#Geoffrey Palmer

[sapphia]

so i've started a substack

[indelibletraces]

Just finished listening to the BBC radio sitcom “High Table, Lower Orders” - why, oh why, weren’t there at least 10 more seasons of this. It was brilliant! I came to it because of Samuel West, but I stayed for the entire cast and the writing.

Haven’t laughed that much in a long time - especially when it came to Geoffrey Palmer’s lines as the Master. Also, as an All Creatures Great and Small fan I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch the Major Sebright-Saunders scenes without cracking a smile thinking of Michael Maloney’s hilarious performance as the Dean.

So thankful that programs like this are still available for more people to discover.

[ljones41]

“TOMORROW NEVER DIES” (1997) Review

"TOMORROW NEVER DIES" (1997) Review Recently, I had watched "TOMORROW NEVER DIES", Pierce Brosnan’s second outing as James Bond. Roger Spottiswoode directed the 1997 Bond movie. It co-starred Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Pryce and Teri Hatcher.

  When I first saw "TOMORROW NEVER DIES" many years ago, I had a low opinion of it. I wish I could say that my opinion of the movie has improved over the years after this latest viewing . . . but I would be lying. TOMORROW NEVER DIES had some highlights, but unfortunately, it possessed more negative traits than positive ones. I think it would be best if I list both the good and the bad about this movie: Positive: *What else can I say? Michelle Yeoh. *I found Bond’s romantic scene with a Danish linguist rather sexy. *The film's foreign locations – Hamburg and Thailand (as Vietnam) - looked more lovely, thanks to Robert Elswit's cinematography. *Bond and Wai-Lin’s escape from Caver building in Vietnam proved to be one of the better stunts I have seen in the entire Bond franchise. *Thanks to Roger Spottiswoode's direction and Michel Arcand's editing, I thought the Saigon motorcycle chase was handled very well. *Pierce Brosnan gave a very natural performance, especially during his scenes with Yeoh. *Oddly enough, I rather liked Vincent Shirerpelli as Dr. Hamburg. He proved to be a more interesting henchman than Mr. Stamper. And his death proved to be even more interesting. *Mr. Gupta seemed like a pretty sharp and cool guy. *The movie's main theme song, performed by Sheryl Crow - what can I say? I realize it is not regarded as one of the best theme songs from the Bond franchise. But I have always had a soft spot for it, thanks to Crow's vocals and the lyrics she co-wrote with Mitchell Froom. I mean . . . the song did earn a Golden Globe nomination. Negative: *Brosnan's angsty scenes with Teri Hatcher seemed stiff and unnatural. And his voice sounded odd in scenes featuring Bond's attempt to suppress his emotions. *Why did the director Roger Spottiswode, have Brosnan shooting two machine guns at once during the final confrontation on Carver’s boat? The actor looked like a walking action movie cliché. *I thought Jonathan Pryce had portrayed one of the most overbearing and annoying villains in the Bond franchise. Only Sophie Marceau in the latter half of "THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH" may have surpassed him. *Is it just me or is the plot of this Bond movie seemed like an extended rip-off of a "LOIS & CLARK" episode from its first season? Perhaps the discovery of Teri Hatcher’s casting must have given screenwriter Bruce Feirstein an idea. *Why is it that nearly every sentence directed by Ms. Moneypenny to Bond came off as a sly, sexual joke? Their dialogue grew very annoying. *Spottiswoode managed to transform Bond and Q’s Meeting in Hamburg into a hammy production number. Q was simply in Hamburg to hand over an armored company car to Bond. What a bore and a waste of time! *Carver's top minion, Mr. Stamper, struck me as a second-rate version of Red Grant from "RUSSIA WITH LOVE". Where was Robert Shaw or Andreas Wisnewski when you need them? *The entire car chase sequence inside a Hamburg parking structure featured Bond using a remote control . . . ah, never mind! The entire sequence struck me as a bore. Even worse, it happened after the marvelous Bond/Kaufman scene. What a waste of my time. *Despite all of the gunfire exchanged and the other action during the final confrontation sequence aboard Carver’s boat, I thought it was too long . . . and boring. *Joe Don Baker seemed wasted in this film as C.I.A. liaison Jack Wade. *Bond’s Cover as a Banker – I am beginning to suspect that Bond makes a lousy undercover agent. By opening his mouth and hinting at Carver’s boat, he ended up exposing himself. What an idiot! *Teri Hatcher seemed wasted in this film. And her angsty scenes with Brosnan seemed forced - almost unnatural. TOMORROW NEVER DIES did managed to produce a few favorite lines of mine: Favorite Lines: "Believe me, Mr. Bond. I can shoot you from Stugartt and still create the proper effect." – Dr. Kaufman to Bond BOND: "You were pretty good with that hook." WAI-LIN: "That’s from growing up in a rough neighborhood. You were pretty good on the bike." BOND: "Well, that comes from not growing up at all." "No more absurd than starting a war for ratings." – Bond to Carver KAUFMAN: "Wait! I am just a professional doing a job!" BOND: "So am I." (Then kills Kaufman) Despite some virtues, "TOMORROW NEVER DIES" is not a favorite movie of mine. In fact, it is my least favorite James Bond movie featuring Pierce Brosnan. Unfortunately, director Roger Spottiswoode seemed unable to elevate Bruce Firstein's generic screenplay marred by an unoriginal plot and one of the hammiest villains in the franchise's history. Hmmm . . . too bad.

[pigs-in-art]

The Pig Of Happiness by Edward Monkton

[camyfilms]

PADDINGTON 2014

Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in. I think she must be right - because although I don't look like anyone else, I really do feel at home.

[mostlybritishactors]

Geoffrey Palmer

[veryslowreader]

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

Butterflies: "He'll Have to Go"

[kwebtv]

Richard Kane, Geoffrey Hutchings, John Gordon Sinclair, Robert Hardy and Geoffrey Palmer in "Hot Metal"

[judi-daily]

As Time Goes By, 1992-2005 S7 E4: The Bypass with Geoffrey Palmer clip: tayryn

[recycledmoviecostumes]

This livery collar or chain of office was first seen on Jeremy Northam as Sir Thomas More in Showtime’s 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒖𝒅𝒐𝒓𝒔. It was worn again in 2012 on Geoffrey Palmer as the Lord Chief Justice in 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑯𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝑪𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒏: 𝑯𝒆𝒏𝒓𝒚 𝑰𝑽 𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝟐.   Livery collars were generally used to denote the holding of an office or as a symbol of loyalty to a specific person or house. This particular design, usually referred to as a “Collar of Esses,” was used as early as 1371. There is speculation that the “S” stands for “Soverayne” (sovereign) or Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spirit), though the actual meaning is unknown.   Throughout the reigns of Henry IV, V, and VI, the “Esses” were typically considered to be a badge of the House of Lancaster. The pendant that adorned the end of the chain at this time was generally a white swan. The chain was used again during the reign of Henry VIII, where Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Thomas More, was painted wearing a chain of Esses, adorned at the end with a Tudor Rose.   This particular chain had to remove the Tudor Rose for 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑯𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝑪𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒏, as the Wars of the Roses had not yet begun, and thus the Tudor Rose – the combination of the Houses of York and Lancaster – did not yet exist.   Learn more on our website! Bit.ly/Acces080

[faymaker]

So I saw this post about how in the books, Dracula is actually an old man and I always imagined Dracula looked like older Christopher Lee, who played him while he was a kid. While looking him up I accidentally discovered that Christopher Lee was the coolest person in the universe and there is a non-zero chance he was actually Dracula in real life

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee CBE CStJ (May 27th 1922 - June 7th 2015), Sir because he was knighted in 2009 for his charity and his contributions to cinema

So first of all, I saw that he actually knew 8 LANGUAGES (English, Spanish, French, Swedish, Italian, German, Russian and Greek) and was also a staggering 6 feet 5 inches in height. Born in Belgravia in London, one of the most Dracula sounding places I’ve ever heard of, here’s some insane facts about him

•His father, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee of the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps, fought in the Boer War and World War 1

•His mother, Countess Estelle Marie (née Carandini di Sarzano) was an Edwardian beauty who was painted by Sir John Lavery, Oswald Birley, and Olive Snell, and sculpted by Clare Sheridan

•Lee's maternal great-grandfather, Jerome Carandini, the Marquis of Sarzano, was an Italian political refugee

•Jerome’s wife was English-born opera singer Marie Carandini (née Burgess), meaning that Lee is also related to famous opera singer Rosina Palmer

•His parents would divorce when he was four and his mother would marry Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, banker and uncle of Ian Fleming, making the author of the James Bond books Lee’s step cousin. Fleming would then offer him two roles as the antagonist in the film adaptations of his books, though he was only able to land the antagonist role in The Man With the Golden Gun. It’s believed his role in the film is significantly better and more complex than his book counterpart, played as “a dark side of Bond”

•His family would move and they lived next door to famous silent film actor Eric Maturin

•One night, before he was even 9 years old, he was introduced to Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, THE ASSASSINS OF GRIGORI RASPUTIN, WHOM LEE WOULD GO ON TO PLAY MANY YEARS LATER

•Lee applied for a scholarship to Eton, where his interview was in the presence of the ghost story author M.R. James, who is considered one of the best English language ghost story writers in history and who widely influenced modern horror

•He only missed by King’s Scholar by one place by being bad at math, one of the only flaws God gave him

•Due to lack of working opportunities, Lee was sent to the French Riviera and stayed with his sister and her friends while she was on holiday, and on the way there he stopped briefly in Paris with journalist Webb Miller, a friend of his step father. Webb Miller was an American journalist and war correspondent and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the execution of the French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, also known as BLUEBEARD. He also helped turn world opinion against British colonial rule of India

•While staying with Miller he witnessed Eugen Weidmann’s execution by guillotine, the last public execution ever performed in France

•Arriving in Menton, Lee stayed with the Russian Mazirov family, living among exiled princely families

•When World War 2 began, Lee volunteered to fight for the Finnish Army against the Soviet Union in the Winter War, and a year later, Lee would join the Home Guard. After his father died, he would join the Royal Air Force and was an intelligence officer and leading aircraft man and would later retire as a flight lieutenant in 1946

•While spending some time on leave in Naples, Lee climbed Mount Vesuvius, which erupted only three days later

•After nearly dying in an assault on Monte Cassino, Lee was able to visit Rome where he met his mother’s cousin Nicolò Carandini, who had fought in the Italian Resistance Movement. Nicolò would later go on to be the Italian Ambassador to Britain. Nicolò was actually the one to convince Lee to become an actor in the first place

•Oh yeah Christopher Lee was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects where he was tasked with HELPING TRACK DOWN NAZI WAR CRIMINALS

•Lee’s stepfather served as a captain in the Intelligence Corps

•He was actually told he was too tall to be an actor, though that would honestly help him considering one of his first roles was as The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein

•He was cast in Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N (1951) as a Spanish captain due to not only his fluency in Spanish but also he knew how to fence!

•Lee’s portrayal of Dracula had a crucial aspect of it which Bela Lugosi’s didn’t have: sexuality, a prime aspect of the original novels.

•While being trapped into playing Dracula under Hammer Film Productions, Lee actually hated the script so much that he would try his best to sneak actual lines from the original novel into the script

•Ironically, he was rejected from playing in The Longest Day because “he didn’t look like a military man”

•Christopher Lee was friends with author Dennis Wheatley, who “was responsible for bringing the occult into him”. He would go on to play in two film adaptations of his novels

•His biggest regret in his career is not taking the role of Sam Loomis from Halloween when offered to him

•Christopher Lee was the only person involved with the Lord of the Rings movies to have actually met J.R.R Tolkien

•When playing Count Dooku, he actually did most of the swordsmanship himself

•Christopher Lee was the second oldest living performer to enter the Billboard Top 100 charts with the song “Jingle Hell” at 91 years old. After media attention, he would get No. 18, and Lee became the oldest person to ever hit the Billboard Top 20 chart

I really am leaving some stuff out here and I may go on

[fredbensonenthusiast]

M.R. James and the “Twice A Fortnight” Club

This picture can be found in the book "Ghosts and Scholars"

According to the book, Fred was a "long-time friend of MRJ', [and] was a member of the Chitchat Society which heard the two original ‘ghost stories of an antiquary’ being read on 28th October 1893…..but very few of his own superb occult tales were distinctly Jamesian". The Twice a Fortnight club was an offshoot of the chitchat.

And thank you @alovelywaytospendanevening for this delightful snippet from Geoffrey Palmer’s book –

Clearly the plan didn’t succeed!

For more on MR James, there is an interesting podcast from ‘Gone Medieval’ about his career as a medieval scholar and how it influenced his writing, as well as his collaborations with Fred.

And a deep dive into one of Fred's most famous ghost stories 'negotium perambulans' can be found here along with some interesting biographical background.

[renaultphile]

Radclyffe Hall being teased by Fred Benson is so sweet. I can't imagine more different personalities 😮

EF Benson - As He Was, Geoffrey Palmer, 1988

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Beverley Nichols and the Bensons

E. F. (Fred) Benson, Beverley Nichols and A. C. (Arthur) Benson

Beverley Nichols dined with Fred and went into raptures about [Fred's] house, saying in his usual whimsical way that the furniture seemed to have been put in its place by the gentle hands of Time; the pictures had almost grown into the walls; and the carpets had sprung naturally from the floors like some gracious form of grass. According to Nichols, Fred's face glowed with happiness as he showed his guest round the house. He was described as ‘a smallish (Fred was five feet ten), pinkish, twinkling, urbane, grey-flannel-trousered man’ who had finally come to rest in a quiet London square, having retained the sparkle of his eyes, his taste for Italian wine and, above all, his love of a sheet of white paper in the stillness of the night. Fred, who had not ‘come to rest’ at all, noted with amusement the slight cattiness behind Nichols's gush. [Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd, E. F. Benson: As He Was]

Beverley Nichols was a lunch guest and on one occasion he came with his nephew. This must have been the time he was contemplating his piece “E. F. Benson, or Very Much at Home” (from Are they the same at home? 1927), because Mr Benson asked him if he was going to show it to him before he published and he said yes. But apparently he didn't, as Mr Benson was pretty peeved at a reference in the article to his novels "growing more and more dusty on the shelves of the subscription libraries. He doesn't care, I'm sure." In fact he did. "Mr Benson didn't like that at all," said Charlie [Tomlin]. Mr Benson had a mild dig at him in retaliation in some review of a publication where Beverley Nichols is in Italy or somewhere abroad and suddenly at the end realises it is April and the daffodils are blooming in England. So he has to rush home, of which Mr Benson wrote "I hope to God he got back in time." (Beverley Nichols was to retain a certain animosity towards Mr Benson until his own death in 1983.) [Cynthia and Tony Reavell, E. F. Benson: Remembered, and the World of Tilling]

Despite this shared animosity between him and Fred, Nichols previously maintained a long friendship with the older Benson brother, Arthur:

In the space of two minutes my war — my very special war — seemed much less unpleasant, because my new friend was none other than the Master of Magdalene, A. C. Benson, whose father had been one of Queen Victoria's favourite Archbishops. There were three Benson brothers, all distinguished in their separate ways, though the only one who is nowadays remembered is E. F. Benson, who is currently enjoying a belated revival as a writer of Edwardian comedy. A. C. Benson, whom I came to know very well indeed, was a true scholar and an admirable administrator, with a knack of coaxing large sums out of American philanthropists for the benefit of Magdalene, which was his chief love. A beautiful little college it was, with a library of exceptional distinction, founded on the original bequest from Samuel Pepys. Benson was a mixed-up man, who had a habit of developing sentimental attachments at a moment's notice, and no doubt this was what had occurred when he met me in the porch, though I did not at first realise the full implications of the encounter.

[…] Ever since my departure [A. C. Benson] had kept in touch through a constant stream of correspondence. No young man ever had a kindlier mentor; he wrote as an equal, drawing me out, seeking my opinions. He was not only kindly but practical. Realising that I had no means apart from my meagre Second Lieutenant's pay, he took some of my letters and sent them to an American magazine called The Outlook with the suggestion that they should be published anonymously. They were accepted, and the editors asked for more. Altogether I made five hundred dollars from The Outlook, which was a small fortune in those days. For the first time I knew the excitement of writing words on paper and selling them, of twisting my pen into symbols that could be exchanged for gold. Which is all that authorship has ever been about, or ever will be. I do not know whether The Outlook still survives and Benson's letters to me have long since disappeared, with the exception of one, which I kept and cherished because I had a feeling that it was a landmark in my life.

"My Dear Beverley, We do not know each other as we might have done, but if you have come to know me at all you will have realised that one of my ‘complexes’ — I believe that is the fashionable expression — is a hatred of waste. Perhaps that is why I can claim some success as the Master of Magdalene. I keep a very strict watch on the outgoings of the Bursary! But it is not only a matter of accountancy. It goes deeper than that. I am bewildered and alarmed by the profligacy of Nature, and even more bewildered and alarmed by the wastage of this hideous war. I think that you are being wasted. You have many talents and none of them is being used. With your precarious state of health your sphere of activities must be limited, but that does not mean that you can be of no use at all. As soon as I see an opportunity I propose to do something about this. Once you suggested to me — with that never-failing impertinence which I find so engaging — that I was an ‘intri- guant.’ (I had been telling you the story of the ingenious manner in which I had persuaded a Chicago millionaire to give us ten thousand dollars for our beloved Library.) You could not have paid me a higher compliment. Intrigue, to me, is the spice of life. I am an ancient spider, sitting in the centre of an ancient web, weaving ancient spells. And some of them will shortly be speeding in your direction. My affectionate greetings, A.C.B."

The ink of the letter has dimmed to a sickly sepia, and the address on the envelope, with its faded penny stamp, is almost illegible. But I still feel a glow of warmth as I read it, with half a century of disillusionment behind me. [Beverley Nichols, The Unforgiving Minute: Some Confessions from Childhood to the Outbreak of the Second World War]

[chernobog13]

The main cast of The Phantom (1943), a 15-chapter serial from Columbia Pictures:

Kenneth MacDonald as the villainous Dr. Bremmer, Tom Tyler as Geoffrey Prescott*/The Phantom, Frank Shannon as Prof. Davidson, and Jeanne Bates as Diana Palmer.

(* Yes, I know The Phantom's real name is Kit Walker. However, at that time in the comic strip he was still a mysterious, unnamed stranger. So the writers of the serial just made a name up.)