Category Archives: Culture

Richard E Grant reveals late wife Joan Washington had lung cancer

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Actor says Washington, who died earlier this month aged 71, was diagnosed eight months before her death

Richard E Grant has revealed his wife of 35 years, Joan Washington, was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer eight months before her death.

The actor, 64, known for films including Withnail And I and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, announced Washington, a voice coach, died earlier this month, aged 71, by sharing a video of the pair dancing together to Only You by the Platters on Twitter.

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Karen Gillan: ‘You should have seen my fight routines when I started – I looked like spaghetti’

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Her big break in Doctor Who led the Scottish actor to Hollywood. She talks her new film, Gunpowder Milkshake, the Jumanji hotpants furore – and why she worries she might be a bit, well, boring …

Karen Gillan’s house in the US is, she says, “like a little piece of Scotland in Los Angeles”. She is sipping coffee in her living room. The wallpaper behind her is a forest of brown, beige and mallards. When Vogue shot here last year, it described Gillan’s taste in interiors as “quirky”. “Yeah,” she sputters. “It’s all old trinkets.”

A piece of Scotland in Los Angeles is not a bad description of Gillan herself. Born in Inverness, she has lived in LA on and off for years. It’s a love-hate relationship. “I never feel settled here. It’s a real issue of mine.” Whenever she’s in LA, she gets the feeling that it’s not where she’s meant to be. Then she flies off and makes a film. “I come back and think …” – she does a cartoonish swooning sigh – “… It’s nice to be home. Then in a week I’m like: I’ve got to move.”

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China’s cultural crackdown: few areas untouched as Xi reshapes society

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Vast range of new regulations prompt fears of a return to tight social control of pre-reform days

On the second floor of a nondescript concrete building in north-east Beijing, the Youyou internet cafe is less than half full. Quiet and dark, the cafe’s customers are all adults, sitting in brown sofas in front of screens set up for hours of comfortable online gaming.

Minors aren’t allowed in, and a poster on the glass entrance reads: “The whole society together cares about the healthy growth of underage teens.” Under new regulations from the Chinese government, minors are limited to just a few hours of gaming a week, with tech platforms ordered to enforce it. The intervention is just one of a recent rush of directives from Beijing aimed at reshaping society.

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‘Maybe the guy’s a masochist’: how Anthony Fauci became a superstar

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The US diseases expert has been spoofed by Brad Pitt and lauded as the ‘sexiest man alive’. Now the pop culture phenomenon is the focus of a documentary

Beer and bobbleheads. Candles, colouring books, cupcakes and cushions. Dolls, doughnuts, hoodies, mugs and socks. T-shirts and yard signs that declare “Dr Fauci is my hero” and “In Fauci we trust”.

Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old scientist, doctor and public servant, has become an unlikely cult hero for millions of people during the Covid pandemic.

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Musician Phil Collins can ‘barely hold’ a drumstick as health deteriorates

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The 70-year-old singer and drummer calls his upcoming Genesis tour putting the band ‘to bed’

British musician Phil Collins says he can barely hold a drum stick because of deteriorating health that has also forced him to sit while singing during live performances.

The 70-year-old drummer and singer told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Thursday that he was frustrated at the challenges he faced. He underwent surgery on his back in 2009 and again in 2015 that affected his nerves, and he also has diabetes.

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The Lost Leonardo: has a new film solved the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting?

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Is the $450m Salvator Mundi a fake? This film – featuring tearful sycophants, sneering experts, dodgy dealers and a secretive superyacht – may finally settle the great da Vinci controversy

It is almost exactly 10 years since Salvator Mundi was unveiled, this “lost Leonardo” instantly triggering astonishment around the world. Since those giddy days, the work has had a turbulent time. As well as becoming the most expensive painting in history, going for $450m (£326m) at auction, Salvator Mundi was denounced by many as a fake and subsequently vanished from view. The painting is now the subject of The Lost Leonardo, a documentary by Andreas Koefoed that opens in cinemas this week.

“I would be surprised,” says Luke Syson, “if I went to see this documentary.” Syson is the curator who, back in 2011, first displayed The Saviour of the World, as its title translates, at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci blockbuster. Syson is probably making a wise choice. He’s in the film and the way he clams up mid-interview makes him look like the archetypal embarrassed expert caught out on screen.

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The 30 best mobster movies – ranked!

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Ahead of the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark hitting cinemas, here are 30 organised crime flicks you must see before you sleep with the fishes

Our criteria here is films featuring actual mobsters and the organised crime milieu – as opposed to hitmen, heists or bank robbers. Stefano Sollima’s punchy neo-noir, set in 2011, fits the bill with its imbroglio of crime families, political corruption and Rome real estate. Financed by Netflix, this is essentially a feature-length pilot for the addictive Suburra: Blood on Rome prequel series.

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Berlin’s bizarre new museum: a Prussian palace rebuilt for €680m

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A cross between a Disneyland castle and a chilling concrete block, the Humboldt Forum is set to teach visitors about Germany’s colonial era. But is the past being examined – or exalted?

A museum gift shop has never been such an ideological battleground. At one end of the store in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum is a display of souvenirs adorned with the gilded silhouette of the Stadtschloss, the city’s former royal palace, which was bombed to pieces in the second world war. Racks of silk scarves and Christmas baubles hang above rows of candles in regal colours, emblazoned with an image of the stately Prussian pile.

At the other end of the shop is a rival range of merchandise, themed around the former East German parliament and leisure centre, the Palast der Republik, which was triumphantly built on top of the ruins of the palace in the 1970s. With its sharp white marble walls, bronze-mirrored windows and space-age chandeliers, it was designed to showcase the wonders of socialism. You can buy keyrings and enamel mugs in a retro Soviet style, as well as a model kit of the building in Formo, the East German version of Lego, for €250.

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Pavel Kolesnikov, the pianist making ‘a palace of sound built by your own imagination’

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The Russian star brings his take on Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the Proms, having recently torn the piece apart with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. He explains his new, ‘tree-like’ twist

“Like climbing an infinite stairway, one step at a time.” That is how Pavel Kolesnikov describes working on JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of the outstanding releases of last year. On Friday 10 September, he will perform them at the penultimate night of the Proms.

“I’ve never had the chance to dedicate so much quality time to a piece before,” he says when we meet in a tiny cafe in central London. The city has been home since the Siberia-born Kolesnikov, now in his early 30s, came to study at the Royal College of Music. He had grown up listening to recordings of the Goldbergs by Glenn Gould and Rosalyn Tureck, but had never considered performing them himself – “I did not feel I had anything to add”.

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Women’s prize for fiction goes to Susanna Clarke’s ‘mind-bending’ Piranesi

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Clarke’s follow-up to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was praised by judges as ‘a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy’

Comment: Piranesi is a triumphantly unusual winner

Susanna Clarke, who published her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 17 years ago and then was struck down with chronic illness, has won the Women’s prize for fiction for her second, Piranesi.

Narrated by its eponymous hero as he explores the endless halls of a house that imprisons an ocean, Piranesi is “a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy which melds genres and challenges preconceptions about what books should be,” according to the Women’s prize chair of judges, Booker-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo.

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‘Running didn’t even occur to me’: Gulnara Samoilova on photographing 9/11

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‘A cop asked me: “How can you take photographs?” I told him: “I have to document this. It’s history”’

I was asleep when the first plane hit. At the time, I lived just four blocks from the World Trade Center, right next to a hospital, a fire station and the HQ of the New York police. The sirens woke me up. They were nonstop. I turned on the television and saw one of the towers on fire. As I watched the second plane hit the south tower on TV, I also heard it because I lived so close.

I was working for Associated Press (AP) as a photo editor. I knew, as their closest staff member, that I should go out and document it. I got dressed, threw some film into my camera bag, and ran out to the World Trade Center. A lot of photography is like muscle memory. Even in a situation like this, your body knows exactly what to do. I remember a cop asking me: “How can you take photographs?” I told him: “I have to document this. It’s history.”

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From Schitt’s Creek to Kevin Can F**k Himself: the perils of swearing in your TV show title

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Once seemingly a fast track to cancellation, TV shows are again dancing around the censors with almost-curse words in their titles. But do they still make viewers go WTF?

When Eugene and Dan Levy were first pitching their idea for a comedy about a wealthy family who go broke, there was one major stumbling block: the name. When several channels asked them to change the title from Schitt’s Creek to something less vulgar, the Levys doubled down. They pulled out pages from a phone directory to prove that there were actual people with the sweary surname. “If CBC was doing a news broadcast with the name Schitt, would you not use it?”, Eugene Levy told the Toronto Star. “They said: ‘Yes, we would air the name.’” After throwing it at the network’s wall, they finally got Schitt to stick.

But when it aired in 2015, the series was not without its issues. NPR had to spell out the word when talking about it; some channels, such as CBS, had to flash up what’s known as “the lower third” – subtitles literally spelling it out – every time they mentioned it on air. Some TV and radio stations were reduced to simply calling it “Creek”, presumably confusing both Dawson’s Creek and Jonathan Creek fans in the process.

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‘I was sliding towards the drop and couldn’t stop’ – the writer who fell from a mountain

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It is every climber’s worst nightmare. In this extract from his thrilling book about the glorious – and treacherous – Cuillin Ridge on Skye, Simon Ingram recalls the day its wild peaks almost took his life

I had been out of signal for most of the day, so when my phone suddenly stirred in my pocket, I decided to have a look. Remembering a climbing maxim – “Don’t try to do two things at once” – I shouted for my friend Kingsley to hang on, stopped and took out my mobile. The message was junk, but I took the opportunity to send some that weren’t and then check my voicemail.

Wandering absent-mindedly to where a boulder jutted off into the mist, I noticed Kingsley moving down the path. Shouting to alert him that I’d stopped, I brought the handset up to my ear and looked out at the cloud hanging off the Cuillin Ridge, waiting for the phone to connect. I took another step, just a small one to the left. And then everything went wrong.

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‘I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase’ – how The Wire’s Omar changed TV

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He was the terrifying stick-up man who loved his gran, shopped in his pyjamas and tenderly kissed his boyfriend. We remember Omar’s great scenes – and pay tribute to Michael K Williams, the actor who brought him to life

Playing stick-up man Omar Little on The Wire, Michael K Williams was tough, frightening and brutal – his face scarred, his smile wide, toting a shotgun and wearing a long trenchcoat. So viewers of David Simon’s intricate TV portrait of Baltimore’s streets, docks, schools and politics felt the rug pulled from under them when they first saw him kiss his boyfriend in episode four of season one.

It was a moment that subverted audience expectations and signalled the complexity, ambition and depth that The Wire – which is often placed at or near the top of lists of the all-time greatest TV shows – was aiming to achieve. This is not a character you’ve seen before, the show seemed to be saying. These aren’t your usual stereotypes and cliches. A similar moment saw Idris Elba’s drug chief Stringer Bell attend a business studies class.

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‘Not always easy to comprehend’: Hollywood struggles with Belfast accent

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Reviewers in the US have lauded the film, but complain it is too difficult to understand and needs subtitles

Kenneth Branagh’s new autobiographical film, Belfast, is tipped for Oscar glory, but his home town will not be happy if it’s in the foreign language category.

Hollywood reviewers who have lauded the film’s storytelling and acting complain the Northern Ireland accents are difficult to understand and require subtitles.

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Hitler’s favourite artists: why do Nazi statues still stand in Germany?

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A shocking new exhibition reveals the thriving postwar careers of artists the Führer endorsed as ‘divinely gifted’. Many made public works that remain on show today

A photograph from 1940 shows three conquering Nazis in Paris against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower. Within a few years one of these men, Adolf Hitler, was dead by his own hand; another, Albert Speer, was writing his memoirs in Spandau prison, having eluded a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials. But the third, Arno Breker, was alive and free, making sculptures in the new West Germany that in their bombast and iconography echoed those he had made during the Third Reich.

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The Wire star Michael K Williams dies aged 54

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The actor was best known for his role as Omar Little in the HBO series, and also starred in Boardwalk Empire

The actor Michael K Williams, best known for his role as Omar Little in The Wire, has died at the age of 54.

Confirming his death to the Hollywood Reporter, Williams’s representative said that it was “with deep sorrow that the family announces the passing of Emmy-nominated actor Michael Kenneth Williams. They ask for your privacy while grieving this unsurmountable loss.”

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Wife of a Spy review – wartime mystery thriller of double and triple dealing

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s old-fashioned drama delivers big performances and intriguing plot twists

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has probably long since got used to seeing the words “no relation” after his name; and this Japanese film-maker has in any case established his own distinctive, valuable presence in Asian cinema. Just two years ago, he released his complex drama To the Ends of the Earth, and now, working with Ryû Hamaguchi as co-writer, he has created this excellent wartime mystery thriller, which won the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice film festival: an old-fashioned drama replete with big performances and plot twists, double-cross and triple-cross. It’s like a three-quarter scale version of a Lean epic, a mid-level Zhivago or English Patient, but all the more intriguing for being relatively modest in scope.

Yû Aoi is outstanding as Satoko, a movie actor in 1940 Kobe in Japan, married to Yûsaku (Issey Takahashi), a prosperous international trader whose liberal politics and contact with foreigners makes him frowned upon in increasingly nationalist Japan. Yûsaku is visited by his old schoolfriend Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), who is now in police uniform, and caught up in the new fascist enthusiasm. A gulf between the two is opening up, despite Taiji having not got over his erstwhile crush on Satoko. Something sinister is in the air, and when Yûsaku comes back from a business trip to Japanese-controlled Manchuria, he is stunned by evidence of war crimes carried out there by Japan’s Kwantung army. Disgusted by his country, he plans to pass on details to the international community and chiefly the Americans: Satoko realises that this makes her the wife of a spy and the question of her own personal and political loyalties, and her husband’s, are a tense enigma to the very end.

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