John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408131072
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
In his lifetime Gielgud was acclaimed as the finest classical actor of the twentieth century and Jonathan Croall's biography from 2000 was instantly recognised by critics as a masterful achievement, one that was 'unlikely to be surpassed' (Sunday Telegraph). Since that time however a considerable amount of new material has come to light and the passing of time has allowed a new candour. John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star sees this peerless biographer return to his subject to offer the definitive life of Gielgud. For this new biography Croall's exhaustive research has included over a hundred new interviews with key people from his life and career, several hundred letters from Gielgud that have never been published, scores of letters written to him and archived versions of his film and television work. As Gielgud worked increasingly in this medium during the last third of his life much greater attention is given to this than in the earlier work. Fresh light is thrown on his professional relationships with figures such as Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans, and on turbulent episodes of his private life. The overall result is a a much more rounded, candid and richly textured portrait of this celebrated and complex actor.

Author: Stanley Wells
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191008346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Great Shakespeare Actors offers a series of essays on great Shakespeare actors from his time to ours, starting by asking whether Shakespeare himself was the first—the answer is No—and continuing with essays on the men and women who have given great stage performances in his plays from Elizabethan times to our own. They include both English and American performers such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, Ira Aldridge, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Janet Suzman, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Kenneth Branagh. Individual chapters tell the story of their subjects' careers, but together these overlapping tales combine to offer a succinct, actor-centred history of Shakespearian theatrical performance. Stanley Wells examines what it takes to be a great Shakespeare actor and then offers a concise sketch of each actor's career in Shakespeare, an assessment of their specific talents and claims to greatness, and an account, drawing on contemporary reviews, biographies, anecdotes, and, for some of the more recent actors, the author's personal memories of their most notable performances in Shakespeare roles.

Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849435863
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
'A glorious compendium of John's scintillating irreverences and fabulous faux pas... He was one of the greatest of all theatrical personalities, and these utterly characteristic throwaway squibs bring him vividly back to life.' Simon Callow This delicious feast of "Gielgoodies", compiled by Gielgud's biographer, reveals a less well-known side to this celebrated man of the theatre: his lightning wit, his love of scandal and gossip, his wicked delight in putting down his fellow-artists, his relish of bawdy humour. Full of startling new material, drawn from many unpublished letters and Jonathan Croall's extensive interviews, the book also celebrates the man who dropped a thousand bricks. Gielgud's excruciating gaffes were legendary, and here are both the famous and the unknown, collected in all their glory. Whether committed backstage, in the wings or in rehearsals, on film sets or in television studios, they bring this merry and much-loved man vividly to life.

Author: Tony Tracy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000830144
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This volume offers a unique exploration of how ageing masculinities are constructed and represented in contemporary international cinema. With chapters spanning a range of national cinemas, the primarily European focus of the book is juxtaposed with analysis of the social and cultural constructions of manhood and the "anti-ageing" impulses of male stardom in contemporary Hollywood. These themes are inflected in different ways throughout the volume, from considering how old age is not the monolithic and unified life stage with which it is often framed, to exploring issues of queerness, sexuality, and asexuality, as well as themes such as national cinema and dementia. Offering a diverse and multifaceted portrait of ageing and masculinity in contemporary cinema, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film and screen studies, gender and masculinity studies, and cultural gerontology.

Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: Book Guild Publishing
ISBN: 1915853982
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
This unusual collection of short stories captures the essence of life in the theatre. Behind the superficial glamour lies a world marked by ambition, jealousy and heartache.

Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
Based on interviews with over 100 friends and colleagues who worked with Gielgud, this biography covers Gielgud's childhood amongst his famous Terry relations, his early struggles as a young actor, his triumphs in Shakespeare at the Old Vic and his late flowering as an Oscar-winning film star.

Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350030740
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Hamlet is arguably the most famous play on the planet, and the greatest of all Shakespeare's works. Its rich story and complex leading role have provoked intense debate and myriad interpretations. To play such a uniquely multi-faceted character as Hamlet represents the supreme challenge for a young actor. Performing Hamlet contains Jonathan Croall's revealing in-depth interviews with five distinguished actors who have played the Prince this century: Jude Law: 'You get to speak possibly the most beautiful lines about humankind ever given to an actor.' Simon Russell Beale: 'Hamlet is a very hospitable role: it will take anything you throw at it.' David Tennant: 'No other part has been so satisfying. It was tough, but utterly compelling.' Maxine Peake: 'Hamlet was a way of accessing bits of me as an actress I've not been able to access before.' Adrian Lester: 'Working with Peter Brook on Hamlet changed me as an actor, and for the better.' The book benefits from the author's interviews with six leading directors of the play during these years: Greg Doran, Nicholas Hytner, Michael Grandage, John Caird, Sarah Frankcom and Simon Godwin. Many other productions are described, from those starring Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield in the 1950s, to the performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott and Paapa Essiedu in recent times. The volume also includes an updated text of the author's earlier book Hamlet Observed, and an account of actors' experiences of performing at Elsinore.

Author: Gregory Woods
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300219563
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

Author: Simon Callow
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698195531
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The third volume of Simon Callow’s acclaimed Orson Welles biography, covering the period of his exile from America (1947–1964), when he produced some of his greatest works, including Touch of Evil In One-Man Band, the third volume in his epic and all-inclusive four-volume survey of Orson Welles’s life and work, the celebrated British actor Simon Callow again probes in comprehensive and penetrating detail into one of the most complex, contradictory artists of the twentieth century, whose glorious triumphs (and occasional spectacular failures) in film, radio, theater, and television introduced a radical and original approach that opened up new directions in the arts. This volume begins with Welles’s self-exile from America, and his realization that he could function only to his own satisfaction as an independent film maker, a one-man band, in fact, which committed him to a perpetual cycle of money raising. By 1964, he had filmed Othello, which took three years to complete; Mr. Arkadin, the most puzzling film in his output; and a masterpiece in another genre, Touch of Evil, which marked his one return to Hollywood, and like all too many of his films was wrested from his grasp and reedited. Along the way he made inroads into the fledgling medium of television and a number of stage plays, of which his 1955 London Moby-Dick is considered by theater historians to be one of the seminal productions of the century. His private life was as spectacularly complex and dramatic as his professional life. The book reveals what it was like to be around Welles, and, with an intricacy and precision rarely attempted before, what it was like to be him, answering the riddle that has long fascinated film scholars and lovers alike: Whatever happened to Orson Welles?

Author: Jonathan Croall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474223885
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
King Lear is arguably the most complex and demanding play in the whole of Shakespeare. Once thought impossible to stage, today it is performed with increasing frequency, both in Britain and America. It has been staged more often in the last fifty years than in the previous 350 years of its performance history, its bleak message clearly chiming in with the growing harshness, cruelty and violence of the modern world. Performing King Lear offers a very different and practical perspective from most studies of the play, being centred firmly on the reality of creation and performance. The book is based on Jonathan Croall's unique interviews with twenty of the most distinguished actors to have undertaken this daunting role during the last forty years, including Donald Sinden, Tim Pigott-Smith, Timothy West, Julian Glover, Oliver Ford Davies, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Plummer, Michael Pennington, Brian Cox and Simon Russell Beale. He has also talked to two dozen leading directors who have staged the play in London, Stratford and elsewhere. Among them are Nicholas Hytner, David Hare, Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Jonathan Miller and Dominic Dromgoole. Each reveals in precise and absorbing detail how they have dealt with the formidable challenge of interpreting and staging Shakespeare's great tragedy.