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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 British Academy Television Award for Best Actress, BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress in 1964. For her role in the film ''Alfie (1966 film), Alfie'' (1966), she received an Academy Awards, Academy Award nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer. In 1967, she starred in the Broadway (theatre), Broadway production of Pinter's ''The Homecoming'', and received a Tony Award nomination. Her other films included ''Accident (1967 film), Accident'' (1967), ''The Offence'' ... [...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 costume designer and set designer for stage and screen. His accolades include three Academy Awards and four Tony Awards. 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 daught ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Billington (critic)
Michael Keith Billington (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 Bald Pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Badel
Alan Fernand Badel (; 11 September 1923 – 19 March 1982) was an English actor who appeared frequently on stage, in film, on radio and on television. 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 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 Karl Denny, the impresario, in the film '' Bitter Harvest'' (1963). Around the same time he played opposite Vivien Merchant in a television version of Harold Pinter's play '' The Lover'' (also 1963) and as Edm ... [...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 four characters in the play: the wife, the husband, the wife's lover and the husband's whore. 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 ... [...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." Accordi ... [...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 s ... [...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 M ... [...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. History The original ''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 2010. In 2022, Arts Council England removed the theatre's ... [...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'', including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar, simultaneously or alternatingly both mundane and frightening; subtle yet contradictory and ambiguous characterizations; a comic yet menacing mood characteristic of mid-twentieth-century English tragicomedy; a plot featuring reversals and surprises that can be both funny and emotionally moving; and an unconventional ending that leaves at least some questions unresolved.See "Biobibliographical Notes" (including secondary sources of works cited in its attached bibliography); Billington, ''Harold Pinter''; and Merritt, ''Pinter in Play''. Setting and characters Pinter has confirmed ... [...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 the first major 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 Picture ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Golden Globe
The Golden Globe Awards are awards presented for excellence in both international film and television. It is an annual award ceremony held since 1944 to honor artists and professionals and their work. The ceremony 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. The eligibility period for Golden Globes corresponds from January 1 through December 31. The Golden Globes were not televised in 1969–1972, 1979, and 2022. The 2008 ceremony was canceled due to the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. Currently, the Golden Globes Awards are owned and operated by Dick Clark Productions, following its sale by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association on June 12, 2023. History The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) was founded in 1943 as the Hollywood Foreign Correspondent Association (HFCA) by Los Angeles–based foreign journalists seeking to develop a better-organized proc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academy Award
The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The Oscars are widely considered to be the most prestigious awards in the film industry. The major award categories, known as the Academy Awards of Merit, are presented during a live-televised Hollywood ceremony in February or March. It is the oldest worldwide entertainment awards ceremony. The 1st Academy Awards were held in 1929. The second ceremony, in 1930, was the first one broadcast by radio. The 1953 ceremony was the first one televised. It is the oldest of the four major annual American entertainment awards. Its counterparts—the Emmy Awards for television, the Tony Awards for theater, and the Grammy Awards for music—are modeled after the Academy Aw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
