Category Archives: Stage

Ian Holm, star of Lord of the Rings, Alien and Chariots of Fire, dies aged 88

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The versatile actor went from the RSC and Harold Pinter to international movie stardom with roles as the hobbit Bilbo Baggins and an android in Alien

Ian Holm, the versatile actor who played everything from androids to hobbits via Harold Pinter and King Lear, has died in London aged 88, his agent confirmed to the Guardian.

“It is with great sadness that the actor Sir Ian Holm CBE passed away this morning at the age of 88,” they said. “He died peacefully in hospital, with his family and carer,” adding that his illness was Parkinson’s related. “Charming, kind and ferociously talented, we will miss him hugely.”

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Larry Kramer, groundbreaking author and Aids activist, dies aged 84

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  • Kramer founded pioneering Gay Men’s Health Crisis group
  • Playwright and author died Wednesday morning in Manhattan

The groundbreaking American writer and tireless activist for gay rights and a national effort to tackle the HIV/Aids crisis, Larry Kramer, has died in New York.

Related: Coronavirus US live: cases still increasing in two dozen states amid push to reopen

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Jerry Stiller, star of Seinfeld and father of Ben, dies aged 92

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Comedian who formed a popular duo with his wife, Anne Meara, has died of natural causes

The comedian Jerry Stiller has died at the age of 92. His death was announced on Monday on Twitter by the actor Ben Stiller, who called him “a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband”.

Jerry Stiller enjoyed a long career on stage and screen, often accompanied by his wife, Anne Meara, with whom he formed a popular comedy act. They met in 1953, married the following year and regularly teamed up for improv sketches, performing in Las Vegas nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV programmes, often in character as the squabbling spouses Mary Elizabeth Doyle and Hershey Horowitz, playing upon their Irish Catholic and Jewish cultures. In 2010, they took their act online, performing from the front room of their New York apartment. Meara died in 2015.

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Colson Whitehead and This American Life among Pulitzer 2020 winners

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Author wins fiction prize for The Nickel Boys while the first ever prize for audio reporting goes to an episode of the hit podcast

Colson Whitehead, This American Life and writers from the New York Times are among this year’s Pulitzer prize winners.

During an online, at-home video, the Pulitzer administrator, Dana Canedy, referred to the “deeply trying times” in which these prizes are being announced but how journalism remains as important as ever and how the arts continue to “sustain, unite and inspire”.

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Tommy Chong: ‘We were always high. That was the job’

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How does half of stoner duo Cheech and Chong cope with coronavirus lockdown? Fine – thanks to drugs, his wife and the experience of nine months in prison for selling bong pipes

Tommy Chong has got the munchies. It’s early afternoon in locked-down LA, and last night he was on the pot cookies. “My wife, Shelby, just made a whole batch of them – oatmeal and maple syrup.” He stops to correct himself. “I put the pot in there, and of course I put too much in. Last night it got me almost comatose. Shelby got kinda mad at me. You know like when a kid gets so stoned all you do is sit there and grin.” Chong is 82 next month.

He sounds about four decades younger – his voice is deep, sexy, pulsing with life. Chong is one half of the most famous stoner comic partnership in history, Cheech and Chong. In the 1970s, they not only sold out their live shows, they topped the album charts and had huge box-office hits with movies such as Up in Smoke and Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. The double-act were as radical as they were bonkers. And while the films were ostensibly about two aspiring rock stars in search of the next spliff, they introduced audiences to a downtown, multiracial Los Angeles rarely seen in movies.

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Australia’s arts have been hardest hit by coronavirus. So why aren’t they getting support? | Esther Anatolitis

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The majority of arts companies and casuals will get little benefit from the jobkeeper package

Data released this week proves what the arts and recreation industry already knows: we are by far the industry hardest hit by Covid-19’s economic destruction.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 47% of arts and recreation businesses remain trading. And that number is falling.

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Shakespeare’s secret co-writer finally takes a bow … 430 years late

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Thomas Watson recognised by literary scholars as the Bard’s forgotten 16th-century collaborator

He was one of the most celebrated English playwrights of the 16th century, yet none of his plays survived, and today the name of Thomas Watson is virtually unknown. Now the writer, poet and pioneer of the English madrigal – who also saved the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in a street brawl – is being seen in a new light.

Watson has been identified as the most likely primary author of Arden of Faversham, the first domestic tragedy in English, which was published anonymously in 1592. Many scholars believe that five of the play’s scenes were co-authored with William Shakespeare.

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Matthew Macfadyen: ‘We are all living by the seat of our pants’

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The British actor on the triumph of HBO’s Succession - and being cast as the ‘coughing major’ in ITV’s Quiz

I met Matthew Macfadyen on one of those days in ancient history, a couple of weeks ago, when we were still not quite sure whether to make silly jokes about elbow-touching greetings, or to fear for civilisation’s immediate future. In many ways, Macfadyen is the archetypal actor for this kind of moment, a master of shifting and ambiguous tone, whose frequent bursts of laughter often threaten to turn hollow. One of the many joys of his portrayal of the bullied and bullying son-in-law Tom Wambsgans in the HBO show Succession – arguably the defining contribution to the defining TV drama of our times – is his winning ability to switch from empathy to psychopathy in a heartbeat.

Next month, Macfadyen will bring all of that gift for nuance to the three-part ITV drama Quiz, in which he plays Major Charles Ingram, the “coughing major” who was convicted of cheating his way to the top prize on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2001. The show, an adaptation of the West End play by James Graham, has been directed for television by Stephen Frears. Macfadyen’s major takes the hot seat across from Michael Sheen, who adds Chris Tarrant to his repertoire of uncanny impersonations.

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Covid-19 prompts all major British theatres to close doors

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Fifty London theatres and 250 throughout UK to close, says industry body

All major British theatre will cease and several cultural institutions will close or postpone shows as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK’s arts and culture sector grows following the government’s call for “drastic action” to halt its spread.

The Society of London Theatre (Solt) and UK Theatre, the industry body that represents nearly every British theatre, announced that, as of Monday night, all its members would close their doors. The groups represent about 50 London theatres and almost 250 others throughout the UK.

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Theatre firm made ‘unexplained’ loans to Sarah Ferguson, court told

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Shareholder owed £2.5m wants administrators brought in at firm now chaired by Lord Grade

Unexplained personal and business loans to the Duchess of York of more than £500,000 from an entertainment investment company were a “matter for investigation,” a high court judge has been told.

Gate Ventures loaned Sarah Ferguson at least £287,577 personally, and loaned £232,003 to Ginger & Moss, her upmarket tea, dinnerware and jewellery venture, court documents showed.

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Carlos Acosta: ‘My mother roasted my pet rabbits. I was sad, but I ate them’

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The Cuban dancer talks about food rationing, what he ate at ballet school and his father’s terrible cooking

I always lived with rationing in Cuba – I was born in 1973. We used the term “the three musketeers” to mean rice, chicharos [split peas] and eggs, although at one point eggs disappeared completely.

I had two rabbits as pets and I arrived home from school one day and there was that smell I’d almost forgotten, of meat. Then I realised that Mamá had roasted my pets and I cried a lot. My mother pressed us to eat them and we all did. The rabbits tasted very good, obviously – I was a kid and I sort of got distracted. I was very sad, but I ate.

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Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood: ‘I confronted my own school bully’

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She loved her nude scenes in the Netflix hit but the West End’s Uncle Vanya gave her stage fright. The Stockport star remembers being the class clown and tracking down her tormentor

Aimee Lou Wood wasn’t sure she wanted to be in Uncle Vanya, even as she made her way to the audition. Having trained at Rada, she knew the lineage of actors who had played the prized part of Sonya, and what an honour it would be to star in a West End Chekhov at the age of 25. “But I just thought it was so the opposite of what I would want to do,” she says.

She did have a point. Sonya is a church-going, sexually naive teenager from the backwaters of 19th-century Russia. Wood, at the time, was fresh out of filming the Netflix teen drama Sex Education. Her character opens the first series with a bout of energetic sex that ends in her boyfriend’s faked orgasm. (Connor Swindells, who played the boyfriend, is her real-life partner of two years.)

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Scenes from Santiago: Chile’s protests spill from streets to stage

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The city’s theatre is emotional, indignant and polemical finds our critic on a whirlwind trip through a dozen shows

The sparky young performers on stage thank us for coming out tonight. There are so many other things we could have been doing, they tell us, before launching into their show, Too Much Sexual Freedom Will Turn You Into Terrorists. “Burning subways” gets the biggest laugh. We are, after all, in Santiago, where only three months ago people took to the streets and did exactly that. Even now, in spite of soaring summer temperatures, Chileans continue to protest every weekend. Their list of complaints ranges from inadequate private pensions to an out-of-touch president.

The graffiti creeping across every surface calls for an end to police violence, for the renationalisation of water and for the indigenous Mapuche people to fight back. Sprayed everywhere is the figure 6% – President Sebastián Piñera’s popularity rating.

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Brian Blessed: ‘All my life, 90% of men have bored the arse off me’

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Dressed in pyjamas and wellies, the great actor talks about his astronaut training in Russia, the original Cats – and putting his might behind his daughter Rosalind’s very personal plays

On a shelf in Brian Blessed’s study is a plastic toy, a replica of himself as Prince Vultan in the film Flash Gordon. There is a resemblance but, with this actor, the very idea of a miniature seems wrong.

The mountainous original is sitting at his desk, wearing a striking winter morning costume of red fleece, pyjama bottoms and wellington boots. He must be the hairiest 83-year-old man in existence, his huge head crowned by a thick grey thatch, his neck Tudor-ruffed by what seem metres of white beard.

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Golden Globes: who will win and who should win the film awards? | Peter Bradshaw

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Will The Irishman clean up? Or Marriage Story? And how will Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fare? Peter Bradshaw offers a lowdown of the main categories and his predictions and omissions

The best film category is dominated – just like everything else in the cultural conversation around movies – by Netflix, which has the majority of the nominees: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes.

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Hogmanay fury as Edinburgh residents told to apply for access to own homes

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Local people must ask Underbelly if they want more than six passes to their houses

Edinburgh residents have vented their anger at having to apply to a private company for access to their own homes during this year’s Hogmanay celebrations amid growing concern that the council’s hunger to attract tourism is reducing the Scottish capital to a “theme park”.

People living in some parts of the city centre will also face potential restrictions on the number of guests they can invite if they wish to have parties of their own on New Year’s Eve, when the entertainment giant Underbelly will be running an event expected to attract more than 70,000 people.

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‘Gross hypocrisy’: Nobel heavyweight to boycott Peter Handke ceremony

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Peter England, former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and current member, refuses to celebrate the controversial 2019 literature laureate

Days before the Nobel laureate Peter Handke receives his award, a longstanding member of the Swedish Academy has announced that he will be boycotting the ceremonies because celebrating the Austrian writer’s win would be hypocritical.

Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Friday that he would not participate this year because “to celebrate Peter Handke’s Nobel prize would be gross hypocrisy on my part”. Handke was set to give a press conference about his win at noon on Friday, with his laureate’s lecture due on Saturday. Formal presentation of his medal is timetabled for Tuesday.

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