Skip to main content

One Knight Only: what we learned about Judi, Maggie, Ian and Derek in their Zoom knees-up

In an event for the theatrical charity Acting for Others, Dench, Smith, McKellen and Jacobi spoke about their highs and lows, superstitions and acting tips

They are, according to their pal Kenneth Branagh, the “greatest quartet of Shakespearean actors on the planet”. And on Sunday evening, for the charity get-together One Knight Only, hosted by Branagh on Zoom, Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench joined Sirs Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi to share acting anecdotes, tell Christmas cracker jokes and speak a bit of verse. It was pure thespian gold – here’s a handful of revelations.

Ian McKellen shared the stage with a ghost …
At least, that’s what Patrick Stewart told him. When they were midway through Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket 10 years ago, Stewart turned to look at McKellen and “his face was ashen and he stopped acting”, remembered McKellen. “He said afterwards he had seen a man standing next to me in a brown overall jacket.” They decided it was a deceased stage manager. Apparently, Stewart often sees ghosts and before he does he always smells bacon. (Perhaps it’s ham, suggests Dench.)

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/36iuyXg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...