‘I had to sprint across Berlin in a pair of Dr Marten boots – and I was smoking two packs a day back then’
I was in New York shooting a couple of films when I got this script called Lola Rennt (Lola Runs). I read it and thought: “This is cool – but kind of weird, too.” I flew back to Berlin, met the writer-director Tom Tykwer, and realised the energy I had felt on the page came from him.
Continue reading...The Years & Years frontman is starring in Russell T Davies’ new drama about the Aids crisis. He talks about bulimia, his ‘dark’ clubbing days – and how he learned to enjoy filming sex scenes
Olly Alexander was so certain he was destined for success that he saw a therapist to help him prepare for his future fame. It was 2014 and his band Years & Years had just signed to Polydor when he visited the shrink.
“I said: ‘The album’s coming out and I really want it to be successful,’ and he said: ‘What happens if it isn’t?’ I said: ‘Well, that’s not an option because I have planned it in my diary since I was a teenager.’”
Continue reading...Nicknamed The Wodge because of its girth, the capital’s tallest ever office has just muscled onto the skyline. But in the age of coronavirus, who wants to jostle for 60 lifts with 12,000 others?
With the City of London deserted once more, its streets only populated by the occasional Deliveroo driver or tumbleweed-seeking photographer, it seems a strange time to be completing the largest office building the capital has ever seen, not least because the very future of the workplace is now in question.
But, rising far above the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, dwarfing the now fun-sized Gherkin and boasting the floor area of almost all three combined, 22 Bishopsgate stands as the mother of all office towers. It is the City’s menacing final boss, a glacial hulk that fills its plot to the very edges and rises directly up until it hits the flight path of passing jets. The building muscles into every panorama of London, its broad girth dominating the centre of the skyline and congealing the Square Mile’s distinctive individual silhouettes into one great, grey lump.
Continue reading...The rebooted show will be called And Just Like That... and will feature the original stars, apart from Kim Cattrall
Sex and the City will be given a 2021 makeover, US streaming service HBO Max has announced.
Long-swirling rumours that the video-on-demand arm of the prestige TV brand was considering commissioning a revival of the 90s and 00s show were confirmed on Sunday night US time when three of the four stars of the original show, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis, shared a trailer for the series on social media platforms.
Continue reading...London based Magic Circle’s event, streamed on Facebook, will feature David Copperfield, Debbie McGee and more
One hundred years ago next weekend, an English magician called Percy Thomas Tibbles literally and laboriously sawed through a sealed wooden box which contained a woman.
It was a sensation and has since become one of the best known magic tricks, performed with all manner of tools and varying degrees of blood - always involving someone cut in half and nearly always with them miraculously put back together.
Continue reading...The former Observer writer and now GP talks about his new book, 34 Patients, and the challenges he has faced during the pandemic
How has life changed for you at the surgery during the pandemic?
The biggest change has been having to talk to patients on the phone rather than seeing them in person. We only see around three per day now in person.
Do you miss seeing people face to face?
Totally. It’s quite right that we do it the way we do but I love being with the patients and having that connection.
Burgeoning hopes for a normal sporting and cultural calendar are now in question again as infections increase
As Covid-19 cases rise across the world, hopes that life could get back to some semblance of normality by summer are fading. What chance do we have of going to a festival, flying off for a holiday or attending a major sporting event?
Continue reading...The scene-stealing star of the French comedy series - a word-of-mouth Netflix hit - on her journey from a prank show in Paris to co-stardom with Matt Damon
“I bought a few sheep during lockdown. Nobody told me they’d eat all my plants. How Parisian is that?” I’m discussing the pandemic with actor Camille Cottin, who during the first Covid lockdown last year decamped from her apartment in the French capital to do up an old farmhouse in Normandy. Now, she’s back in Paris, preparing for what will be a huge year. Already a star in her native France, Cottin is making the leap to major Hollywood roles. Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, in which she co-stars with Matt Damon, is due for release in the autumn. She is currently polishing her English for her role in Ridley Scott’s Gucci biopic, which starts shooting in a few months and features Adam Driver as Maurizio Gucci and Lady Gaga his ex-wife. And she has just signed up for a huge project that she’s not yet allowed to talk about.
Before all that comes the fourth and final season on Netflix later this month of Call My Agent!, the word-of-mouth hit drama that has found new fans looking to binge during lockdown. As Andréa – tough, ruthless, gay, and agent to some of France’s biggest movie stars – Cottin’s is the standout role in a show that has brought her international attention, including a role in series three of Killing Eve.
Continue reading...The rock critic who revived British music writing at the NME in the 70s is back with his first novel – a caustic tale of rock megalomania
Nick Kent, who is as close as British music journalism ever came to producing a legend, finally stopped writing about rock in 2007. “There was really nothing around that sparked my imagination,” he tells me. “There was no mystery, and rock’n’roll needs mystery.”
So ended a singular odyssey that had begun 35 years earlier, in 1972, when Kent joined a then struggling NME and, within a year or two, had helped push its weekly readership to near the 300,000 mark. Back then, a tall, stick-thin fop in leather trousers, matching biker jacket, a dangling earring and eyeliner, Kent was as sartorially stylish and – to borrow one of his own phrases – as “elegantly wasted” as the dissolute rock stars he profiled. And he walked it like he talked it, hanging out with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, befriending Iggy Pop, stepping out with Chrissie Hynde (briefly a fellow NME writer) and even playing guitar in a very early incarnation of the Sex Pistols.
Continue reading...From a childhood in care to dazzling readers with her debut The Panopticon, Fagan talks about writing her third novel, channelling rage, and why now is a pivotal moment for us all
For all that she was laid low early in the pandemic, and then spent months as a single parent trying to home-school her nine-year-old son, the last year has been far from a write-off for Jenni Fagan. Her third novel is about to be published, she completed her PhD. And on the day she speaks to me from her Edinburgh home, she is hours away from finishing a memoir of her life up until the age of 16.
For most people, that would amount to a very thin book, but not for Fagan. As a child growing up in the Scottish care system, those first 16 years involved 29 different placements, under four different names. The only thing she knows about her birth was that it took place in a Victorian psychiatric hospital in 1977. Perhaps, she muses, it has helped her to cope better than most with the events of the last months. “You know, I kind of understand crisis. I grew up in a very, very extreme way, and the idea that bad things happen to other people was never my reality. I always knew they happen to you. And sometimes they happen over and over.”
Continue reading...The actor and singer on RuPaul’s Drag Race, learning how to be loved, and why no actor could play him in the film of his life
Born in Pennsylvania, Billy Porter, 51, studied drama and moved to New York in 1991 to appear in Miss Saigon. He went on to star in Kinky Boots, winning the 2013 Tony award for best actor in a musical, and a Grammy for the soundtrack. In 2018, he was cast in Netflix’s Pose, which will return for a third series. He is married and lives in New York state.
What is your greatest fear?
That I will be forgotten and my legacy won’t matter.
Forbidden desires, strange obsessions and a singular talent for suspense... Carmen Maria Machado on the dark allure of the writer behind Ripley
There has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.
Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.
Continue reading...BBC reporter Will Grant has produced an excellent look at the group of strongmen who came from left field
If there was ever a surreal start to a trip to Cuba, it was the one that coincided with the news Fidel Castro had died. That was what I woke up to on 26 November 2016, hours before my husband and I were due to fly to Havana. A day later, we found ourselves in what seemed like an endless queue under a blazing autumn sun, waiting to enter Castro’s memorial at the Jose Martí monument in the Plaza de la Revolución.
Related: Sisters in Hate review: tough but vital read on the rise of racist America
Continue reading...The first woman to have her own column in the Observer, Whitehorn was a celebrated writer and author
Katharine Whitehorn, the pioneering newspaper columnist and author, has died aged 92.
The Cambridge graduate worked briefly as a model before embarking on a celebrated writing career, working for publications including the Observer, Picture Post and Saga magazine, where she was agony aunt for 19 years.
Continue reading...Apted made his name with the brilliant Up TV series that examined people’s lives every seven years, before going on to become a film-maker of distinction, whose influence cannot be overstated
Michael Apted, who has died aged 79, was a British movie director who – like Ken Loach and Ken Russell – earned his stripes working on TV. But it was his destiny to help create an epic ongoing masterpiece for the small screen with truly cinematic scope and beyond: current-affairs television which had the scale of cinema, combined with the Mass Observation Project and the Roman census.
Granada Television’s Seven Up! from 1964, was, to quote a comedy of the era, not so much a programme, more a way of life. It took 14 British children at the Jesuit age of seven (that is, the age at which the Jesuits’ St Ignatius of Loyola famously said he could “show you the man” if schooled early enough) and interviewed them about their lives and opinions – seven from a working-class background and seven from a posher caste. Then it was updated every seven years, finally spanning 56 years.
British director made films Coal Miner’s Daughter and The World is Not Enough, and the long-running Up documentary series
The British director Michael Apted has died at the age of 79.
The film-maker and documentarian was known for films such as Gorillas in the Mist and Coal Miner’s Daughter, as well as his long-running series of Up documentaries.
Continue reading...In his song Five Years, Bowie imagined a dying Earth. Five years on from his death, it seems to have come true – yet he continues to uplift us
On 11 January 2016, in pitch darkness, I turned on the radio at 7am and heard the news that David Bowie had died. I switched rapidly between stations hoping to find a parallel universe in which he was still alive, but there were only the halting voices of presenters choking back tears alongside snippets of Bowie’s incomparable musical world, collapsing into collective grief.
My first reaction was to think magically: “But he can’t be dead!” Bowie had just released his 25th album, Blackstar, only three days previously, on his 69th birthday. His official website had recently posted new photographs of him, sharp-suited and yelling playfully into the camera. Occasional news of what the critic Paul Morley called Bowie’s “cheering, ongoing life” – especially in the decade after Bowie suffered a heart attack on stage in 2004 – had been enough to reassure me and his millions of fans that he was still around. Not that he owed us anything, but a world that still had David Bowie in it couldn’t be all bad. And now he was gone from it.
Continue reading...The streaming service and the mindfulness app have joined forces to inject some calm into our tech diet. Elle Hunt tries to switch off, while switching on
Those who subscribe to the notion of “new year, new me” will be familiar with the advice to empty your fridge and kitchen cupboards of junk food before 1 January, so as to set yourself up for healthy-eating success. (Or else a New Year’s Day McDonald’s delivery, when you wake up very much the old you, and not in the mood for overnight oats.)
After all that bingeing on Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset last year, Netflix now provides a similarly aspirational refresh, with a new series of guided meditations. Produced with the popular Headspace app, the eight 20-minute episodes are billed as a beginner’s guide to meditation, helping you to start the year “by being kind to your mind”.
Continue reading...The late film-maker Joan Micklin Silver exploded the cliches of modern romances. If only others would do the same
The director Joan Micklin Silver, who died last week, was – to use the kind of cliche she abhorred – a pioneer. She was a female director at a time when studio executives were more than comfortable with being openly sexist, telling Silver: “Women directors are one more problem we don’t need.”
She made distinctly Jewish movies, as opposed to the kind of Jewish-lite movies that were – and are still – Hollywood’s more usual style. Her two greatest films, Hester Street (1975), about a Jewish immigrant couple (Steven Keats and Carol Kane) on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and the peerless 1988 romcom Crossing Delancey, about a modern young woman (Amy Irving) who is reluctantly fixed up with a pickle seller (Peter Riegert), are to When Harry Met Sally what the Netflix series Shtisel is to Seinfeld: Jewish as opposed to merely Jew-ish.
Continue reading...Mammoth task to collate magical folklore of Anatolian plateau involves thousands of stories
Once upon a time, in the old, old days when the mouse was a barber, and the donkey ran errands, and the tortoise baked bread, there was a great mountain called Kaf Daği on the border of the spirit realm, from which many of the fairytales and myths of the Middle East sprang forth.
Today, Kaf Daği is thought to be somewhere in the Caucasus mountain range that separates the Black Sea from the Caspian. In this magical place – also known as Jabal Qaf in Arabic and Kuh-e Qaf in Persian – princes are cursed by witches, who turn them into stags; beautiful maidens are birthed from oranges; and sultans, courtiers, slaves and farmers alike are at the mercy of the peri (fairies) and ifrit (demons) that populate the Turkish fairyland.
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