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England, My England
''England, My England'' is a 1995 British historical film directed by Tony Palmer and starring Michael Ball, Simon Callow, Lucy Speed and Robert Stephens. It depicts the life of the composer Henry Purcell, seen through the eyes of a playwright in the 1960s who is trying to write a play about him. It was written by John Osborne and Charles Wood. Cast * Simon Callow ... Charles II * Michael Ball ... Henry Purcell * Rebecca Front ... Mary II * Lucy Speed ... Nell Gwyn * Letitia Dean ... Lady Castlemaine * Nina Young ... Frances Purcell * John Shrapnel ... Samuel Pepys * Robert Stephens ... John Dryden * Terence Rigby ... Captain Henry Cooke * Bill Kenwright ... Bill * Murray Melvin ... Earl of Shaftesbury * Corin Redgrave ... William of Orange * John Fortune ... Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon * Guy Henry ... James II * Peter Woodthorpe ... Kiffen * Edward Michie ... Young Harry * Tom Shrapnel ... Young Pelham * Antonia de Sancha ... Louise * Constantine Gregor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tony Palmer
Tony Palmer (born 29 August 1941)IMDb: Tony Palmer Retrieved 24 September 2011 is a British film director and author. His work includes over 100 films, ranging from early works with The Beatles, Cream (band), Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Rory Gallagher (''Irish Tour '74 (Film), Irish Tour '74'') and Frank Zappa (''200 Motels''), to his classical portraits which include profiles of Maria Callas, Margot Fonteyn, John Osborne, Igor Stravinsky, Richard Wagner, Yehudi Menuhin, Julian Lloyd Webber, Carl Orff, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He is also a stage director of theatre and opera. Among over 40 international prizes for his work are 12 Gold Medals from the New York Film Festival as well as numerous BAFTAs and Emmy Awards. Palmer has won the Prix Italia twice, for ''A Time There Was'' in 1980 and ''At the Haunted End of the Day'' in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nell Gwyn
Eleanor Gwyn (2 February 1650 – 14 November 1687; also spelled ''Gwynn'', ''Gwynne'') was a celebrity figure of the Restoration period. Praised by Samuel Pepys for her comic performances as one of the first actresses on the English stage, she became best known for being a long-time mistress of King Charles II of England. Called "pretty, witty Nell" by Pepys, she has been regarded as a living embodiment of the spirit of Restoration England and has come to be considered a folk heroine, with a story echoing the rags-to-royalty tale of Cinderella. Gwyn had two sons by King Charles: Charles Beauclerk (1670–1726) and James Beauclerk (1671–1680) (the surname is pronounced ''boh-clair''). Charles was created Earl of Burford and later Duke of St Albans. Early life The details of Gwyn's background are somewhat obscure. A horoscope in the Ashmolean manuscripts gives her date of birth as 2 February 1650. On the other hand, an account published in ''The New Monthly Magazi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Fortune
John Fortune (born John C. Wood; 30 June 1939 – 31 December 2013) was an English satirist, comedian, writer, and actor, best known for his work with John Bird and Rory Bremner on the TV series ''Bremner, Bird and Fortune''. Early life Fortune was born John Wood in Bristol in 1939. He was educated at Bristol Cathedral School and King's College, Cambridge, where he was to meet and form a lasting friendship with John Bird. He was a member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Career Fortune's early work included contributions to Peter Cook's Establishment Club team in 1962, and as a regular member of the cast of the BBC-TV satire show ''Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life'', both alongside Eleanor Bron and John Bird. Fortune and Bird also worked together on the TV show ''A Series of Birds'' in 1967, and Fortune and Bron wrote and performed a series of sketches for TV in '' Where Was Spring?'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William III Of England
William III (William Henry; ; 4 November 16508 March 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was the sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from the 1670s, and King of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II. He is sometimes informally known as "King Billy" in Ireland and Scotland. His victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 is commemorated by Unionists, who display orange colours in his honour. He ruled Britain alongside his wife and cousin, Queen Mary II, and popular histories usually refer to their reign as that of "William and Mary". William was the only child of William II, Prince of Orange, and Mary, Princess Royal, the daughter of King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His father died a week before his birth, making William III the prince of Orange from birth. In 1677, he marr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Corin Redgrave
Corin William Redgrave (16 July 19396 April 2010) was an English actor and left-wing socialist activist. Early life Redgrave was born on 16 July 1939 in Marylebone, London, the only son and middle child of actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson. He was educated at Westminster School and King's College, Cambridge. Career Redgrave played a wide range of character roles on film, television and stage. On stage, he was known for performances by Shakespeare (such as ''Much Ado About Nothing'', ''Henry IV, Part 1'','' Antony and Cleopatra'', and '' The Tempest'') and Noël Coward (a highly successful revival of ''A Song At Twilight'' co-starring his sister Vanessa Redgrave and his second wife, Kika Markham). For his role as the prison warden Boss Whalen in the Royal National Theatre production of Tennessee Williams's '' Not About Nightingales'', Redgrave was nominated for an Evening Standard Award, and after a successful transfer of the production to New York, he received a Ton ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murray Melvin
Murray Melvin (born 10 August 1932) is an English actor. He is best known for his acting work with Joan Littlewood, Ken Russell and Stanley Kubrick. He is the author of two books: ''The Art of Theatre Workshop'' (2006) and ''The Theatre Royal, A History of the Building'' (2009). Early years Melvin was born on 10 August 1932 in St. Pancras, London, the son of Hugh Victor Melvin and Maisie Winifred, née Driscoll. Melvin left his north London secondary school at the age of fourteen unable to master fractions but as head prefect, a qualification he says he gained by always having clean fingernails and well-combed hair. He started work as an office boy for a firm of travel agents off Oxford Street. To help channel the energies of the young after the disturbing times of the war, his parents had helped to found a youth club in Hampstead, financed by the Co-operative Society of which they were longstanding members. A drama section formed with Melvin its most enthusiastic participan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bill Kenwright
William Kenwright, CBE (born 4 September 1945) is an English West End theatre producer and film producer. He has also been the chairman of Everton Football Club since 2004. Kenwright was born in Liverpool and attended Booker Avenue County Primary School, and then Liverpool Institute High School from 1957 to 1964. He appeared in school productions (including Shylock in ''The Merchant of Venice'') on the stage in the Mount Street building (predecessor to LIPA). He was also treasurer of the Christian Union at school. Kenwright was a judge in the 2007 BBC1 television series '' Any Dream Will Do''. Theatre Kenwright is one of the UK's most successful theatre producers, best known for the long-running West End hit '' Blood Brothers'' and the record-breaking UK tour of ''Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat''. Other productions have included West End runs of '' Whistle Down the Wind'' at the Palace Theatre, '' Festen'' in London, on a UK tour and on Broadway, '' The Big ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Captain Henry Cooke
Henry Cooke (c. 1616 – 13 July 1672) commonly known as Captain Cooke, was an English composer, choirmaster and singer. He was a boy chorister in the Chapel Royal and by the outbreak of the English Civil War was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He joined the Royalist cause, in the service of which he rose to the rank of captain. With the Restoration of Charles II he returned to the Chapel Royal as Master of the Children and was responsible for the rebuilding of the chapel and the introduction of instrumental music into the services. The choristers in his charge included his successor and eventual son-in-law Pelham Humfrey, as well as Henry Purcell and John Blow. On reconstituting the choir of the Chapel Royal, Dussuaze states: Cooke was one of the five English composers who created music for Sir William Davenant's ''The Siege of Rhodes ''The Siege of Rhodes'' is an opera written to a text by the impresario William Davenant. The score is by five composers, the vocal m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terence Rigby
Terence Christopher Gerald Rigby (2 January 1937 – 10 August 2008) was an English actor with a number of film and television credits to his name. In the 1970s he was well known as police dog-handler PC Snow in the long-running series '' Softly, Softly: Task Force''. Early life Terence Rigby was born in Erdington, Birmingham, and was educated at St Philip's School. He was trained at RADA and had his national service in the Royal Air Force. Career His film roles included ''Get Carter'' (1971), '' Watership Down'' (1978), ''Tomorrow Never Dies'' (1997), '' Elizabeth'' (1998), '' Mona Lisa Smile'' (2003) and '' Colour Me Kubrick'' (2006). His notable television roles included '' Dixon of Dock Green'', '' Softly, Softly: Taskforce''; ''Z-Cars'', '' The First Lady'', '' Callan'', '' The Saint'', '' Public Eye'', '' Edward & Mrs. Simpson'', '' Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy''; ''Airline'', ''Rumpole of the Bailey'', ''Boon'', ''Lovejoy'', ''Our Friends in the North'', ''Born to Run'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Dryden
'' John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John". Early life Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Barone t (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Wes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys (; 23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament and is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade. Pepys had no maritime experience, but he rose to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II through patronage, diligence, and his talent for administration. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalisation of the Royal Navy. The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. Early life Pepys was born in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, London, on 23 Febru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Shrapnel
John Morley Shrapnel (27 April 1942 – 14 February 2020) was an English actor. He is known mainly for his stage work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in the United Kingdom and for his many television appearances. One of his well-known roles was Mr. Skinner in the 1996 live-action film '' 101 Dalmatians''. Early life Shrapnel was born John Morley Shrapnel in Birmingham, Warwickshire (now West Midlands) on 27 April 1942, the son of journalist / author Norman Shrapnel and Mary Lillian Myfanwy (née Edwards). Shrapnel was brought up in Stockport and London, and was educated first at Mile End School, Stockport, where he started acting as a member of the school's drama society, and then at the City of London School, an independent school for boys in the City of London, where he played Hamlet in the school play; he then attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge, from which he received an MA. Career As a stage actor, Shrapnel was a member of Lau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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