway in New York and in London's West End as a mark of respect for Richardson. |}
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| Name | Kenneth Branagh |
|---|---|
| Caption | Branagh in July 2009 |
| Birth name | Kenneth Charles Branagh |
| Birth date | December 10, 1960 |
| Birth place | Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK |
| Years active | 1981—present |
| Occupation | Actor, film director |
| Spouse | Emma Thompson (1989-1995; divorced)Lindsay Brunnock (2003-present) |
Kenneth Charles Branagh (; born 10 December 1960) is a Northern Irish actor and film director. He is known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays.
Category:1960 births Category:Alumni of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Category:European Film Awards winners (people) Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Emmy Award winners Category:English-language film directors Category:Film actors from Northern Ireland Category:Living people Category:Northern Ireland stage actors Category:Anglicans from Northern Ireland Category:People from Belfast Category:People from Reading, Berkshire Category:People of the Year Awards winners Category:Royal Shakespeare Company members Category:Screenwriters from Northern Ireland Category:Shakespearean actors Category:Television actors from Northern Ireland Category:Venice Best Director Silver Lion winners
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| Name | Judi Dench |
|---|---|
| Caption | Dench at the 2007 BAFTAs. |
| Birth name | Judith Olivia Dench |
| Birth date | December 09, 1934 Notable relatives also include her niece, Emma Dench, a Roman historian and professor previously at Birkbeck, University of London, and currently at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She applied and was accepted, where she was a classmate of Vanessa Redgrave, graduating with a first class degree in drama and four acting prizes, one being the Gold Medal as Outstanding Student. |
| Rowspand | "1"|2012 |
| Title | Awards for Judi Dench |
Category:1934 births Category:Living people Category:Actresses awarded British damehoods Category:Alumni of the Central School of Speech and Drama Category:European Film Awards winners (people) Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Drama Actress Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Best Miniseries or Television Movie Actress Golden Globe winners Category:Best Supporting Actress Academy Award winners Category:British racehorse owners and breeders Category:Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:English film actors Category:English musical theatre actors Category:Former Methodists Category:English Quakers Category:English writers Category:English radio actors Category:English stage actors Category:English television actors Category:English voice actors Category:Evening Standard Award for Best Actress Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Arts Category:Honorary Fellows of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge Category:Interactive Achievement Award winners Category:Members of the Order of the Companions of Honour Category:Olivier Award winners Category:Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners Category:People from York Category:Royal National Theatre Company members Category:Royal Shakespeare Company members Category:Shakespearean actors Category:Tony Award winners
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| Name | Henrik Ibsen |
|---|---|
| Birthname | Henrik Johan Ibsen |
| Imagesize | 250px |
| Caption | Ibsen in 1900 |
| Birthdate | March 20, 1828 |
| Birthplace | Skien, Norway |
| Deathdate | May 23, 1906 |
| Deathplace | Christiania (Oslo), Norway |
| Occupation | Playwright, poet, theatre director |
| Nationality | Norwegian |
| Genre | Naturalism Realism |
| Notableworks | Peer Gynt (1867)A Doll's House (1879)Ghosts (1881)An Enemy of the People (1882)The Wild Duck (1884)Hedda Gabler (1890) |
| Influences | Kierkegaard Brandes Jacobsen |
| Influenced | Chekhov Stanislavski Shaw Brandes Antoine Lugné-Poe Freud Joyce Miller Williams Ray |
| Signature | Henrik Ibsen's signature.png |
At fifteen, Ibsen was forced to leave school. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, when Ibsen was age 18, a liaison with a servant produced an illegitimate child, whose upbringing Ibsen had to pay for until the boy was in his teens, though Ibsen never saw the boy. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo) intending to matriculate at the university. He soon rejected the idea (his earlier attempts at entering university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catiline (1850), was published under the pseudonym "Brynjolf Bjarme", when he was only 20, but it was not performed. His first play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was determined to be a playwright, although the numerous plays he wrote in the following years remained unsuccessful. Ibsen's main inspiration in the early period, right up to Peer Gynt, was apparently Norwegian author Henrik Wergeland and the Norwegian folk tales as collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In Ibsen's youth, Wergeland was the most acclaimed, and by far the most read, Norwegian poet and playwright.
Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of the Christiania Theatre. He married Suzannah Thoresen on 18 June 1858 and she gave birth to their only child Sigurd on 23 December 1859. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was as a noted, but controversial, playwright.
His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.
With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas". His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.
Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.
Ghosts followed in 1881, another scathing commentary on the morality of Ibsen's society, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But his philandering continued right up until his death, and his vices are passed on to their son in the form of syphilis. The mention of venereal disease alone was scandalous, but to show how it could poison a respectable family was considered intolerable.
In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. Contemporary society's belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen chastised not only the conservatism of society, but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a physician in a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water is contaminated by the local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor.
As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions; but this time, his attack was not against society's mores, but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always an iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.
The Wild Duck (1884) is by many considered Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play, the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. Furthermore, while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.
Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.
: "30.8.[18]99. Dear Mr. Gosse! It was to me a hearty joy to receive your letter. So I will finally personal meet you and your wife. I am at home every day in the morning until 1 o'clock. I am happy and surprised of your excellent Norwegian! Yours friendly obliged Henrik Ibsen."]]
Late in his career, Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of society's moral values. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of current conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic or hackneyed, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them, and while Hedda has a few similarities with the character of Nora in A Doll's House, many of today's audiences and theater critics feel that Hedda's intensity and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. He had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates him in his early autobiographical novel "Stephen Hero". Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.
Ibsen was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo.
On 23 May 2006, The Ibsen Museum (Oslo) reopened to the public the house where Ibsen had spent his last eleven years, completely restored with the original interior, colors, and decor.
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Frederick (Freddy/Fred) Terrell Jones (born March 11, 1979) is an American professional basketball player who plays at the shooting guard position.
In 2004 he won the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, beating out two-time champion Jason Richardson, but hasn't competed in the contest ever since.
On November 23, 2004, against the Boston Celtics, Jones recorded his first ever double double, with 16 points and a career high 10 rebounds.
In the 2006 off-season, the Toronto Raptors signed Fred Jones.
On February 22 2007, the Raptors traded Jones to the Portland Trail Blazers in exchange for guard Juan Dixon.
Jones, along with Zach Randolph and Dan Dickau, was traded to the New York Knicks on June 28, 2007 for Channing Frye and Steve Francis. The trade reunited Jones with New York Knicks head coach Isiah Thomas, the man who drafted him. The Knicks did not re-sign him after the year.
On December 28, 2008, Jones signed with the Los Angeles Clippers as a free agent. He was waived on January 5, 2009, however 3 days later he was again signed by the Clippers to a 10-day contract.
On January 28, 2009, Jones received news that the Clippers would resign him for the rest of the season, which they did the following day.
Category:1979 births Category:Living people Category:African American basketball players Category:American expatriate basketball people in China Category:American expatriate basketball people in Italy Category:Indiana Pacers draft picks Category:Indiana Pacers players Category:Toronto Raptors players Category:Portland Trail Blazers players Category:New York Knicks players Category:People from Malvern, Arkansas Category:People from Portland, Oregon Category:NBA Slam Dunk Contest champions Category:Oregon Ducks men's basketball players Category:Shooting guards
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| Name | Doug Fine |
|---|---|
| Birth place | New York, USA |
| Residence | New Mexico, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Occupation | Author, Journalist, Filmmaker, Speaker, Comedian |
| Website |
Farewell, My Subaru has been highly critically acclaimed, earning comparisons to Bill Bryson and Douglas Adams, and landed Fine interviews on CNN and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
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| Name | Dennis Potter |
|---|---|
| Caption | Cover of The Life and Work of Dennis Potter |
| Birthdate | 17 May 1935 |
| Birthplace | Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England |
| Deathdate | June 07, 1994 |
| Deathplace | Ross-on-Wye, England |
| Occupation | television playwright, director novelist |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 1960–1994 |
| Genre | Drama |
| Notableworks | Pennies from Heaven (1978)Blue Remembered Hills (1979)The Singing Detective (1986) |
| Influences | William Hazlitt, George Orwell, David Mercer |
| Influenced | Andrew Davies, Steven Bochco, Peter Bowker |
Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.
Brought up a Protestant he attended the local Salem chapel, and went to Christchurch junior school where, in 1946, he passed the eleven-plus entrance examination to Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. He then went to St. Clement Danes School in London, while the family lived for a time with his maternal grandfather in Hammersmith. During this time, the ten year old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle; it was an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing.
Both series were released on DVD release on 6 September 2010.
Following in this spirit of non-naturalism, Potter's characters are frequently "doubled up"; either by using the same actor to play two different roles (Kika Markham as the actress and escort in Double Dare; Norman Rossington as Lorenzo the gaoler and the English traveller in Casanova) or two different actors whose characters' destinies and personalities appear interlinked (Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Colley as Arthur and the accordion man in Pennies from Heaven; Rufus (Christian Rodska) and Gina the bear in A Beast With Two Backs).
One major motiff in Potter's writing is the concept of betrayal, and this takes many forms in his plays. Sometimes it is personal (Stand Up, Nigel Barton), political (Traitor; Cold Lazarus) and other times it is sexual (A Beast With Two Backs; Brimstone and Treacle). In Potter on Potter, published as part of Faber and Faber's series on auteurs, Potter told editor Graham Fuller that all forms of betrayal presented in literature are essentially religious and based on "the old, old story"; this is evoked in a number of works, from the use of popular songs in Pennies from Heaven to Potter's gnostic retelling of Jesus' final days in Son of Man.
The "Pinteresque" device of a disruptive outsider entering a claustrophobic environment is another recurring theme. In plays where this occurs, the outsider will commit some liberating act of sex (Rain on the Roof) or violence (Shaggy Dog) that gives physical expression to the unsublimated desires of the characters in that setting. While these more malevolent visitors are often supernatural beings (Angels Are So Few), intelligence agents (Blade on the Feather) or even figments of their host's imagination (Schmoedipus), there are also —rare— instances of benign visitors whose presence resolves personal conflicts rather than exploits them (Joe's Ark; Where Adam Stood).
::"Potter announced at the beginning: I'm going to get down there in the gutter where so many journalists crawl... what I'm about to do is to make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy... the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch... Hannibal the Cannibal....
::As a performance, it had a lot going for it. I have never seen a talking head on television so immediate or so unabated in its anger. In many ways, it felt like being collared by a madman on the Tube. Filmed disturbingly close to camera, seemingly ad-libbing the entire half-hour, now mumbling, now rasping, Potter somehow managed to cut through the vacuum that on television usually separates viewer from viewee. This made the performance extraordinary." It was thought that this was a side effect of the medication he was taking to control his psoriasis. With typical sardonic humour, he named his cancer "Rupert", after Rupert Murdoch, who represented so much of what he found despicable about British mass media. On 15 March 1994, three months before his death, Potter gave a strikingly memorable interview to Channel 4 (he had broken most of his ties with the BBC as a result of his disenchantment with Directors-General Michael Checkland and especially John Birt, whom he had famously referred to as a "croak-voiced Dalek"), in which he described his work and his determination to continue writing until the end. As he sipped on a morphine cocktail, he told a visibly moved Melvyn Bragg that he had two works he intended to finish (Cold Lazarus and Karaoke) before his impending death: "My only regret is if I die four pages too soon". The interview was shown on 5 April 1994.
BBC Four marked the tenth anniversary of Potter's death in December 2004 with a major series of documentaries about his life and work, accompanied by showings of Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, as well as several of his single plays — many of which had not been shown since their maiden broadcast. His influence has also extended into popular music: Welsh band Manic Street Preachers used quotes from Potter on the inner sleeves to their single "Kevin Carter" and greatest hits collection, while Scottish art rock band Franz Ferdinand modelled the promotional video for their song "The Dark of the Matinée" after Blue Remembered Hills and The Singing Detective. Guy Garvey, lead singer with Elbow, has said he named his band after the exchange in The Singing Detective where the central character claims that word to be the most beautiful in the English language.
;Footnotes
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