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Peter Shaffer wanted to make elaborate theatre – and he succeeded

Edit The Guardian 06 Jun 2016
Mark Lawson. The playwright was a commercial success, but his works could only have been created in subsidised venues ... Related. Sir Peter Shaffer obituary ... Twitter ... Twitter ... When Scofield declined to take the play to Broadway, another National and RSC stalwart, Ian McKellen, took over, while the part of the psychiatrist in Equus was played by a succession of heavyweight names including Alec McCowen, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Burton ... ....

Peter Wood obituary

Edit The Guardian 18 Feb 2016
he directed a triumphant London premiere at the Arts of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, with Ian Bannen as Hickey and Patrick Magee as Slade; The Birthday Party; Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the Edinburgh festival; and a television play, Sunday Out of Season, which got both Smith and Alec McCowen snapped up by the Old Vic in 1959....

Anthony Simmons obituary

Edit The Guardian 11 Feb 2016
Writer and director whose best-known films captured London life over several decades ... “I make European films,” he once said ... Twitter ... Alongside making his own documentaries, he produced several low-budget feature films, including Time Without Pity (1957), directed by Joseph Losey in which Michael Redgrave investigates a young woman’s murder, for which his son (Alec McCowen) has been convicted and sentenced to death ... ....

The Odd Couple

Edit Huffington Post 29 Jan 2016
Originally published in The Sunday Times on August 15, 2004 ... the old Bernard ... And he did fly out, and he brought Maggie Smith with him, and he did do all the work for me, writing the most brilliant piece for Smith and Alec McCowen to perform ... "From the balcony actors Alec McCowen and Maggie Smith, in a production by Bernard Levin, read excerpts from Shakespeare's greatest hits, making 'a virtue of necessity' if the 'truth were known' ... ....

Reviving The Ruling Class, Peter Barnes’s ‘drama of extremes’

Edit The Guardian 27 Jan 2015
Barnes’s People, a series of seven monologues written for Radio 3 in 1981, drew performers including Alec Guinness, John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft and Judi Dench. When a series of duologues followed two years later, the casts included Paul Scofield, Alec McCowen, Claire Bloom and Peter Ustinov, while the three-handers that completed the People project in 1986 signed up Sean Connery, Donald Pleasance and John Hurt to the same script ... ....

Jeffry Wickham: Character actor in the theatre and on television whose patrician bearing made him ...

Edit The Independent 05 Sep 2014
In spite of claiming to be "hopeless at auditions", Jeffry Wickham was a constantly busy actor for over half a century ... He also found himself in two Jeffrey Archer potboilers, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (Queen's, 1987) as a prosecutor, and Exclusive (Strand, 1989), starring Paul Scofield, Eileen Atkins and Alec McCowen; he summed up the latter as "three heroes in one copper-bottomed disaster" ... GAVIN GAUGHAN ... ....

Today in History

Edit The Washington Post 26 May 2014
Today is Monday, May 26, the 146th day of 2014. There are 219 days left in the year. This is the Memorial Day observance. Best news photos of the week. A look at some of our favorite images of the week. Today’s Highlight in History.. On May 26, 1954, explosions rocked the aircraft carrier USS Bennington off Rhode Island, killing 103 sailors ... On this date. ... In 1942, the U.S ... In 1960, U.N ... Embassy in Moscow ... Actor Alec McCowen is 89 ... is 65 ... ....

Best Shakespeare productions: what's your favourite Tempest?

Edit The Guardian 12 May 2014
This stormy staple of the Shakespeare canon has appeared in many guises. But the great Giorgio Strehler's Italian version is our critics's top pick. What's your favourite version? ... Photograph. Tristram Kenton for the Guardian. I've experienced a deluge of Tempests in my time ... In Sam Mendes's 1993 Royal Shakespeare Company's production, Simon Russell Beale's newly enfranchised Ariel spat vehemently in the face of Alec McCowen's Prospero ... ....

Best Shakespeare productions: what's your favourite Romeo and Juliet?

Edit The Guardian 09 Apr 2014
Shakespeare's poorly plotted tragedy turns on the shortcomings of the Veronese postal service and is eclipsed by West Side Story – yet the best productions overcome these defects ... Photograph. Snap/Rex Features ... But I still think West Side Story is better plotted ... John Stride and Joanna Dunham (replacing Judi Dench) were the lovers when I saw it, but my abiding memory is of Alec McCowen's brilliant Mercutio ... read the series so far ... ....

Best Shakespeare productions: The Comedy of Errors

Edit The Guardian 02 Apr 2014
This perfectly plotted play can be pure magic – especially with a cast including Judi Dench and Richard Griffiths. What's your favourite version?. Sublime … Judi Dench, second from left, with Richard Griffiths, far right, in The Comedy of Errors. Photograph. ITV/Rex ... Clifford Williams did the play twice at Stratford – once with Ian Richardson and Alec McCowen as the twin masters, the next time with John Wood and Corin Redgrave ... Pure magic....

A Pilgrim's Process To "The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo ...

Edit Huffington Post 23 Jan 2014
Twenty-seven years ago I had an idea for a play. This week, it opens in Los Angeles at the NoHo Arts Center under the title "The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy. DISCORD". I don't know how audiences and critics will respond to it, but I know this epic process has enriched my life ... Now, I had recently seen the great English actor Alec McCowen perform his one-man show of the unabridged St ...  ....

Why this is the West End's Year of the Three Hitlers

Edit The Guardian 20 Dec 2013
Challenging taboos … Andrew Lloyd Webber's Stephen Ward. Photograph. Nobby Clark ... Although Alec McCowen's delivery of this final 20-minute monologue is commonly regarded as one of the most powerful pieces of stage acting ever seen, the play has never been revived here and had only one major US production, which suggests a continuing discomfort among producers – and, possibly, actors – at the depiction of this figure ... ....
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