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Peter Elliott (British Actor)
Peter Elliott (born 1956) is a British actor best known for playing apes and other non-human characters in film and television. Early life Elliott grew up in Hertfordshire; one parent was a woodwork teacher. He was trained as a Method actor at East 15 Acting School. His interests as an early-career performer were in highly physical forms of acting, doing acrobatics, martial arts, and boxing. Acting career Elliott's specialization in ape roles began in 1978, when he auditioned for the film '' Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes'' (released 1984). Producers on the film, disappointed by a pre-production attempt to create ape movement using mime and animatronics, instead hired Elliott on the strength of a "very apelike" screen test. Tasked with determining whether costumed human actors should be mixed with real apes on the production, Elliott spent two years as a head of research and development for the film (eventually opting for an all-human cast), and was sent out to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For government statistical purposes, it forms part of the East of England region. Hertfordshire covers . It derives its name – via the name of the county town of Hertford – from a hart (stag) and a ford, as represented on the county's coat of arms and on the flag. Hertfordshire County Council is based in Hertford, once the main market town and the current county town. The largest settlement is Watford. Since 1903 Letchworth has served as the prototype garden city; Stevenage became the first town to expand under post-war Britain's New Towns Act of 1946. In 2013 Hertfordshire had a population of about 1,140,700, with Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage, Watford and St Albans (the county's only ''city'') each having between 50,000 and 100,000 r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creole language, creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutination, agglutinative morphology. ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in West Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has been propagated w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling's works of fiction include the ''Jungle Book'' duology ('' The Jungle Book'', 1894; '' The Second Jungle Book'', 1895), ''Kim'' (1901), the '' Just So Stories'' (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include " Mandalay" (1890), " Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), " The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.Rutherford, Andrew (1987). General Preface to the Editions of Rudyard Kipling, in "Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".Rutherford, Andrew ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Birmingham Stage Company
The Birmingham Stage Company was founded by the Actor/Manager Neal Foster in 1992, with Sir Derek Jacobi and Paul Scofield CH as patrons. It presents productions both on its home stage at The Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham and touring throughout the United Kingdom and internationally, most recently Delhi, Sydney and Dubai. Box Office receipts account for 100% of the company's income. Although the company has staged productions of plays by American authors such as Tennessee Williams, David Mamet and Arthur Miller, it has concentrated much of its work on collaborating with Britain's top living writers, including David Walliams, David Almond, Michael Morpurgo, Philip Pullman, Terry Deary, and has also enjoyed great success with its productions of Roald Dahl stories such as Fantastic Mr Fox, George's Marvellous Medicine, The Witches and James and the Giant Peach. The company is strongly associated with the world stage premieres of Horrible Histories including Terrible Tudors, Vil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack The Giant Slayer
''Jack the Giant Slayer'' (previously titled ''Jack the Giant Killer'') is a 2013 American fantasy adventure film directed by Bryan Singer and written by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney, from a story by Lemke and David Dobkin. The film, based on the British fairy tales " Jack the Giant Killer" and "Jack and the Beanstalk", stars Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, and Ewan McGregor. The film tells the story of Jack, a young farmhand who must rescue a princess from a race of giants after inadvertently opening a gateway to their land in the sky. Development of ''Jack the Giant Slayer'' began in 2005, when Lemke first pitched the idea. D. J. Caruso was hired to direct the film in January 2009, but in September of that year, Caruso was replaced by Singer, who hired McQuarrie and Studney to rework the script. The main characters were cast between February and March 2011, and principal photography began in April 2011 in Englan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Snow White And The Huntsman
''Snow White and the Huntsman'' is a 2012 American fantasy film based on the German fairy tale "Snow White" compiled by the Brothers Grimm. The directorial debut of Rupert Sanders, it was written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini, from a screen story by Daugherty. The cast includes Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin, and Bob Hoskins in his final film performance. In the film's retelling of the tale, Snow White grows up imprisoned by her evil stepmother, Queen Ravenna, a powerful sorceress. After Snow White escapes into the forest, Ravenna enlists Eric the Huntsman to capture her, but he becomes her companion in a quest to overthrow Ravenna. ''Snow White and the Huntsman'' was theatrically released in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2012 and in the United States on June 1, 2012, by Universal Pictures. The film was a box office success, having grossed $396 million worldwide against a $170 million budget. Critics praised the production ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Where The Wild Things Are (film)
''Where the Wild Things Are'' is a 2009 fantasy adventure drama film directed by Spike Jonze. Written by Jonze and Dave Eggers, it is based on Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's book of the same name. It combines live-action, performers in costumes, animatronics, and computer-generated imagery (CGI). The film stars Max Records, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ruffalo, and features the voices of Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, and Forest Whitaker. The film centers on a lonely young boy named Max who sails away to an island inhabited by creatures known as the "Wild Things", who declare Max their king. In the early 1980s, Disney considered adapting the film as a blend of traditionally animated characters and computer-generated environments, but development did not go past a test film to see how the animation hybridizing would result. In 2001, Universal Studios acquired rights to the book's adaptation and initially attempted to develop a computer-animat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (film)
''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' is a 2005 science fiction comedy film directed by Garth Jennings, based upon previous works in the media franchise of the same name, created by Douglas Adams. It stars Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Nighy, Anna Chancellor, John Malkovich, and the voices of Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren, Thomas Lennon, Richard Griffiths, Ian McNeice, Bill Bailey and Alan Rickman. Adams co-wrote the screenplay with Karey Kirkpatrick but died in 2001, before production began; the film is dedicated to Adams. The film received positive reviews from critics and grossed over $100 million worldwide. Plot One Thursday morning, Arthur Dent discovers that his house is to be immediately demolished to make way for a bypass. He tries delaying the bulldozers by lying down in front of them. Ford Prefect, a friend of Arthur's, convinces him to go to a pub with him. Over several pints of beer, Ford explains that he is an alien from the vicinity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Congo (film)
''Congo'' is a 1995 American science fiction action-adventure film based on the 1980 novel by Michael Crichton. It was directed by Frank Marshall and stars Laura Linney, Dylan Walsh, Ernie Hudson, Grant Heslov, Joe Don Baker, Tim Curry and Bruce Campbell. ''Congo'' was released on June 9, 1995, by Paramount Pictures. It received negative reviews but performed better than expected at the box office. Plot While searching for rare blue diamonds that could lead to a new revolutionary communications laser, TraviCom employees Charles Travis and Jeffrey Weems discover the ruins of a lost city near a volcanic site in a remote part of the Congo jungle. Karen Ross, Charles' ex-fiancée and a former CIA operative, and R. B. Travis, Charles' father and the CEO of TraviCom, lose contact with the team while tracking their progress at the company headquarters. Activating a remote camera, they find the camp destroyed and strewn with corpses, as well as a savage ape-like creature that destro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quest For Fire (film)
''Quest for Fire'' (french: La Guerre du feu) is a 1981 prehistoric fantasy adventure film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, written by Gérard Brach and starring Everett McGill, Ron Perlman, Nameer El-Kadi and Rae Dawn Chong. The Canadian-French co-production is a film adaptation of the 1911 Belgian novel ''The Quest for Fire'' by J.-H. Rosny. The story is set in Paleolithic Europe (80,000 years ago), with its plot surrounding the struggle for control of fire by early humans. The film was critically acclaimed. It won the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best Makeup, and the César Awards for Best Film and Best Director. At the 5th Genie Awards, the film was nominated in seven categories and won in five (Best Actress, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Overall Sound). Plot The ''Ulam'' are a tribe of cavemen who possess fire in the form of a carefully guarded small flame which they use to start larger fires. Driven out of their home after a blo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IndieWire
IndieWire (sometimes stylized as indieWIRE or Indiewire) is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Hollywood and the expanding universes of TV and streaming." IndieWire is part of Penske Media. History The original IndieWire newsletter launched on July 15, 1996, billing itself as "the daily news service for independent film." Following in the footsteps of various web- and AOL-based editorial ventures, IndieWire was launched as a free daily email publication in the summer of 1996 by New York- and Los Angeles-based filmmakers and writers Eugene Hernandez, Mark Rabinowitz, Cheri Barner, Roberto A. Quezada, and Mark L. Feinsod. Initially distributed to a few hundred subscribers, the readership grew rapidly, passing 6,000 in late 1997. In January 1997, IndieWire made its first appearance at the Sundance Film Festival to begin their coverage o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Buddy (1997 Film)
''Buddy'' is a 1997 American family comedy drama film written and directed by Caroline Thompson, produced by Jim Henson Pictures and American Zoetrope, and released by Columbia Pictures on June 6, 1997. It starred Rene Russo as Mrs. Gertrude "Trudy" Lintz and Robbie Coltrane as her husband. The film was based on the life of a gorilla called Massa with elements of Gertrude Lintz's other gorilla Gargantua (who was called "Buddy" at the time). In real life, Massa became the oldest gorilla on record until 2008, while Buddy/Gargantua died young as a circus attraction and his remains are now on display in a museum. The gorilla suit used for Buddy was created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Plot Eccentric millionaire Trudy is an animal lover who is not apologetic about it. Trudy takes her two newly arrived chimpanzees Joe and Maggie to the movies, causing lots of stares. Returning home to her grand estate, she greets her varied animals: kittens, horses, a cheeky talking green parrot, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
