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Vivien Merchant
Ada Brand Thomson (22 July 1929 – 3 October 1982), known professionally as Vivien Merchant, was an English actress. She began her career in 1942, and became known for dramatic roles on stage and in films. In 1956 she married the playwright Harold Pinter and performed in many of his plays. Merchant achieved considerable success from the 1950s to the 1970s, winning the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress in 1964. For her role in the film ''Alfie'' (1966), she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer. In 1967, she starred in the Broadway production of Pinter's ''The Homecoming'', and received a Tony Award nomination. Her other films included ''Accident'' (1967), ''The Offence'' (1972), ''Frenzy'' (1972), ''The Homecoming'' (1973), and ''The Maids'' (1975). Suffering from depression and alcoholism as her marriage ended, she died in 1982, two years after her divorce. Career Merchant took her stage name as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cecil Beaton
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as an Oscar–winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre. Early life and education Beaton was born on 14 January 1904 in Hampstead, north London, the son of Ernest Walter Hardy Beaton (1867–1936), a prosperous timber merchant, and his wife, Esther "Etty" Sisson (1872–1962). His grandfather, Walter Hardy Beaton (1841–1904), had founded the family business of "Beaton Brothers Timber Merchants and Agents", and his father followed into the business. Ernest Beaton was an amateur actor and met his wife, Cecil's mother Esther ("Etty"), when playing the lead in a play. She was the daughter of a Cumbrian blacksmith named Joseph Sisson and had come to London to visit her married sister. Ernest and Etty Beaton had four children – Cecil; two daughters, Nancy Elizabeth Louise Hardy Beaton (190 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Billington (critic)
Michael Keith Billington OBE (born 16 November 1939) is a British author and arts critic. He writes for ''The Guardian'', and was the paper's chief drama critic from 1971 to 2019. Billington is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts. He is the authorised biographer of the playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008). Early life and education Billington was born on 16 November 1939, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, and attended Warwick School, an independent boys' school in Warwick. He attended St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1958 to 1961, where he studied English and was appointed theatre critic of '' Cherwell''. He graduated with a BA degree. As a member of Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), in 1959, Billington played the Priest in '' The Birds'', by Aristophanes, his only appearance as an actor, and, in 1960, he directed a production of Eugène Ionesco's ''The Ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Badel
Alan Fernand Badel (; 11 September 1923 – 19 March 1982) was an English stage actor who also appeared frequently in the cinema, radio and television and was noted for his richly textured voice which was once described as "the sound of tears". Early life Badel was born in Rusholme, Manchester, and educated at Burnage High School. He fought in France and Germany during the Second World War, serving as a paratrooper on D-Day. He partially lost his hearing when a shell exploded near him. Career In his early career, he played leading parts, including Romeo and Hamlet, with the Old Vic and Stratford companies. Badel's earliest film role was as John the Baptist in the Rita Hayworth version of '' Salome'' (1953), a version in which the story was altered to make Salome a Christian convert who dances for Herod in order to save John rather than have him condemned to death. He portrayed Richard Wagner in ''Magic Fire'' (1955), a biopic about the composer. He also played the role of K ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Lover (play)
''The Lover'' is a 1962 one-act play by Harold Pinter, originally written for television, but subsequently performed on stage. The play contrasts bourgeois domesticity with sexual yearning. As with the drama of Anton Chekhov, some of Pinter's plays support "serious" and "comic" interpretations; ''The Lover'' has been staged successfully both as an ironic comedy on the one hand and as a nervy drama on the other. As is often the case with Pinter, the play probably contains both. Plot Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are three characters in the play: the wife, the husband and the lover. But the lover who comes to call in the afternoons is revealed to be the husband adopting a role. He plays the lover for her: she plays the whore for him. As the play goes on the man (first as the lover and then as the husband) expresses a wish to stop the pretend adultery, to the dismay of the woman. Finally, the husband suddenly switches back to the role of the lover. Original pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Collection (play)
''The Collection'' is a 1961 play by Harold Pinter featuring two couples, James and Stella and Harry and Bill. It is a comedy laced with typically "Pinteresque" ambiguity and "implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses" (''Oxford English Dictionary''). Setting ''The Collection'' takes place on a divided stage, shared by a house in London's Belgravia, and a flat in Chelsea, with another space between them where telephone calls take place; according to Pinter's stage description, the "three areas" comprise "two peninsulas and a promontory" (''Three Plays'' 3. Bill, a dress designer in his twenties, lives with Harry, a man in his forties, in Harry's house, in Belgravia, which has "Elegant decor" (''Three Plays'' 3. Stella, another dress designer, in her thirties like her husband and business partner James, lives with him in "James' flat" in Chelsea, which has "Tasteful contemporary furnishing." Accordin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Night Out (play)
''A Night Out'' is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1959. Albert Stokes, a loner in his late twenties lives with his emotionally suffocating mother and works in an office. After being falsely accused of groping a female at an office party, he wanders the streets until he meets a girl, who invites him to her flat, where he responds to her overtures by angrily demeaning her. Then he returns home to his mother. The play had its first performance on the BBC Third Programme on 1 March 1960, with Pinter's acting-school classmate and friend Barry Foster as Albert Stokes, Harold Pinter as Seeley, and Vivien Merchant, Pinter's first wife, as the Girl. (Full production details and "Radio Review" accessible at www.haroldpinter.org.) Its performance on television a month later, on 24 April 1960, was Pinter's first big success as a playwright in that medium. As presented on ABC Weekend TV's ''Armchair Theatre'', it was viewed by 6.4 million households, at that time a record for a sin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Slight Ache
''A Slight Ache'' is a tragicomic play written by Harold Pinter in 1958 and first published by Methuen in London in 1961. It concerns a married couple's dreams and desires, focusing mostly on the husband's fears of the unknown, of growing old, and of the "Other" as a threat to his self-identity. Characters *Edward *Flora *a match seller Themes One of the main themes involves one's insecurity about threats to one's self-identity embodied in the character of the matchseller, of whom one of the other two characters, Edward, is utterly terrified. The theme of growing old is also prevalent: according to Edward, the Matchseller is old, practically stone deaf, and has a glass eye, and the middle-aged Edward and Flora continually reminisce about their youth throughout the play. Threat of the "Other" and obsessive romantic jealousy are also recurrent. Productions ''A Slight Ache'' premièred as a radio broadcast in 1959, prior to its first stage production. On radio, because the Mat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hampstead Theatre
Hampstead Theatre is a theatre in South Hampstead in the London Borough of Camden. It specialises in commissioning and producing new writing, supporting and developing the work of new writers. Roxana Silbert has been the artistic director since 2019. History The original theatre (The Hampstead Theatre Club) was created in 1959 in Moreland Hall, a parish church school hall in Holly Bush Vale, Hampstead Village. James Roose-Evans was the founder and first Artistic Director, and the 1959–1960 season included ''The Dumb Waiter'' and ''The Room'' by Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco's ''Jacques'' and ''The Sport of My Mad Mother'' by Ann Jellicoe. In 1962 the company moved to a portable cabin in Swiss Cottage where it remained for nearly 40 years, before, in 2003, the new purpose-built Hampstead Theatre opened in Swiss Cottage. The main auditorium seats 373 people. The studio theatre, Hampstead Downstairs, seats up to 100 people and was turned into a laboratory for new writing in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Room (play)
''The Room'' is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, ''The Birthday Party (play), The Birthday Party'', including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work#Pinteresque, Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterisation, characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy#Later developments, tragicomedy; a plot (narrative), plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional Dénouement, ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.See Harold Pinter#Bio-bibliography, "Biobibliographical Note ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Board Of Review
The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures is a non-profit organization of New York City area film enthusiasts. Its awards, which are announced in early December, are considered an early harbinger of the film awards season that culminates in the Academy Awards. Origins The organization which is now a private organization of film enthusiasts has its roots in 1909 when Charles Sprague Smith and others formed the New York Board of Motion Picture Censorship to make recommendations to the Mayor's office concerning controversial films. It quickly became known as the National Board of Motion Picture Censorship. In an effort to avoid government censorship of films, the National Board became the unofficial clearinghouse for new movies. The Board's stated purpose was to endorse films of merit and champion the new "art of the people", which was transforming America's cultural life. In March 1916 the Board changed its name to the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures to avoid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Golden Globe
The Golden Globe Awards are accolades bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association beginning in January 1944, recognizing excellence in both American and international film and television. Beginning in 2022, there are 105 members of the HFPA. The annual ceremony at which the awards are presented is normally held every January and has been a major part of the film industry's awards season, which culminates each year in the Academy Awards, although the Golden Globes' relevance has been declining in recent years. The eligibility period for the Golden Globes corresponds to the calendar year (from January 1 through December 31). History The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) was founded in 1943 by Los Angeles-based foreign journalists seeking to develop a better organized process of gathering and distributing cinema news to non-U.S. markets. One of the organization's first major endeavors was to establish a ceremony similar to the Academy Awards to honor film achi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academy Award
The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment industry worldwide. Given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the awards are an international recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements, as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The various category winners are awarded a copy of a golden statuette as a trophy, officially called the "Academy Award of Merit", although more commonly referred to by its nickname, the "Oscar". The statuette, depicting a knight rendered in the Art Deco style, was originally sculpted by Los Angeles artist George Stanley from a design sketch by art director Cedric Gibbons. The 1st Academy Awards were held in 1929 at a private dinner hosted by Douglas Fairbanks in The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The Academy Awards cerem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
