Category Archives: Culture

James Cromwell: ‘My father told me: “Don’t be an actor, you’re too damn tall”‘

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The 80-year-old actor and activist recalls being raised among film royalty, avoiding the draft for Vietnam, and his losing streak at tennis tournaments

I was born in 1940 and went to an American prep school, The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 50s. It was all white boys: no people of colour, no Hispanics, no Chinese, and it was all very organised and bound in tradition. Other kids brought records to school by people such as Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. To me, they seemed like stylised crooners singing about some fake emotion and I found them quite boring. I later grew very fond of Tony Bennett, but at that time he didn’t seem to project that wonderful persona through his music.

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New Order’s 30 greatest tracks – ranked!

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With the 40th anniversary of their debut single approaching, we rate the band who blend dance and rock like no other

You can see why Movement is viewed less as New Order’s debut album than a footnote to Joy Division’s career – that is really what it is – but that doesn’t mean it is not good. The surges of The Him would have made a great Joy Division track; the lyrics, which attempt to understand the death in 1980 of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s frontman, are powerful and heartbreaking.

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‘A legend in her own right’: Carolyn Franklin, Aretha’s forgotten sister

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She was a genius songwriter and singer but could never escape her sibling’s shadow – and died at just 43. Family and friends including Martha Reeves and Bettye Lavette celebrate the life of a cruelly overlooked artist

Some of the most remarkable footage of Aretha Franklin was taken in 1968, as she rehearses Ain’t No Way, written by her youngest sister, Carolyn. Diminutive and tomboyish in appearance, Carolyn is clearly in control of the session: she anchors the beat with a church clap, teaching her sister the melody while Aretha holds down chords on the piano. For the woman who ferociously demanded respect, Aretha appears meek, almost sheepish. Carolyn’s commanding presence and musicality are what shine.

Yet it was Aretha who would go on to become the Queen of Soul, and whose story will be depicted this year in the biopic Respect, while Carolyn has been mostly overlooked, known – if at all – for a few songwriting credits. Her life and career as a songwriter, backing vocalist and solo artist, though cut short, is one of frustrated opportunity, hidden identity and fantastic accomplishment.

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Why Mr Bean and Borat are ready to retire

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Rowan Atkinson and Sacha Baron Cohen are killing off two of comedy’s most indelible characters. They’ve picked the perfect time

Nothing lasts for ever. In time the trees will wither, the seas will boil and the mountains will crumble to dust. And nothing reinforces the ephemeral cruelty of the universe like the news that Rowan Atkinson doesn’t want to be Mr Bean any more.

In an interview with the Radio Times this week, Atkinson said of Mr Bean: “I don’t much enjoy playing him. The weight of responsibility is not pleasant. I find it stressful and exhausting, and I look forward to the end of it.” And that’s fair enough; Mr Bean has now been a going concern for 31 years, and has taken the form of a television programme, two films, an animated series, a sketch performed for the Olympics nine years ago and – slightly improbably – four books.

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Making waves: the hit Indian island radio station leading climate conversations

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With its unique blend of gossip, jokes and songs mixed with serious global issues, Kadal Osai has built a devoted audience

Selvarani Mari is a fisher and seaweed collector who lives on Pamban Island of Tamil Nadu, on the southernmost tip of India.

Every day she helps her husband cast the fishing nets, maintains rafts for cultivating seaweed, and dives into the ocean to gather sargassum. But she always makes time to listen to the radio.

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Maradona lifts the World Cup: David Yarrow’s best photograph

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‘I bribed a stadium guard with whisky and got dead close just as he was lifted on to another player’s shoulders. It was like a biblical scene. He looked magnificent’

On the final day of exams at Edinburgh University in the summer of 1986, most students partied, but I flew directly to Mexico City. I was 20 years old and studying business and economics while taking photos on the side. I’d never been to the Americas before, and I wasn’t at all a good photographer; in fact, I was incredibly average.

I arrived at the 1986 World Cup under the guise of being a freelance photojournalist, but I was a Scotland fan first and foremost – they always used to say that Scottish journalists are just fans with typewriters. I did have a press pass that I’d managed to blag off the Times, which granted me access to the media pen, but I was much more interested in watching football than taking photographs of it. There was a moment in the first round of a match with Uruguay when Scotland missed an open goal. Back at the Times they were watching the TV coverage of the game and could see the striker with his head in his hands, and in the background me with my head in my hands and with my camera nowhere near the moment. And they thought: “Well this guy, Yarrow, he’s not focused on the task at all.”

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This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection review – an uncompromising tale of resistance

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Mary Twala gives an intimate yet epic performance as an 80-year-old widow fighting plans for dam that will obliterate her village in Lesotho

This is an extraordinary and otherworldly feature film from the tiny landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa. It is the tale of a rebel spirit: an elderly woman who opposes government plans to flood her village, making way for a dam. It’s a film about resistance and resilience, but director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is coolly unsentimental and realistic about the inevitable march of capitalism and construction. Weaving in ideas around displacement, collective identity and history, this film takes on almost mythic qualities.

Related: From Beyoncé to the Oscars: Mary Twala, Africa's queen of cinema

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Denmark launches children’s TV show about man with giant penis

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Critics condemn idea of animated series about a man who cannot control his penis, but others have backed it

John Dillermand has an extraordinary penis. So extraordinary, in fact, that it can perform rescue operations, etch murals, hoist a flag and even steal ice-cream from children.

The Danish equivalent of the BBC, DR, has a new animated series aimed at four- to eight-year-olds about John Dillermand, the man with the world’s longest penis who overcomes hardships and challenges with his record-breaking genitals.

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James Comey: Donald Trump should not be prosecuted after leaving office

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  • Fired FBI director: next attorney general must ‘foster trust’
  • President has insulted Comey and threatened him with jail

Donald Trump should not be prosecuted once he leaves the White House no matter how much evidence has been amassed against him, the former FBI director James Comey writes in a new book.

Related: Trump call to Georgia secretary of state electrifies voters in Senate runoffs

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Beirut’s wounds on show in display of art damaged by port blast

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Exhibition presents torn paintings and grazed sculptures in a museum itself hit by explosion

Through the entrance is a version of Guido Reni’s 17th-century portrait of St John the Baptist, blown to shreds. Nearby, a chandelier lies splattered on the ground where it fell. Mirrors are cracked, paintings ruptured, and roofs in some rooms half-caved in.

Beirut is slowly rebuilding from the explosion on 4 August that destroyed much of its eastern seafront neighbourhoods and tore through galleries and hotel lobbies where some of Lebanon’s most renowned art was on display.

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Grammy awards postponed weeks before ceremony over Covid concerns

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The biggest night in US music is being pushed back as a result of virus spread in California

The 2021 Grammy awards will be postponed after a steady increase in Covid-19 cases in California.

The ceremony was scheduled to take place on 31 January hosted by Trevor Noah and while a new date has yet to be confirmed, sources suggest that it could be pushed back until March. A limited show had already been planned without an audience and only performers and presenters allowed on stage with nominees accepting awards remotely.

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Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan on his battle with anxiety: ‘Getting help was scary’

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The young actor, who plays the timelord’s arch enemy The Master, talks about his meaty new role in The Great – and reveals how he overcame the fears that used to leave him traumatised in his trailer

When Sacha Dhawan learned that he had been chosen to play Doctor Who baddie The Master, it should have been one of the biggest moments of his career. “My agent was ecstatic,” he says. “The BBC was ecstatic.” But he wasn’t. “I put the phone down and I couldn’t have felt more sad,” he says. The reason, it turns out, is a hidden battle with anxiety that Dhawan had been waging for years.

The opportunity was too big to pass up, but at that moment its scale felt insurmountable. “I would be the first British South Asian actor to play The Master,” he says. “So I’m kind of representing not only the Whoniverse but my community. And if I fuck this up, they aren’t going to be casting another South Asian actor for this.”

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How Promising Young Woman shows the limits of #MeToo revenge

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The tart Oscar-tipped dark comedy offers an intoxicating revenge plot against bad men. But can insight be found in assuming everyone’s worst potential?

Promising Young Woman, writer/director Emerald Fennell’s acidic dark comedy which coats an incendiary rape revenge plot with a pastel sheen, runs an alluring, looping trap: Cassie, a singularly obsessed character played with singularly impressive depth by Carey Mulligan, pretends to be near-passed-out drunk at a bar, plays along to a skeevy man’s predatory machinations, then flips the switch when he begins to sexually assault a woman he believes is too drunk to notice or care. “What are you doing?” she asks, suddenly stone-cold sober. The first time Cassie pulls the trap, in the film’s first sequence, it’s not quite shocking – if you’ve seen the trailer, you know her revenge scheme – but given that it’s The OC heartthrob Adam Brody as the aw-shucks predator, Mulligan’s archly calibrated facade drop is an enticing and unnerving jolt.

Related: Promising Young Woman review – Carey Mulligan ignites fiery #MeToo revenge tale

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Emma Mackey: ‘You’d have to be a sociopath to want to be a celebrity’

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The Sex Education star on the perils of social media, playing Emily Brontë, and her new Disney whodunnit with French and Saunders

When the trailer came out, it felt really Hollywood, which makes me laugh. I was like: ‘Ah, OK. This is quite a big deal.’” Emma Mackey spent the last few months of 2019 filming Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot adaptations. It’s a big-budget, big-name Disney extravaganza, and for Mackey, who turns 25 on Monday, it marks a first dip into blockbuster waters.

“I’d never really had that experience of walking into a studio before, where the sets were all built, and the costumes were tailored to my body, and I had a wig, and it was just … ” She trails off, lost for words. “I clearly can’t talk about it!” she says, laughing. “It completely blows my mind, still.” She does an impression of a 1930s ingenue. “‘It felt like a movie! A proper movie!’ Which is a good sign, I guess.”

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Cinema legend Ellen Burstyn: ‘It was never my intention to be a movie star’

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As she prepares to smash an Oscar record, the great actor talks about drawing on her own suffering, missing her violent mother – and surviving the Hollywood ‘hamburger machine’

Ellen Burstyn is struggling to make herself heard above the sirens that are screeching across the city. “I live on a road that’s very popular with police cars and ambulances,” she says down the line from New York. She had been trying to tell me about the Oscars when she was interrupted by the racket. If she is nominated in March – and, with the odds of her winning best supporting actress currently at 5/1, she almost certainly will be – this would make her the Academy’s oldest acting nominee, having turned 88 this month. “At the moment, it’s Chris Plummer,” she says excitedly. “But I would beat him by 42 days! What a great crown that would be to wear.”

If her performance in the Netflix drama Pieces of a Woman wins her a nomination, it will be her seventh. Over the last 50 years, Burstyn has been recognised for her portrayals of a jaded wife in The Last Picture Show; of a mother whose child is demonically possessed in The Exorcist; and of a widowed waitress who hits the road with her young son in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. In Same Time, Next Year, she played a married woman who meets annually with her lover; in Resurrection she was a car crash survivor who acquires healing powers; and in Requiem for a Dream she starred as the mother of a junkie who becomes an addict herself.

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21 things to look forward to in 2021 – from meteor showers to the Olympics

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From finally seeing the back of Donald Trump to being in a football stadium – the new year is full of promise

You probably found a few things to enjoy about last year: you rediscovered your bicycle, perhaps, or your family, or even both, and learned to love trees. And don’t forget the clapping. Plus some brilliant scientists figured out how to make a safe and effective vaccine for a brand new virus in record time.

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Tanya Roberts’ publicist retracts report that said actor had died

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The former Bond girl was mistakenly reported dead after being hospitalised following a fall at her home

Tanya Roberts, who played Roger Moore’s love interest in A View to a Kill and later starred in the sitcom That ‘70s Show as Midge Pinciotti, has been hospitalised after falling at her home.

Her publicist, Mike Pingel, mistakenly reported the 65-year-old dead on Monday, leading multiple outlets, including the Guardian, to publish stories saying she had died. Pingel later told the Associated Press that Roberts was still alive as of 10am in California but was in a poor condition.

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