Fletcher, who won Academy Award for her role of Nurse Ratched in 1975 film, dies, aged 88
Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her role in the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has died, aged 88.
Fletcher died in her sleep surrounded by family at her home in Montdurausse, France, her agent, David Shaul, told the Associated Press.
Continue reading...Readings boss sends angry rebuke after more than 250 writers campaigned for better pay and conditions for booksellers
For many Melburnians, Readings is more than just a bookstore – it’s a bricks-and-mortar embodiment of progressive values, a business that doubles as a community space where ideas are shared and diversity is celebrated.
But an ongoing pay dispute has divided staff and threatens to tarnish the independent retail stalwart’s image, with hundreds of authors – such as Michelle de Kretser, Jennifer Down, Clementine Ford and Omar Sakr – recently campaigning on behalf of booksellers, and protesting outside the company’s flagship Carlton store.
Continue reading...€3 charge aims to gives independent booksellers a chance against e-commerce firms that use free delivery loophole
France’s crusade to protect independent booksellers against huge online retailers was stepped up on Friday as the government proposed a €3 (£2.66) minimum delivery fee for all online book orders of less than €35.
The government’s fixed fee for online deliveries is part of a quest to support independent bookshops against the domination of big tech firms, such as Amazon.
Continue reading...Big releases with usually bankable male stars criticised for formulaic storylines as audience taste evolves
The opening of a new big-name Bollywood film was once a national event across India, greeted by weeks of fanfare, long queues outside cinemas and halls packed to the rafters with audiences cheering and singing along.
But this year, with 77% of releases flopping at the box office, cinema halls have been left eerily quiet and Bollywood’s once unshakeable domination of the Indian film industry has begun to look uncertain.
Continue reading...English Heritage identifies six most vulnerable sites as climate change intensifies coastal erosion
The wonderful wildness of the spot, a rocky Cornish headland pounded relentlessly by Atlantic breakers, has inspired poets, artists and dreamers for many a century.
But Tintagel, immortalised in British mythology as the place of King Arthur’s conception, is one of a string of castles at risk of tumbling into the sea as climate change increases the pace of coastal erosion.
Continue reading...Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey – the first woman to be appointed permanently in the role – take up their posts in June
Michael Billington: An inspired duo to lead the RSC – with an immense task
The Royal Shakespeare Company has appointed two people to be co-artistic directors for the first time in four decades.
Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey – the first woman to be permanently appointed artistic director at the RSC – will take up their post in June next year.
Continue reading...Actor appears alongside Australian musician Nick Cave and British sculptor Thomas Houseago to reveal his first ever public art exhibition
Most know him for his blockbuster movies, chiselled cheekbones and high-profile relationships, but Brad Pitt can now add creating sculpture to his list of achievements after publicly debuting his first works of art in a lakeside museum in Finland.
The A-list Hollywood star unveiled the sculptures – what he called a “radical inventory of self” – at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, a move that came as a surprise. It is the first time the “largely self taught” artist presented his sculptures to the public, the gallery said.
Continue reading...Director’s most autobiographical film to date picks up audience prize generally seen as indicator of awards success to come
Steven Spielberg’s new film The Fabelmans has won the Toronto international film festival’s People’s Choice award, long regarded in the film industry as a key indicator of awards success over the next few months.
The Fabelmans, directed by Spielberg and co-written with Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, has been hailed as Spielberg’s most autobiographical film and has won generally admiring reviews. The story of a teenage boy coping with his parents’ disintegrating marriage in the 60s midwest, the Guardian described it as a “rare insight into the world’s most famous director who has usually kept us at arm’s length”.
Continue reading...Joke by joke, standup sensation Sherihan El Hadwa is challenging lazy stereotypes about victimhood
On a small stage in Tulkarm, a city in the north of the occupied West Bank, Sherihan El Hadwa emerges from the wings to a Palestinian pop song. Dancing and waving the long white cane she uses to navigate the world, the visually impaired comedian already has her audience laughing and clapping along to the music.
Hadwa did not have an obvious route into standup comedy, and the many difficulties of life as a disabled woman in the Palestinian territories are not a straightforwardly humorous topic.
Continue reading...Broadway’s longest-running musical never fully recovered from the pandemic shutdown and will close next February
The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway’s longest-running show, is scheduled to close in February 2023.
The musical – a fixture on Broadway since 1988, weathering recessions, war and cultural shifts – will play its final performance on Broadway on 18 February, a spokesperson said on Friday. The closure will come less than a month after its 35th anniversary. It will conclude with an eye-popping 13,925 performances.
Continue reading...The medical report on death of 91-year-old director said he had chosen to end his life
Jean-Luc Godard, the maverick French-Swiss director who revolutionised post-war cinema in Europe, died by assisted dying, his lawyer has confirmed.
The medical report on the death of the 91-year-old director said he had chosen to end his life. He “had recourse to legal assistance in Switzerland for a voluntary departure” because he was “stricken with ‘multiple incapacitating illnesses’”, Godard’s legal council, Patrick Jeanneret, told AFP.
Continue reading...Section of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month
A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.
The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.
Continue reading...Defeated president told aide ‘we’re never leaving’ despite Biden’s win, according to new book Confidence Man
In the days after Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 election, Donald Trump told an aide he was “just not going to leave” the White House, according to a new book on his presidency and its chaotic aftermath.
“We’re never leaving,” he vowed to another aide, says the book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman titled Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. “How can you leave when you won an election?”
Continue reading...Singer-songwriter apologises to fans in announcement on Instagram after becoming ‘burnt out’ from touring
Sam Fender has cancelled a number of forthcoming shows and announced he is “taking some time off the road” to look after his mental health, after admitting that he was “burnt out” from touring.
The 28-year-old singer-songwriter from Newcastle posted the announcement on Instagram, saying it would be “completely hypocritical” of him to advocate for discussion of the topic without looking after his own mental wellbeing.
Continue reading...Marías, also a translator and columnist, was described as ‘one of Spain’s greatest contemporary writers’
The Spanish novelist Javier Marías, author of All Souls, A Heart so White, and the epic, three-part Your Face Tomorrow – and a writer regularly touted as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature – has died at home in Madrid at the age of 70.
Marías, who had been ill with pneumonia for the past month, died on Sunday, according to his publisher, Alfaguara.
Continue reading...Madrid museum buys three hand-carved canoes from Zapatistas, with proceeds going to Open Arms NGO
Three exquisitely decorated canoes hand-carved in the jungles of southern Mexico and borne across the Atlantic on a ship tasked with a peaceful, symbolic – and cumbia-soundtracked – invasion of Spain could soon find a permanent mooring in the heart of Madrid.
More importantly, proceeds from the sale of the small boats could help save some of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean each year.
Continue reading...Brothers of Italy’s Federico Mollicone urges state broadcaster not to show episode with co-parenting polar bears
A senior member of a far-right Italian political party tipped to win general elections this month has appealed to state broadcaster Rai not to screen an episode of the globally popular children’s cartoon series Peppa Pig over the inclusion of a same-sex couple in its cast of characters.
The episode, called Families, was shown for the first time in the UK on Tuesday, and features two co-parenting lesbian polar bears. A character called Penny announces: “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti.” The family then sit down for a meal together.
Continue reading...Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people and is about to be translated into English
The climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the environment has become a surprise bestseller.
The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.
Continue reading...After cancellation of Thursday evening’s event, BBC announces final two concerts of the eight-week season will not go ahead
The BBC has announced that both Friday and Saturday’s Proms have been cancelled. Saturday would have been the Last Night, the traditional celebration that concludes the eight-week classical music festival that takes place predominantly in the Royal Albert Hall.
Although the Last Night has been modified in response to public events (the programme was changed in 1997 after the death of Diana Princess of Wales and in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks) this is the first time since the second world war that the final concert has not taken place at all.
Continue reading...Set at Oxford in the 1800s, Rebecca F Kuang’s new novel is a magic-infused allegory for structural oppression – and social media can’t get enough of it
A boy lies still beside the body of his mother. Her skin is blue and her eyes are open, wet and glassy. It is 1828, and a cholera epidemic has swept through Canton, China.
The boy is the only one left alive in the house and is on the brink of death when a quiet white Englishman brings him to London. There, the young Chinese boy is named Robert Swift and grows up in solitude, trained in English, Latin, ancient Greek and Chinese. For what reason, he does not yet know.
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