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mimi-0007 · 11 months ago

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FATHER & SON: James Earl Jones with his Father Robert Earl Jones on Stage in the 1962 Production "Moon on a Rainbow Shawl."

Robert Earl Jones (February 3, 1910 – September 7, 2006), sometimes credited as Earl Jones, was an American actor and professional boxer. One of the first prominent Black film stars, Jones was a living link with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, having worked with Langston Hughes early in his career.

Jones was best known for his leading roles in films such as Lying Lips (1939) and later in his career for supporting roles in films such as The Sting (1973), Trading Places (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), and Witness (1985).

Jones was born in northwestern Mississippi; the specific location is unclear as some sources indicate Senatobia, while others suggest nearby Coldwater. He left school at an early age to work as a sharecropper to help his family. He later became a prizefighter. Under the name "Battling Bill Stovall", he was a sparring partner of Joe Louis.

Jones became interested in theater after he moved to Chicago, as one of the thousands leaving the South in the Great Migration. He moved on to New York by the 1930s. He worked with young people in the Works Progress Administration, the largest New Deal agency, through which he met Langston Hughes, a young poet and playwright. Hughes cast him in his 1938 play, Don't You Want to Be Free?.

Jones also entered the film business, appearing in more than twenty films. His film career started with the leading role of a detective in the 1939 race film Lying Lips, written and directed by Oscar Micheaux, and Jones made his next screen appearance in Micheaux's The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940). Jones acted mostly in crime movies and dramas after that, with such highlights as Wild River (1960) and One Potato, Two Potato (1964). In the Oscar-winning 1973 film The Sting, he played Luther Coleman, an aging grifter whose con is requited with murder leading to the eponymous "sting". In the later 20th century, Jones appeared in several other noted films: Trading Places (1983) and Witness (1985).

Toward the end of his life, Jones was noted for his stage portrayal of Creon in The Gospel at Colonus (1988), a black musical version of the Oedipus legend. He also appeared in episodes of the long-running TV shows Lou Grant and Kojak. One of his last stage roles was in a 1991 Broadway production of Mule Bone by Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, another important writer of the Harlem Renaissance. His last film was Rain Without Thunder (1993).

Although blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s due to involvement with leftist groups, Jones was ultimately honored with a lifetime achievement award by the U.S. National Black Theatre Festival.

Jones was married three times. As a young man, he married Ruth Connolly (died 1986) in 1929; they had a son, James Earl Jones. Jones and Connolly separated before James was born in 1931, and the couple divorced in 1933. Jones did not come to know his son until the mid-1950s. He adopted a second son, Matthew Earl Jones. Jones died on September 7, 2006, in Englewood, New Jersey, from natural causes at age 96.

THEATRE

1945 The Hasty Heart (Blossom) Hudson Theatre, Broadway

1945 Strange Fruit (Henry) McIntosh NY theater production

1948 Volpone (Commendatori) City Center

1948 Set My People Free (Ned Bennett) Hudson Theatre, Broadway

1949 Caesar and Cleopatra (Nubian Slave) National Theatre, Broadway

1952 Fancy Meeting You Again (Second Nubian) Royale Theatre, Broadway

1956 Mister Johnson (Moma) Martin Beck Theater, Broadway

1962 Infidel Caesar (Soldier) Music Box Theater, Broadway

1962 The Moon Besieged (Shields Green) Lyceum Theatre, Broadway

1962 Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (Charlie Adams) East 11th Street Theatre, New York

1968 More Stately Mansions (Cato) Broadhurst Theatre, Broadway

1975 All God's Chillun Got Wings (Street Person) Circle in the Square Theatre, Broadway

1975 Death of a Salesman (Charley)

1977 Unexpected Guests (Man) Little Theatre, Broadway

1988 The Gospel at Colonus (Creon) Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Broadway

1991 Mule Bone (Willie Lewis) Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway

FILMS

1939 Lying Lips (Detective Wenzer )

1940 The Notorious Elinor Lee (Benny Blue)

1959 Odds Against Tomorrow (Club Employee uncredited)

1960 Wild River (Sam Johnson uncredited)

1960 The Secret of the Purple Reef (Tobias)

1964 Terror in the City (Farmer)

1964 One Potato, Two Potato (William Richards)

1968 Hang 'Em High

1971 Mississippi Summer (Performer)

1973 The Sting (Luther Coleman)

1974 Cockfighter (Buford)

1977 Proof of the Man (Wilshire Hayward )

1982 Cold River (The Trapper)

1983 Trading Places (Attendant)

1983 Sleepaway Camp (Ben)

1984 The Cotton Club (Stage Door Joe)

1984 Billions for Boris (Grandaddy)

1985 Witness (Custodian)

1988 Starlight: A Musical Movie (Joe)

1990 Maniac Cop 2 (Harry)

1993 Rain Without Thunder (Old Lawyer)

TELEVISION

1964 The Defenders (Joe Dean) Episode: The Brother Killers

1976 Kojak (Judge) Episode: Where to Go if you Have Nowhere to Go?

1977 The Displaced Person (Astor) Television movie

1978 Lou Grant (Earl Humphrey) Episode: Renewal

1979 Jennifer's Journey (Reuven )Television movie

1980 Oye Ollie (Performer) Television series

1981 The Sophisticated Gents (Big Ralph Joplin) 3 episodes

1982 One Life to Live

1985 Great Performances (Creon) Episode: The Gospel at Colonus

1990 True Blue (Performer) Episode: Blue Monday

#james earl jones #black tumblr #black literature #black community #black excellence #blackexcellence365 #actor #robert earl jones #stage actor

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bowditch · 5 months ago

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HELLO?!?

#hamlet

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ladykailitha · 15 hours ago

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Yellow Daisies Epilogue Part 2

This is the end, two weeks after Valentine's Day. Oof. And this is the longest chapter I've every put out because I refuse to cut it up and prolong the ending longer than I have to.

We have the next five anniversaries (and a little bit of their lives as they age). Also minor angst in seven and eight.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Epilogue Pt 1

~ 6. Iron Jasmine- Unconditional Love

Their sixth anniversary was in London. Like actual fucking London. Steve couldn’t believe it. He had traveled with his parents, because they couldn’t leave him behind until he was old enough to fend for himself, so of course he had been to places like LA, Chicago, New York and even sunny sojourns in places like the Bahamas and the Caribbean. But his dad didn’t like foreigners, mostly in general, but he really hated Europe.

It wasn’t until he got older that he realized it was because of how they treated the working class, Thatcher not withstanding. He liked her the way he liked Reagan.

So Steve seeing London for the first time was incredible. Eddie and Steve did all the tourist-y things like see the Tower of London and the London Museum of Natural History. But they also did things like visiting old graveyards and taking in a play at the Prince Albert Royal Theatre. They saw ‘The Phantom of the Opera��.

Steve would have called it a mistake with the way that Eddie played up the Phantom role, going so far as even buying a cape and mask, but for one key thing.

That silliness was exactly why he loved his partner with all his heart. He even almost managed to walk off with one of the Tower ravens if the bird hadn't escaped.

After a nice dinner at the Savoy they went for a romantic walk along the Thames.

“Your flowers are back at the hotel,” Eddie murmured. “But I didn’t want to give them to you at dinner, new places make me itch between my shoulder blades.”

Steve nodded. He knew. They couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that a place wasn’t homophobic and just preferred to keep that between the two of them.

“That’s okay,” he said with a smile. “I understand. I get to have a piece of you that no one else does and yeah it’s scary now, but it won’t be always be this way.”

Eddie’s answering smile was a little fragile and that was okay with Steve. He would keep all of fragile moments so that no one could use them against him.

“So what’s the theme this year?” Steve asked with a grin and bumping their shoulders together.

Eddie snorted. “I’m surprised you don’t have the next thirty years memorized.”

Steve shrugged. “I like not knowing so that I can be amazed every time. Like I know it’s silver for twenty-five years and gold for fifty.” He shrugged again. “The rest though? I leave to you.”

Eddie’s face lit up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“The next bunch are almost all different metals,” Eddie explained, talking happily. “All except year nine which is pottery, but I have an idea for that one. So since they’re metals, I thought I’d learn how to make flowers out of the different metals.”

“That’s awesome!” Steve enthused. And it was, too. There were a couple of years that Eddie couldn’t make them himself and Steve could tell that it bothered him a little. So that one skill would produce so many years really made Steve happy.

“This year is iron,” Eddie said smiling broadly. “Now, iron is a little hard to work with if you aren’t a blacksmith, so I fudged it a bit with steel. Which is technically eleven but there are a couple of years that double up, so I figured I’d change up the flower.”

“I can’t wait,” Steve breathed.

They got back to the hotel and laying on the bed were the steel flowers.

Steve gasped when he saw them. “They’re beautiful. What flower are they?”

“Jasmine.”

Steve thought for a moment. “Unconditional love?”

Eddie kissed him deeply. “Right in one, my clever boyfriend. Because that’s how it will always be, okay?”

“Okay.”

~ 7. Copper Carnations (they oxidize to green)- Gay Love

Steve couldn’t believe it had been seven years since he rocked up to Eddie’s doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and a hope. Now Eddie and he were world travelers, and all because Eddie made it big with his band.

They had been through it all, the highs and the lows. Steve had to stay out of the spotlight for the most part because there weren’t any metal stars who were gay and Eddie had been told to stay firmly in the closet.

So all he would say in interviews was that he was in a committed relationship and then ‘no comment’ after that. So sometimes tabloids and other entertainment media would pair Eddie off with one woman or another.

One week it would be an up and coming starlet, next it would be some popstar. Steve snorted over that one. As if Eddie would date someone who liked pop music. He would whine about it having no soul and that it was basic.

But with the press hounding him night and day, it was hard for him to break away enough to spend time with Steve. Those were the worst days in Steve’s opinion. Eddie’s too, if he was honest.

But Eddie had flown Steve out to a private beach in Hawaii for just the two of them. Eddie even hired an actor to play him going about New York to throw them off the scent.

It was nice.

Steve had gotten up early to sit on the shore and watch the sun come up over the Pacific ocean. He had put out a large beach towel and pulled his knees up to his chest as watched as the sky went from black to blue to red and orange and finally the sun came up and sky settled on a deep blue, so unlike the almost grey skies of LA or New York.

Just as the sun was about to fully come up over the horizon, Eddie came out with a picnic basket and sat down next to him.

“Hey, baby,” he murmured, giving Steve a kiss on the cheek. “Wha’cha doing up so early for?”

Steve turned to him and smiled. “I just wanted to see the sun come up. It’s not often we get to do that anymore.”

Eddie looked over at the sun and then back to Steve. “No. I wish you had woken me up though. I would have joined you.”

“I know,” Steve said softly. “But you just looked so cute, sprawled out like a star fish, I couldn’t bear to wake you.”

Eddie huffed, but wisely said nothing about his starfish status, instead opting to get out all the things he prepared for breakfast. There was chopped fruit and yogurt, granola and orange juice and a little vodka if Steve felt a little daring.

About half way through their beach side breakfast Eddie pulled out of the flowers from the basket. Copper carnations.

Steve recognized the flower from all the carnations he had given to Claudia over the years. But why carnations?

“Are they meant to be yellow for copper?” he asked in confusion. Yellow carnations meant rejection and disdain. His lip started to wobble.

Eddie shook his head. “Do you know what copper’s most defining characteristic is?”

“No,” he said softly, his voice small as he took in the flowers in his hands.

“It turns green.”

Steve looked up at Eddie in surprise.

“Oh!”

“It takes awhile,” Eddie continued. “But I promise you, when those flowers turn green, I will come out and I will tell the world you are mine.”

“And how long does it take?” Steve asked breathless. “For them to turn green.”

“Usually about five years,” Eddie said with a half shrug. “It can take up to thirty though.”

Steve burst out laughing. “Then here’s to the next thirty years, babe.”

Eddie brought their lips together and kissed Steve tenderly. What he didn’t tell Steve was that there was a way to speed up the process and if they weren’t green by the flowers’ fifth year, he was going to dumping them in a solution of vinegar, ammonia, and salt. There was no way he was going to wait thirty years to come out.

~ 8. Bronze Tulips (orange)- Appreciation and Truest of Love

It was two days before their anniversary and things were not going well. Eddie had agreed to a European tour even though Steve had asked for them to be home for their anniversary this year. London and Hawaii had been nice, but they had a whole ass mansion they never used because they were gone all the time.

It resulted in the biggest blow up the two of them had ever had. There was even full on screaming. That was yesterday. It was Valentine’s day and he was alone in this big ass mansion he never wanted. Eddie was somewhere in Germany or Austria or something.

The Sunday tabloids had been filled with Eddie going out with this hot rocker in leather hotpants and ripped t-shirt. They had screamed about that too. Especially since Eddie refused to tell Steve who she was. Only the repeated phrase of ‘I’m not cheating on you.” But no other explanation.

He called Robin and Dustin and begged them during each of his calls with them to tell him that it was all in his head that Eddie was pulling away.

Dustin’s “Ehhh...” was not helpful and neither was Robin’s, “It only feels like he’s pulling away because he is far away.”

He sat there looking at all the flowers Eddie had got him over the years. He brought all the different vases to the long dinning table and just stared at each one, his hands shaking and his lower lip quivering as recount each flower and their meaning.

He picked up the yellow daisy. The one that had started it all. Attached was the original note: ‘I will love you until the last petal falls.’

Steve tugged at one of the silk petals, vaguely wondering if it could be plucked off.

The phone rang and Steve ignored it at first. But then on the seventh ring he got up. He picked it up on the eighth.

“Hello?” he said dully. He hoped it wasn’t someone selling something. He had gotten a lot of those kind of calls lately and he really didn’t need that right now.

“Ste-ie!” Eddie said.

“You’re breaking up,” Steve said with a frown.

“So-ry, I -st nee-d to he-r you- vo-ce.”

“Eddie,” Steve said a little louder. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I can’t –ay. Can’t –t – see y– aga–n. I– t– soon.”

Then the line went dead.

Steve looked at the phone for a moment or two and then let out a sob. Did he just get broken up with? On Valentine’s day no less?

He didn’t understand what Eddie was saying, but it didn’t sound good. He set the phone back on the cradle and slid the floor.

He looked up at all the flowers on the table, all the years of promised love and devotion to have it all ripped away from him.

He wanted to be angry. To yell, to tear, to destroy the flowers Eddie had given him. But he didn’t even feel sad in that moment. He felt numb.

Eddie bounded through the front door. He had tried to call Steve back several times but the call wouldn’t go through. So his manager did the smart thing and put him on a flight back to LA immediately. But thanks to horrible layover in London due to a storm in New York, he arrived just after midnight on the 16th.

He was surprised that none of the lights were on. But considering had badly they had been fighting lately, he knew he was being optimistic about that. Wayne had called him every synonym to idiot in the book when he took this tour instead being home with Steve.

But he had taken the tour for Steve. He was so close to being able to retire and the label wanted one more tour before they all went their separate ways for a while. The goal was two years, but it might be longer if the burnout stuck around for longer than they planned. But everyone was on board with doing the last tour so that they could actually rest.

Eddie paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. There weren’t any lights on up there, either. He was about to check out the kitchen when he heard faint sobbing from the front room. It was then he noticed the flickering light of a TV screen.

His heart sank. He had suspected that Steve didn’t understand he was coming home for their anniversary, but now hearing the faint sobs, it was clear Steve’s mind had gone the absolute worst direction.

He set his suitcase on the floor and quietly dashed up to their bedroom. He dug around the back of their walk-in closet until he found it. Eight bronze tulips.

Eddie gathered them up and dashed back downstairs as quietly as he had come. He opened the door and sure enough, there was Steve curled up on their sofa, tissues strewn everywhere, bottles littered the floor, and piles of half eaten take-out were on the coffee table.

He set the flowers on the armchair and scooted the Ottoman over to the sofa. He gently lifted Steve’s head and whispered, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. I’m here. I’m here now.”

It took Steve a moment to realize who it was before he launched himself into Eddie’s arms, his sobbing taking on a relieved quality.

Eddie wrapped his arms around his boy and held him tight whispering over and over that he was here and he wasn’t going anywhere.

Finally when Steve was calm enough to talk, Eddie wrapped himself up in him and they cuddled on the couch.

“It sounded like you were breaking up with me,” Steve admitted shyly. “But I couldn’t reverse dial an international call.”

“I know, Stevie,” he muttered, kissing the top of his head. “I was saying that I needed to hear your voice after that big fight we had and that I was coming home as soon as I could.”

“The tour!” Steve cried and he bolted up right. “Are you going to get into trouble for that?”

“No,” Eddie said, taking his face in his hands. “Because we all needed a break. We were running on empty so badly that we were barely able to stand up straight, let alone play our instruments.”

“Oh.”

Eddie kissed him gently on the nose, each cheek, his forehead, and then finally his lips. “I’m not going anywhere. Not for a really long time.”

“Do you mean it?”

Eddie nodded and then got up. He grabbed the flowers and handed them to Steve. “Eight, like with year four, one for every year we’ve been together.”

“Tulips?” Steve said, cocking his head to the side. “Is the metal what the color is?”

Eddie nodded. “Bronze for orange. No tricks this time, I promise.”

Steve didn’t have to say it. It was written all over his face. It was perfect for this year. Appreciation and the truest of love.

And as Steve showed his own appreciation by kissing the hell out of Eddie, Eddie knew that they would make it through any storm as long as they had each other.

~ 9. Pottery Vase (with a bird of paradise painted on the side)- Joyfulness

Eddie had spent almost every day in the first couple months after that fateful flight home in Steve’s pocket. And Steve ate up every moment. There wasn’t an interview he had to go to, or an award show Steve was forced to stay home for, or a studio session with long hours. Eddie was all Steve’s and they talked about it. With Wayne getting on age, they wanted to move closer to him so that they could be within easy distance if he needed anything, so they settled on moving to Chicago.

It was far enough away that they would have their own space but close enough that it would be a day drive or a quick flight and they would be there in a flash.

The house they bought wasn’t as big as their LA home or even Steve’s childhood home. But it had a heated pool, rooms for all their friends and comfortable space.

This was Steve’s dream home.

Even better they moved in the fall instead of the dead of winter, so by Christmas they were completely settled in and had all their friends over for New Years.

Eddie had gotten Steve into painting and himself into pottery as something they could do together but separate as the classes were at the same time.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays they would drive down to the rec center and go their respective classes.

It had been rough for Eddie the first couple of week because of the publicity. But once it settled down that Eddie was just a regular Joe, the class continued as normal.

By February Eddie could make the vase he wanted for their ninth anniversary. Then he got the brilliant plan to have Steve paint a flower on it before having it fired.

Steve thought long and hard about which flower to do. It was usually Eddie who picked the flower, but this time they were doing it together.

“It’s a ridiculous sounding name for a flower,” Steve hedged. “But I think its meaning fits this year a lot.”

Eddie smiled up at him. “Come on, baby. I live for the ridiculous.”

“It’s a called a bird of paradise and it means joyfulness.”

“It’s perfect, Stevie.”

So Steve painted the flower on the vase and then they pressed each of their hands on either side of the flower on the vase. Eddie’s left hand and Steve’s right.

Then when it was done baking and cooling, they took it home.

Steve took out one flower from each of the previous eight years and added the daisy. The rest of the flowers were still in their own vases around the house, but this one was the center piece at their table.

The proof of their love.

~ 10. Tin Daffodils- New Beginnings

Ten years. Steve couldn’t believe it. It had been a whole decade since he walked up to Eddie’s house and handed him the bouquet that would change both of their lives forever. And in those ten years their little family has grown.

Max and Lucas got married and had a sweet baby girl. Dustin and Erica got married, which was a surprise to everyone but Steve. He had been there for the their first adventure together and he hoped to be there for all them. Mike and El broke up for good and it took Will having a steady boyfriend to get his head out of his ass a realize who he wanted along was his best friend. El was still living with Hopper and had no plans to settle down in the near future.

Robin had moved around the country, first New York, then San Francisco, before finally growing roots in Seattle. There she met a nice woman named Emilia and they had moved in together just last year. Nancy and Jonathan also split up, but they remained friends. Jonathan had gone to NYU with Robin and learned a lot about himself before moving to California with Eden and Argyle. Steve was pretty sure they were in a ployamorous relationship, but he hadn’t wanted to pry.

Eddie’s bandmates had spread out over the world. Gareth had to Wales to learn about where his grandparents had come from. Jeff went to New York to write musicals. And Brian was writing music for Hollywood blockbusters. They still got together every couple of months to hangout and discuss the future of Corroded Coffin and each time it was unanimous that they not bring it back together. They still were struggling with the affects of burnout from being on the road.

Wayne had finally decided to move in with them in Chicago and was happy to putting around in their garden for the rest of their days.

For their anniversary Wayne was going back to Hawkins to visit friends so that Steve and Eddie would have the house to themselves.

Steve was making the dinner and Eddie was providing dessert. They way they moved through the kitchen was like dancers in sync. A perfect ballet of just knowing where the other is going to be after ten years of being together.

Steve was making manicotti and Eddie was making white chocolate raspberry cheesecake. When they were done, Eddie popped the cheesecake in the fridge and they sat down to eat. Just happily chatting and enjoying each other’s company like they had the last two years. It had been healing for them.

Then they settled in front of their TV and watched cheesy rom-coms until they laughed themselves sick.

Then Eddie brought out three things, his flowers, the cheesecake and a small envelope and set all three down on the coffee table in front of them.

Steve picked up the envelope. “What’s this, Eds?”

Eddie plucked that from his fingers. “Not yet! That’s for last.” He picked up the flowers first and handed them to him. “Tin is much easier to work with then the other metals, so I made daffodils.”

“New beginnings?” Steve questioned, cocking his head to the side. “What new beginnings are we gonna have, sunshine?”

“You remember my manager, Archie MacDonald, right?” Eddie asked chewing on his bottom lip.

Steve smiled. “Of course I remember. I might have had too many hits to the head, but I can remember someone who has been a major part of your life for almost as long as we have been a couple.”

“Well,” Eddie said nervously. “Archie used to be Angie and he got pregnant. He can’t get an abortion with back alley’ing it. So he asked around to see if anyone wanted the baby.”

Steve’s eyes immediately starting tearing up. “They’ll let us? They’ll let us have the baby?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, pressing their lips together. “They’ll let us have the baby. Everything has been taken care of, all you have to do is go in tomorrow and sign the papers. He’s already signed documents that he is relinquishing rights to the baby, so no matter what happens, it won’t be staying with Archie.”

Eddie cocked his head to the side and pulled out a picture from the envelope. “Technically is not an it, the baby is a she.”

He handed the picture over to Steve and he took it gingerly. There in his hand was an ultrasound showing a healthy baby. A healthy baby girl.

“Is this real?” he asked, his voice quaking. He didn’t mean the picture exactly, but all of it.

“Yeah, babe,” Eddie said pulling Steve in for a hug. “It’s all real. It’s not the six you wanted, but it’s a start. The baby is due in June.”

Steve let the tears of happiness fall. At the age of twenty-nine he was going to be a father. He looked up at Eddie with such adoration, Eddie just had to kiss him.

“To new beginnings, honey,” Eddie murmured. “You got any ideas on what you’ll want to name her?”

Steve thought about it for a moment. “Heather Amelia Munson.”

“Why Heather?” Eddie asked, not because he didn’t like the name, but because he had a feeling it meant something to Steve.

“White heather means protection,” Steve explained, “and wishes come true. Protections so she gets all the help from the universe she can from being our kid and wishes come true, because she absolute is.”

Eddie chuckled. “Fair enough. And why Amelia?”

Steve just shrugged. “It just seemed like a fairy tale name and I wanted something connected to you, too.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

Little Heather would be born to a world that still didn’t know Eddie was gay and living with his life partner. But just eleven days before their eleventh anniversary, Rob Halford of Judas Priest came out as gay. Eddie had a brief meeting with him and then on their anniversary announced it to the world with green carnations, lavender, and pink hydrangeas.

The meaning was there for all those that knew where to look. And as with Halford, Eddie and Corroded Coffin’s fans rushed out to support them.

Then on their thirty-eighth anniversary they were legal wed. Wayne had lived to see it, but passed not long after. At their wedding all their friends and their families were there. And all three of Eddie and Steve’s kids. Heather, Valerian, and Daphne. Val as his friends called him was their first test tube baby. He was used using Steve’s sperm and his name meant readiness. Daphne was their last and used Eddie’s sperm, her name meant sweets to the sweet. Little Daphne was only ten, while Valerian was thirteen and Heather, sixteen.

They lived happily ever after.

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#my writing #stranger things #steddie #ladykailtiha writes #valentine's fic

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jbaileyfansite · 3 months ago

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Interview with British Vogue (2025)

Jonathan Bailey has always flatly refused to pose topless on a shoot. For Vogue, he relented. How come? “There was this pair of Loewe trousers and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, what an incredible silhouette.’ No one suggested it, I just knew it was right.” He pauses. “But please don’t mention I said I’m always asked to take my top off.” I plead with him. “OK,” he replies. “It’s the truth.”

But why all the prudishness? Didn’t he reveal his naked bum in season one of Netflix’s phenomenally successful Regency romp, Bridgerton? It was quite the performance, I say. Has it been nominated for any awards? “Not yet,” he replies, rolling his eyes.

We are lounging on a velvet sofa in an anteroom at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the location a nod to the Brit’s imminent, post-stratosphere-hitting return to the West End. He was last on the London stage in 2022, in Mike Bartlett’s Cock at the Ambassadors Theatre, already a star, and yet the 36-year-old’s wattage has continued to grow and grow. Any attempt on my part to observe him dispassionately disappears quickly. His dark-haired and unshaven beauty is too intoxicating, as is his style. He is male-model catwalk-ready in pale blue Levi’s, an ivory Sunspel rib-knit short-sleeved polo shirt, off-white slip-on suede Birkenstocks and beige socks. M&S? “Uniqlo – they’re my favourite holey socks,” he answers, raising a tanned, muscular arm (an Omega De Ville watch dangles from his wrist) to scratch his head. His biceps look like they’ve done time in the gym. “I did that on purpose so you’d notice,” he says cheekily. “I’ve got real gunnage.”

Bailey has managed to achieve what was once thought impossible in Hollywood. He is among a new guard of out actors to be lusted over by men and women (the latter tag him their “internet boyfriend”) while also evading falling into a gender pigeonhole, snagging roles of every persuasion. Tragedy, comedy, singing, dancing, stage, big screen, small screen, fashion week, fan mobbings… he can do it all. Scarlett Johansson, his costar in next year’s looming instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise, recently gushed on the red carpet: “I adore absolutely every single thing about that man.”

Bailey, who despite a tightly honed skill set never attended drama school, has been acting since the age of seven, when he was scouted by the Royal Shakespeare Company to star in its production of A Christmas Carol at the Barbican Theatre. But it was in 2020 that he became swarmed-in-the-streets famous, following his performance as Lord Anthony Bridgerton (the second series, in which his character, a viscount, took centre stage, became the most-watched English language series on Netflix). Hollywood beckoned. Now, he’s riding a wave of Wicked mania, his career having been taken to a whole new level thanks to his turn as the fleet-footed, high note-hitting, dashing male lead, Fiyero, opposite Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the big-screen musical, not to mention the accompanying press tour to end all press tours. Next year, he’ll go on to star in the aforementioned Jurassic World Rebirth. True blockbuster fare.

Theatre, though, has been his foundation. A run of television hits (he has starred on the small screen in W1A, Bramwell, Broadchurch, Heartstopper, Fellow Travelers and Leonardo, among others) has been built from, and woven through with, a long career on stage – notable roles in the past decade, aside from Cock, include Company, King Lear, The York Realist and Othello. He has a shelf full of shiny hardware, with awards including an Olivier for best actor in a supporting role in a musical, for playing panicked groom-to-be Jamie in Marianne Elliott’s 2018 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, and a Critics Choice Award for best supporting actor in a limited series or movie made for television in Fellow Travelers earlier this year. On balance, he loves the protection of being on stage – how immersive it feels, how he feeds off the reactions of an audience. “There’s security in the theatre community,” he says.

And so, he is ready to make a return to live performance. His next role feels like a career zenith. In February, he will appear as Richard II in director Nicholas Hytner’s production at the Bridge Theatre. It is his most high-profile Shakespearean role to date, his second with Hytner, who first cast him as Cassio in Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. “People talk about fame and Bridgerton, but the one moment where I really thought I’d made it was when Nicholas cast me as Cassio 10 years ago,” says Bailey. “He gave me the biggest break. He’s been an incredible mentor. With Richard II, I am returning not just to a play, but to a theatre director. He’s seen me freak out in the rehearsal room. He’s seen me sobbing.”

On Bailey’s far-reaching talent, Hytner tells me: “Jonny is eloquent, mercurial, intelligent and transparent.” The star director is giving little away ahead of the production, only to comment it will reveal: “a feudal world on the cusp of modernity”. He recalls: “As Cassio in Othello – and later as Edgar to Ian McKellen’s King Lear, which I didn’t direct – he had the rare ability to speak Shakespeare as if it’s his first language. His imagination is vivid enough to put himself directly in the position of characters… It becomes completely natural in his hands.” Doubtless he will lean heavily on Bailey’s gifts for precision wit, dark charm and petulance for the flawed, weak Richard. “What do you do when a ruler is absolutely inadequate?” Hytner wonders. “How do you get rid of the rightful leader?”

In person, Bailey’s flair is plain as day. He’s not just stylish – he is friends with Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson, who dressed him for 2024’s Met Gala (and whom he designed a T-shirt with for the LGBTQ+ initiative he recently founded, The Shameless Fund), has worn Givenchy on the red carpet and modelled Emporio Armani eyewear in its latest campaign – but also intoxicatingly charismatic. He laughs readily and expansively, gesticulating often, occasionally jumping up like a young Rudolf Nureyev about to leap, before crashing back down and curling his legs underneath him. The writer and actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whom he costarred with in her 2016 miniseries Crashing (a precursor to Fleabag), once described him as “a meteorite of fun”. I can see why.

“There’s a big wonderful tribe of friends in London to which we both belong,” longtime friend and actor Andrew Scott tells me. “As well as being the most charismatic and gifted performer, he’s always struck me as someone who adores and prioritises his friends and family and loved ones. That counts for so much in my book. It’s so wonderful to watch Jonny soar.”

So too is he eloquent and honest, especially when we veer to the more personal, such as what it was like growing up questioning his sexuality and how he only came out as gay to his family and close friends in his early 20s. Did he have a sense of his sexuality from a young age? He indicates it was more of a gradual realisation, mentioning how he went out with a girl for two years in his early 20s. “It’s interesting with the binary,” he says, “where you’re perceived to be either this or that. That’s how I saw it at the time, but there are so many nuances to it. My experience of that relationship was not that I was in the shadows. She remains one of my best friends.”

“I think other people understood my sexuality before I was even aware of it,” he continues. As a young boy, he remembers rummaging through the family’s dressing-up box, jumping around and being flamboyant, and entertaining his grannies by singing and dancing whenever he stayed with them. He sounds like Billy Elliot. “A bit, but really Shirley Temple, if I’m honest.” He credits his parents with encouraging him to take up ballet. “I remember looking through the window at these girls at school in their tutus. They were doing, like, first position, second position, and I knew I just wanted to be in there.”

One night at a sleepover with primary school friends he remembers excitedly asking them: “‘Guys, guys, who else thinks they’re gay? Do you? I do. I do.’ It was a conversation I really, really wanted to have, to see if everyone else was on the same page,” he says. “But everyone went quiet.” Then a teacher called him out in front of the whole class. “I was having trouble with my work and he said, ‘Well, if you weren’t so busy being a fairy you’d understand.’”

More recently, and in addition to his work with The Shameless Fund, he became a patron for the charity Just Like Us, which aims to ensure young LGBTQ+ people in school and beyond can thrive. He is keenly aware of the challenges that still exist, even in the everyday. “I’ve always been a confident hand-holder in relationships,” he says. “I had a boyfriend who wasn’t experienced at holding hands in public. We got heckled in London. But that kind of behaviour is now outweighed by the smiles you get.” Is he currently in a relationship? “Not discussing that,” he answers, sharply.

We talk instead about how he deals with the nature of fame. “It felt quite hard-hitting after Bridgerton came out,” he says. “I really struggled initially; I was overwhelmed by it. But the people in your life have to adapt too. That’s the hardest thing: you see them struggling before you see it in yourself, someone pushing past your dear mum and dad to get a picture. I’m really good now at saying no to photos.” Does he think he might become too big for his boots? “Let’s see,” he says. “It would be good if you could keep your eye on me as we go through the next few years, tell me if I’m doing well or I’ve fallen down the [fame] hole.”

Friends like Andrew Scott will no doubt help keep him grounded. “The search for us to be in the right thing together is on,” says Scott. “Bert and Ernie the movie is the frontrunner, it just depends on who’s willing to shave off their eyebrows.”

Bailey was brought up in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, along with three older sisters, and later attended The Oratory School. His mother was an audiologist and his father, a one-time DJ who played in Sloopy’s, a ’70s nightclub just off Piccadilly Circus, would go on to become the managing director of Rowse Honey. “Every time I see an easy-squeezy bottle of honey I think my dad was an absolute legend.”

He was five when his grandmother took him to see Oliver! in the West End. He knew at that moment he had found his calling. His first acting role was at school, where he played a raindrop in Noah’s Ark. A year after starring in A Christmas Carol at the Barbican, he landed the role of Gavroche in the West End production of Les Misérables.

In 2017, he appeared in King Lear at the Chichester Festival Theatre, as Edgar, opposite McKellen in the title role. “We had amazing conversations,” he says of his costar. “I was like: ‘Tell me everything. Tell me what it was like back in the day.’ I assumed everyone would have been happily expressing themselves, fucking in the wings, all the things you’d hoped. And he said, ‘No, no. No one knew, not even in the most creative pockets.’”

But liberation can be found on stage too. Cock, as its title suggests, focused on some of the thornier realities of gay romance and proved life-changing for Bailey. “I was able to mine and explore and have this experience on stage which felt like everything I would want for my life. It was all about a boy coming out and falling in love at school, and somehow by experiencing it within someone else’s story, you can dress-rehearse your own life.”

We discuss his most recently released film, Wicked (a two-part adaptation of the hit musical, the second instalment of which will drop towards the end of 2025). “What did you think of it? Did you like it?” he asks nervously. I tell him I’m not usually a fan of musicals, but it took me by surprise and I found it emotionally touching. He breathes a sigh of relief. “Isn’t it lovely, isn’t it special, isn’t it actually!” he says, bouncing on his knees like an excitable teenager. “You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who’s seen it. When I watched it, I sobbed. I think it’s a masterpiece.”

For now, having just finished filming the latest season of Bridgerton, he’s finally taking a break. “Everything else is on pause until Richard II opens.” He admits finding it difficult going between roles and his everyday life in Brighton, where he moved in 2020 so he could be close both to the sea, which he loves, and his mother’s side of the family who live there. “It can be a hard, cold transition, so I get back to friends as soon as possible or I go travelling. I love Salento in Italy – I try and go every year.” Is he tempted to move to the US? “No. That’s a hard no,” he says. “I love New York theatre, so maybe, but it would be led by work.”

He says that, more than anything, he yearns for quiet. He spends time in nature, either walking, paddleboarding or mountaineering (in 2018, he hiked to Everest base camp and a year later climbed Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Scafell Pike in 24 hours in aid of a motor neurone disease charity), as well as cold-swimming in the sea and cycling (he has competed in marathons and triathlons). He likes the calm those activities bring him but always takes his noise-cancelling headphones wherever he goes. “I feel naked if I forget them.” What does he listen to? “I go through phases, most recently ’60s and ’70s California rock, and The Beatles.” But surely he parties too? “I love a dirty martini,” he says. “The dirtier the better. But really I’m obsessed with breakfast, especially oats. Sometimes I make my own granola. I just love a seed.”

While he might not tell me if he’s in a relationship, he is surprisingly candid when I ask him if he wants children. “Yes, it’s such a privilege for a man,” he says. “But I can’t bring children into my lifestyle now.” Because he is so busy? “Yes,” he answers. I tell him it’s never a good time. “I want to make sure I’m going to be present. I’m reading books on adoption. I might coparent with a woman, but I’m thinking it will be with a man.”

Just as we’re about to say goodbye, he squeals, holding up his phone. “Andrew Scott has just texted me! He calls me ‘J-Bads’. I told him I was doing a Vogue shoot, with the total self-awareness of what that sounds like.” He slips on his Birkenstocks. “You know I’ve got them in Parma violet too,” he says, as he slinks out of the door, headphones on.

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#jonathan bailey #jonny bailey #interviews #interviews:2025 #british vogue #british vogue interview 2025 #NEW!

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scotianostra · 20 days ago

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On February 9th 2007 the very well respected Scottish actor Ian Richardson passed away.

Ian William Richardson was born on April 7th 1934 in Edinburgh, he attended Ballgreen Primary School, Tynecastle High and George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh, he caught the acting bug early starring in an amateur production of A Tale of Two Cities at aged 14. The director encouraged his talent but warned that he would need to lose his Scottish accent to progress as an actor, a comment that would appall the likes of Ewen MacGregor nowadays.His mother arranged elocution lessons, and he became a stage manager with the semi-professional Edinburgh People’s Theatre.

After National Service in the Army (part of which he spent as an announcer and drama director with the British Forces Broadcasting Service) he obtained a place at the College of Dramatic Arts in Glasgow. After a period at the Old Rep (also known as the Birmingham Repertory Theatre), he appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company of which he was a founding member, from 1960 to 1975. During this time he also appeared on Broadway where the The New York Times, called his performance in a production as “outstanding.“ He would later play Henry Higgins in a revival of “My Fair Lady,” for which he was nominated for a Tony Award.

On the big screen he played the part of Oberon in a lukewarm film version of RSC’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that nevertheless bore an elite company of Britain’s finest pre-Dames in Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Diana Rigg..

Richardson starred in many UK mini-series including Porterhouse Blues, Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy, The Gravy Train, and of course perhaps the most well know, House of Cards, playing the Machiavellian Tory politician Francis Urquhart, famous for the quote "You might well think that … I couldn’t possibly comment”, which became a catchphrase for the series.

Looking through his biography I wasn’t surprised to find he was in the excellent TV series Private Schultz, I was however surprised that he played three different roles in the six episodes!

Whereas he was less well known in on the other side of the Atlantic, Americans might also know him from commercials, as the man who asked, out of the window of a Rolls-Royce, for Grey Poupon mustard.

Richardson married actress Maroussia Frank in 1961, they spent the rest of his life together, in a 2007 interview she recalled the night he passed away…….

“We went to bed, and at 2am Ian made a little bit of a noise, as if he were having a dream. I just shook him a little and expected him to mutter something like: ‘What, oh sorry’ - but he didn’t. I got up and went round to his side of the bed.”

Her husband died in her arms a few minutes later.

She went on to say that Ian had told her he wanted to go first and that

“Ian would have been helpless on his own. I did everything for him. He didn’t even know which bank his account was with. In a way, it is good that he died in his sleep rather than suffer from a long illness - a wonderful way for him to go.”

Ian Richardson was 72 when he died of an undiagnosed Heart disease.

#scotland #scottish #history #edinburgh #actor

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paulftompkins · 4 months ago

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VarieTOURpia 2025 is coming with the Spring! And tickets are BLOOMING in these links!

WEDNESDAY 23 APRIL 2025 IOWA CITY IA USA

THE ENGLERT THEATRE

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THE FITZGERALD THEATRE

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FRIDAY 25 APRIL 2025 MADISON WI USA

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SATURDAY 26 APRIL 2025 CHICAGO IL USA

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TUESDAY 29 APRIL 2025 LAKEWOOD OH USA

THE ROXY

TICKETS link to come

WEDNESDAY 30 APRIL 2025 TORONTO ON CANADA

QUEEN ELIZABETH THEATRE

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FRIDAY 2 MAY 2025 NEW YORK CITY NY USA

IRVING PLAZA

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SATURDAY 3 MAY 2025 BOSTON MA USA

THE WILBUR

TICKETS link to come

SUNDAY 4 MAY 2025 PHILADELPHIA PA

THEATRE OF LIVING ARTS

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WEDNESDAY 7 MAY 2025 WASHINGTON DC USA

THE HOWARD

TICKETS link to come

FRIDAY 9 MAY 2025 DURHAM NC USA

THE CAROLINA THEATRE OF DURHAM FLETCHER HALL

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SATURDAY 10 MAY 2025 ATLANTA GA USA

VARIETY PLAYHOUSE

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SATURDAY 6 JUNE 2025 PORTLAND OR USA

REVOLUTION HALL

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NEPTUNE THEATRE

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COMMODORE BALLROOM

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#varietopia #paul f. tompkins #variety #north america #canada!#mr. jordan katz #entertainment #anthropomorphic bus #bus with hair #bus with facial hair #bus with teeth #nearsighted bus

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notearsnora · 4 months ago

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THE JOURNEY THROUGH OZ TOUR:

The first WICKED red carpet premiere will take place in SYDNEY, Australia in exactly 2 weeks on November 3rd. The Sydney State Theatre will be transformed into Munchkinland for the event.

The LOS ANGELES premiere will take place in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on November 9th. The venue will be transformed into Shiz University.

The MEXICO CITY premiere will take place in the National Auditorium on November 11th. It will be transformed into the enchanted forest.

The NEW YORK premiere will take place in the Museum of Modern Art on November 14th. It will be transformed into the Ozdust Ballroom.

The LONDON premiere will take place in the Royal Festival Hall on November 18th and it will be transformed into The Emerald City.

#wicked #wicked movie #ariana grande #glinda upland #elphaba thropp #gelphie #dailygrande #cynthia erivo #galinda upland #wicked the musical #jeff goldblum #jon m chu #jonathan bailey #ethan slater #marissa bode #bowen yang #michelle yeoh

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yorkcalling · 5 months ago

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Gary Oldman to Star in Knapp's Last Tape at York Theatre Royal

York Theatre Royal today announces that Gary Oldman will return to the theatre where he began his career in Samuel Beckett’s seminal work, Krapp’s Last Tape. The production begins previews on 14 April, and runs until 17 May 2025. CEO Paul Crewes said today, “When Gary visited us at the beginning of the year, it was fascinating hearing him recount stories of his time as a young man, in his first…

#york theatre royal

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garyoldmansource · 5 months ago

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"EXCLUSIVE: Slow Horses star Gary Oldman is stepping back on stage in April 2025 for the first time after an absence of nearly four decades to star in Samuel Beckett’s celebrated one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape for a limited season at the British theatre where the actor began his professional career in 1979.

Oldman, who won an Oscar for Darkest Hour, is in London shooting season 6 of the acclaimed Apple TV+ spy drama Slow Horses. He will play Beckett’s famous old-timer, struggling to listen to a tape he recorded 39 years ago, at York Theatre Royal in North Yorkshire from April 14 through May 17."

#gary oldman #actor #slow horses #jackson lamb #theatre #london

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insanityclause · 7 months ago

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EXCLUSIVE: Sigourney Weaver will make her West End stage debut as storm-creating sorcerer Prospero in The Tempest and Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell will play sparring lovers Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing when director Jamie Lloyd returns Shakespeare early this winter to the historic Theatre Royal Drury Lane, a landmark venue in Covent Garden owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Weaver, star of Ridley Scott’s Alien movies and James Cameron’s Avatar epics, last starred in one of Will’s plays when she played Portia in a 1986 off-Broadway revival of The Merchant of Venice.

As a sophomore at Stanford in 1979, she played Goneril in a traveling production of King Lear.

The star once revealed that she pretended “I was doing Henry V the entire time” she was playing Ripley in Alien. “I thought, ‘Well, as a woman, I’ll never be cast as Henry V, so this is my Henry V,” Weaver told New York magazine in a 2012 interview.

“Sigourney knows her Shakespeare, she knows theater, and I could not be more excited that she has agreed to play this role,“ Lloyd told Deadline.

He also said that he’s “thrilled” that “my dear friends Tom and Hayley” are headlining the romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing in his Jamie Lloyd Company Drury Lane Shakespeare season.

The first preview of The Tempest is December 7, and it runs through February 1.

The first Much Ado About Nothing preview is on February 10, and that runs until April 5.

Built in 1763, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane became a popular venue for performances of Shakespeare. David Garrick and the ancient thespian greats played the Bard’s work there.

Lloyd Webber and his LW Theatre company spent an estimated $77M on a superbly realized restoration of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and he’d noted several times that he wanted Shakespeare back at The Lane, as it’s affectionately known, because he fondly remembers at age 9 being taken to see Gielgud in The Tempest “and it clearly made an impression on him,” said Lloyd.

The two men formed a close bond when they worked together on the now-Broadway-bound Olivier Award-winning Sunset Boulevard starring an incandescent Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond.

“Andrew told me the story about Gielgud snapping Prospero’s staff on the last night and announcing that The Lane would be lost to musicals forever,” the director said.

Oklahoma! and other shows had preceded The Tempest, and it was to be immediately followed by My Fair Lady and many other musicals since.

One day, unexpectedly, the composer and impresario told Lloyd ,”Look, I’ve always wanted Shakespeare back at Drury Lane.”

Lloyd was shown around the theatre, was open to exploring “all the possibilities” and felt excited to be the first company to bring Shakespeare back to The Lane.

It made sense that The Tempest needed to be the one that marked the return.

Lloyd told us that he had an epiphany one night that Sigourney Weaver playing Prospero would “create theatrical electricity.”

He fired off an email Weaver’s agent, who responded that it was unlikely that she’d want to engage because Weaver hadn’t performed Shakespeare in public for over 30 years, and the last time she was on a stage was when she did Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike in NYC in 2012.

The very next morning, Lloyd continued, ”There was an email in my inbox with the subject, “Hello from Sigourney.” And she wrote me this amazing email — really passionate, excited email. We got on Zoom straight away, and we had an amazing, inspiring conversation. She’s such a lovely, witty person. So insightful. She’d read the play, especially from a perspective of a woman playing Prospero. And that really excited her and it made sense and illuminated the play in new ways. And so she’s coming to make her West End debut at Drury Lane playing Prospero in The Tempest.”

He added that he kept coming back to Weaver’s performances “in all those iconic movies — Ghostbusters, Gorillas in the Mist, Working Girl, all of them.”

Lloyd went a little bit fanboy and told her that he’d seen “Alien more times than any other movie. And I just thought, ‘How amazing would it be to work with someone that you’ve admired since you were a kid?’ Oh, wow. And to bring her to London. And again, it just feels like such an event.”

The director believes that Weaver’s “commanding presence, huge charisma and that amazing power” is perfect to play Prospero. And that she can “clearly get into the complexity of the role” of this person “with delusions of vengeance, this kind of ruthless revenge against the people that have sent her away, to learning about forgiveness and love and compassion. There’s a real journey in that, isn’t there? And there’s a real internal struggle. And we talked about how a shipwreck can become a new kind of hope. Can’t there? I mean, really, that’s my sort of key thinking about the entire season, is that I just want this to be a really joyful season. And both of the plays are about the hope of the future and not dwelling on the past, maybe,“ he said.

Lloyd added that he felt “honored” that Weaver even responded to his email because he thought “it bode so well in terms of just a direct email straight away; it’s very personal. As we know, sometimes people kind of do things through their teams and managers. But actually, she knows what theater is, and she knows it’s about relationships.”

Lloyd’s well aware of that too.

He goes way back with Hiddleston, even further with Atwell.

Back in early 2019, Lloyd directed a hauntingly sublime version of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal with Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It quickly transferred to the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre for a limited run, where it was nominated for four Tony Awards.

Lloyd has remained close to his cast ever since.

Similarly with Atwell, who he directed in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2011 play The Faith Machine at London’s Royal Court Theatre. They reunited two years later in a revival of Kaye’s The Pride, in which Atwell excelled, at the Trafalgar Studios. The drama was an early example of Lloyd’s then-nascent Jamie Lloyd Company, which at the time was in partnership with ATG Entertainment.

He added that it’s “very meaningful” in terms of the season for him to be working with “those two old collaborators, they’re Jamie Lloyd Company alumni. And I think they’re both two of the finest of our generation, aren’t they? And they know each other well. So there’s an instant chemistry between the two of them, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with for Benedick and Beatrice.”

Lloyd’s enjoyed watching Hiddleston and Atwell on screens both big and small. He mentioned Hiddleston’s performance in The Night Manager — he’s in the midst of shooting its sequel — and the actor’s adventures playing Loki in the various levels of the Marvel Universe. “And he still comes home to the theatre whenever he can,” Lloyd marveled.

Atwell soared in the Marvel Universe as well, plus she has been starring with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One and its follow-up Mission: Impossible 8. She was remarkable in a a revival of Rosmersholm, directed by Ian Rickson at the Duke of York’s in 2019, the year before she played Isabel for director Josie Rourke in Measure for Measure at the Donmar Warehouse.

“So she’s the real deal,” Lloyd declared. “Both are, and they’re also both very witty people. … They’ve got this great intelligence, this great wit,” Lloyd observed, perfect qualities for Much Ado About Nothing, which he called “a joyful play.”

Although he complained that he has seen it played a touch too “broad.”

He said that it doesn’t need to be played at a “slapstick pace” to be fun. “The language in its own right is funny. I think they’ll be amazing sparring partners but also hint at that kind of tenderness under the surface.”

Both productions of The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing will be stripped back, and he will ponder with frequent collaborator Soutra Gilmour on how the shows will look and feel.

There’s a shipwreck in The Tempest, but Lloyd won’t reveal whether he’s tempted or not to place one on the Drury Lane’s boards.

However, unlike his Sunset Boulevard and Romeo and Juliet productions, he won’t be using video as part of the performance for the Drury Lane shows.

“They’ll be stripped down, but no video. I’m saving all the video energy for Sunset Boulevard on Broadway,” he explained.

The two Shakespeares will run between Disney’s Frozen, which closes September 8, and musical Hercules, which begins performances in summer 2025.

“That’s why the Shakespeare season is a strictly limited total of 16 weeks,” said Lloyd. He added that there have been no discussions about the plays being captured by the National Theatre’s NT Live cameras, nor has there been talk of transferring to Broadway.

“I always just make something for the theatre in which it’s meant to be performed, and then we see the after that,” Lloyd said during a conversation at the Jamie Lloyd Company offices located in a wing of Somerset House on the Strand, literally a stone’s throw from the Drury Lane.

We first touched base about the possibility of Shakespeare at Drury Lane late last year and have kept talking, on and off, since.

All kinds of names were bandied about by a few in the know. “Tom Hanks,” someone gleefully told me. Wrong Tom, old boy.

“Margot Robbie,” another boasted.

“It’s so funny. I’ve heard these names, “ said Lloyd, “but no, not true. I mean, I would love to work with Margot Robbie on a play. I think she’s remarkable, isn’t she? And she came to see A Doll’s House that we did with Jessica Chastain. And that would be a dream come true to work with her.”

However, he revealed that he had spoken to Robbie “a couple of times” but “not” about Shakespeare.

“I think, as I say, one day, she’d like to explore the idea of doing a play, but let’s see what happens,” he cautioned.

Lloyd soon heads back to New York to begin rehearsals for Sunset Boulevard.

He and Weaver plan to meet up while he’s there to discuss her Prospero. He noted that the name won’t switch gender to Prospera as happened with Julie Taymor’s 2010 film of The Tempest, where the revengeful noble magician was played by Helen Mirren.

“It will remain Prospero,” Lloyd insisted.

Rehearsals for The Tempest will begin in London on October 28, “literally a week after we open Sunset on Broadway,” Lloyd said.

His Jamie Lloyd Company will produce the season alone without the participation of ATG Entertainment.

The 16-week Shakespeare season will feature 25,000 tickets for £25 [US$32] and they’ll be “ring-fenced exclusively” for under-30s, key workers and those receiving government benefits. He said that he’s “well aware” that in the past wealthier folk who can afford to pay steeper prices have taken unfair advantage and gobbled up specially priced cheaper seats.

“These are good seats too,” he beamed. But they will introduce new methods to ensure the cheap seats go to the “right people.”

Working on The Tempest at Drury Lane will sort of complete a circle of coincidence for Weaver.

She’ll be taking on a role last performed there by Gielgud.

Her first Broadway credit in 1975 was to work on a revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, starring Ingrid Bergman.

Weaver worked as an assistant stage manager and understudy.

The production was directed by John Gielgud.

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bearsinpotatosacks · 7 months ago

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The beautiful thing about the Bear is that it's such a high stress show that you can apply it to other high stress environments and the AU works. I can see some kind of hospital/medical AU, or, in this case, a dancer AU.

The Berzattos run a dance school for kids, teens, and adults. They do different styles of dance, teach according to syllabus and some of their best students, like Carmen Berzatto even go on to become professionals. Syd used to go there when she was a kid until her dad noticed her passion, and worked extra hard to get into the Joffrey Ballet, then the New York Ballet before she got disillusioned and tried to start her own dance company and failed.

Carmy joined the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, being taught by Andrea, as a child before being picked up by the Paris Opera ballet, before moving to the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen, then moving onto the San Francisco Ballet before finally joining the American Ballet Theatre in New York, this is where David abuses him.

Mikey didn't have as much promise, he was a good dancer at many things, but didn't have the drive that Carmy did, so runs the dance school instead. He met Richie at the school, his mother was a dancer and she noticed his inability to sit still and put him in the dance school, his dad didn't approve at first but he started getting roles in musicals, he's a brilliant tap dancer and could've gone far in musical theatre but Mikey pulled him in. He got roles, worked hard for them but always got brought back to the dance school eventually.

Tina got into musical theatre 'too late', she's been in a local theatre outside of work but after getting fired, she's heard singing to herself at the bus stop outside the dance school, Mikey hears and offers her a job as the musical theatre teacher with Richie.

Mikey dies and Carmy's left the dance school. The place isn't doing well, they could be going out of business. Syd, who's been idolising him since she saw him in the Royal Danish's production of the Nutcracker, starts to work there. Carmy becomes strict on uniform and respect to the teacher, Richie's more relaxed, he's dance teacher but wants it to be fun, not a military school.

She and Richie don't get on, she's used to the skill levels of professional ballet studios, not local dance schools. She starts to see how good he is with the students, he can control the room easier and his students have more freedom and are generally happier.

Carmy decides to up the stakes of the school's usual yearly show, they promise Jimmy a certain amount of profit and a certain number of new uptake of students. They ask Tina choreograph her own section of the show to whatever she wants, she goes with West Side Story.

Sydney looks at some of the previous shows, and some of the previous work of the teachers to see if there's anything they could possibly do and stumbles upon some of Richie's work in musical theatre. She mentions it to Carmy, they talk to Richie, who's unsure as it's been a while.

She's there late one night when she hears something and sees Richie dancing to Singin in the Rain, which he performed on tour. They talk about dreams and goals, she encourages him to perform, but he's hesitant as it's been so long

Syd and Carmy are going to do a duet, but when it comes to the night, Carmy gets locked in one of the dressing rooms getting something for one of the kids. Syd's scared, so Richie improvises and steps in, he's seen them rehearsing and does his best (is this all because I want to imagine Richie lifting Syd like she weighs nothing? yes).

She joins him in doing 'Moses Supposes' from Singin in the Rain (minus the singing), something he used to perform with Mikey, because she makes him feel confident enough to perform again. They get through, make a fair bit of money and get some sign ups. Richie also gets an invitation to audition for another musical, with Syd's encouragement, he does.

Also added on: Eva being in Richie's dance class, Richie and Syd are in suits when they dance together to 'Moses Supposes', Syd and Richie teaching a class together and reluctantly getting along

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justforbooks · 1 month ago

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Dame Joan Plowright

Stage and screen star who was part of a radical generation of actors responsible for establishing the National Theatre

Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, played a central role in the historic overhaul of British theatre at the Royal Court in the late 1950s. A founder member of George Devine’s English Stage Company in 1956, she made her name as Beatie Bryant, the working-class heroine in Arnold Wesker’s Roots in 1959, and married Laurence Olivier in 1961. The union of Plowright and Olivier was symbolic of the new theatre order embracing the old glamour, as the greatest actor of the day threw in his lot with the younger generation.

Olivier had scored one of his biggest successes as Archie Rice, the dying music hall star, in John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Court in 1957. When the play transferred to the West End and Broadway, Plowright took over from Dorothy Tutin as Jean Rice, Archie’s daughter, and their friendship ripened into an unshakeable intimacy, and marriage, that lasted until Olivier’s death in 1989.

Plowright embodied the qualities of common sense, honesty and a sort of earthy vitality that characterised her acting. She had deep brown, currant-bun eyes in a face of plump beauty and openness. Olivier always admired the self-deprecating quality in her performances, and encouraged her to develop this as a comic weapon in her armoury. As she revealed in an affecting autobiography, And That’s Not All (2001), she worried about being employed at the National Theatre as the wife of the boss when Olivier launched that institution first at Chichester in 1962 and then at the Old Vic. But her early performances, as Sonya in what many believe to be the greatest Uncle Vanya ever seen on the British stage (Michael Redgrave in the title role, Olivier as Astrov, Sybil Thorndike as the old nurse), and as George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, put paid to suspicions of nepotism.

She had an intense and fiery quality, and a wonderfully melodious speaking voice that was a constant, grounded musical counterpoint to the brilliant skitterings of the NT’s star turns, Maggie Smith and Geraldine McEwan. In later years, she acquired a comforting matronliness in her film performances, though a quality of rare decency always shone through, as in her supporting role as a suspected witch in Roland Joffé’s version of The Scarlet Letter (1995) or as a trusted confidante in Franco Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever (2002).

Plowright’s father, William, was a journalist and newspaper editor from Worksop in Nottinghamshire, and her mother, Daisy (nee Burton), an enthusiastic actor from Kent. Joan, born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, was the middle of three children; her younger brother, David Plowright, became a senior executive at Granada Television and was closely involved in much of Olivier’s later television work, including Brideshead Revisited and his final King Lear.

From 1931 the family lived in Scunthorpe, where Joan attended the grammar school before joining the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester and the Old Vic Theatre School in London. At the latter (from 1949) she studied with Glen Byam Shaw, Michel Saint-Denis and Devine, and this period was crucial to her development as a prominent artist in the postwar theatre, as new British writing and the European theatre of Brecht, Ionesco and Beckett fuelled an upsurge of brilliant acting among a new generation, many of them from the provinces. This crew articulated the changing face of modern society, and Plowright was in the vanguard, alongside Albert Finney, Alan Bates, Eileen Atkins, Billie Whitelaw and Robert Stephens.

Before joining Devine at the Royal Court, she appeared in Orson Welles’s bare stage, kaleidoscopic production of Moby Dick at the Duke of York’s in 1955, a show described by Kenneth Tynan as “a sustained assault on the senses which dwarfs anything London has seen since, perhaps, the Great Fire”. As Pip the cabin boy, she was the only girl in a cast that included Patrick McGoohan, Kenneth Williams, Gordon Jackson and Welles himself as Captain Ahab.

The impact of Roots at the Court, in John Dexter’s famously incisive, unsentimental production, was nearly as great as Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had been three years earlier. Beatie was in some ways a feminine, rustic counterpart (the play was set in Norfolk) to Osborne’s metropolitan antihero, Jimmy Porter, but she was also a young woman finding her voice. At the end of a blazing tirade lambasting her own family for their ignorance and conservatism, Plowright’s Beatie cried out, said Tynan, with the wonder that is cognate with one’s first sense of identity – “I’m beginning. I’m beginning!”

You could argue that no subsequent performance was ever so stirring, or ever so influential. But at the National she made a great impact even when she shared a role, Hilde Wangel, with Smith, in The Master Builder, and then as Masha in Three Sisters and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Her finest NT performances following the opening season were as Portia in Jonathan Miller’s brilliant 19th-century production in 1970 of The Merchant of Venice and, in the following year, opposite a candescent Anthony Hopkins, in John Dexter’s stark and scrupulous revival of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness. In the first, she gave full rein to her capacity for wit, irony and a scathing sense of justice; in the second, she boiled with fallibility and indignation as the unfaithful Anne Frankford.

When Olivier gave way to Peter Hall at the National, she sidestepped with some dignity all rumours that she might have wanted to succeed her husband, and her memoirs give a lucid account of the jostling that took place between the factions. She worked with her “beloved” Zeffirelli for the first time on the smash hit Saturday Sunday Monday by Eduardo de Filippo at the Old Vic in 1974 (transferring to the Queen’s theatre) and repeated her success with the same author’s equally popular Filumena at the Lyric in 1977.

In between those hits, in 1974, she joined Lindsay Anderson’s newly formed West End company to play Arkadina in The Seagull and the sexually awakened Alma in Ben Travers’s jaunty but tiresomely scatological The Bed Before Yesterday. There followed modest successes as Nurse Edith Cavell at Chichester in 1982 and an imposing Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard at the Haymarket in 1983, with an all-star cast but, alas, an unfinished set on a disastrous opening night. Plowright recalled how the abandoned old retainer Firs (played by Bernard Miles) wailed disconsolately that everyone had left and locked him in while rattling the handle of a door that swung invitingly open and rendered the last moments of the play quite meaningless.

By now she was happily reconciled to the older roles, joyfully seizing on Lady Wishfort, “the old peeled wall”, in The Way of the World (Chichester, 1984), with Smith as a definitive Millamant, directed by William Gaskill. In Núria Espert’s glorious 1986 production of Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba at the Lyric Hammersmith, as a sleeve-rolling old maid, Plowright suggested “a lifetime of drudgery in the folding of linen”, said Michael Billington. Both shows sailed triumphantly into the West End.

After Olivier’s death, she gathered her family around her in a sombre revival of JB Priestley’s Time and the Conways at the Old Vic in 1990. Both daughters, Tamsin and Julie-Kate, were in the cast, as well as her son-in-law, Simon Dutton, and her son, Richard, directed. Her last notable West End appearance was a great one as the fraught mother-in-law, Signora Frola, in Zeffirelli’s sleek 2003 revival of Pirandello’s Absolutely! (Perhaps) at Wyndhams, with a new text by Martin Sherman.

She worked mostly in films, however, from 1990, gracing two charming Italian idylls: Mike Newell’s Enchanted April (1991) and Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini (1999). The latter was based on the director’s own memories of wartime, scripted by John Mortimer, and co-starred her old friends Smith and Judi Dench as well as Cher and Lily Tomlin – a regular galère of delightfully entertaining eccentrics.

Before she announced her retirement from acting in 2014, due to her failing eyesight from macular degeneration, she made several more films including Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), in which she embarks on an unlikely friendship with a young writer played by Rupert Friend, the animated movie Curious George (2006) and Anthony Hickox’s spooky horror thriller Knife Edge (2009).

She celebrated her retirement in a series of onstage anecdotal conversations in 2014 with the director Richard Digby Day – “Acting is an outlet for comedy and grief, and all the characters inside you,” she said; and, now almost totally blind, invited three fellow dames, and good friends – Dench, Smith and Atkins – to join her in an overlapping, chatty reminiscence filmed by Roger Michell for the BBC in the garden of the West Sussex home she had shared with Olivier and her young family. Feisty and funny, Nothing Like a Dame (2018) was a surprise delight.

She was made CBE in 1970 and a dame in 2004 and was particularly pleased to receive an honorary degree from Hull University, conferred in a ceremony in Lincoln Cathedral, which she had often visited as a girl.

Her first marriage, in 1953, to the actor Roger Gage, ended in divorce. She is survived by her children from her second marriage, Richard, Tamsin and Julie-Kate, four grandchildren, Troy, Wilf, Ali and Kaya, and a great-grandchild, Sophia.

🔔 Joan Ann Plowright, actor, born 28 October 1929; died 16 January 2025

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #Joan Plowright #in memoriam

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ratherembarrassing · 17 days ago

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2025: week 5

with a bonus monday to make this london week because what the hell else happened this week besides that? uh, nothing.

perth to london, qf9. it's a coin toss on whether this was actually better overall than going via singapore or the middle east. between the flight to flight to perth, the layover, and the delay to departure, all up it took 29 hours from leaving my house to arriving at heathrow, and only 18 of those hours were the long flight. on the other hand, having 17+ hours to sit, eat a food, watch an entire tv season, and then sleep (albeit badly) for 10 hours? is really nice? at the very least it made me pumped for when they launch the melbourne to london and new york direct flights. 21 hours and it's done and dusted? yes. please.

big mood, season 1 (qantas' in flight entertainment thing / channel 4, 2024). it's tradition now to find the dark british comedy on the long haul flight entertainment system and holy heck, this is dark. nicola coughlan is an actual treasure.

theatah: the devil wears prada: the musical (dominion theatre, west end). what i was trying to get at in my exhausted delirium is that when a movie is bad and then turned into a musical, musicals make all that bad worse. anyway, it was fine, i'm glad i went, no one will remember this happened three years from now.

theatah: elektra (duke of york's theatre, west end). every review of this hated it for a different reason, but whatever, i really enjoyed it. a special shout out to the american sitting behind me who said out loud my exact thought: this staging is exactly like the jessica chastain a doll's house. which was true, but also entirely irrelevant for reasons that will become apparent. brie larson is polarizing in the best of circumstances, and these were not the best of circumstances, but the take seems to be that this production was ultimately impenetrable. i think reviewers need to harden the fuck up, if i was fine while almost unconscious from exhaustion. also: stockard channing!

theatah: much ado about nothing (theatre royal drury lane, west end). aaaaaaaaarguably the reason i detoured into london in the first place. it was cute! people love to hate jamie lloyd, and i don't think the crux of those complaints will be overcome with this one. my issue was mostly just that it felt like it was set in a season of love island, which is a comparison i am now equipped to make, and that's just not how i like my art to feel. this was an especially odd vibe because the staging deployed the apparently very on trend empty warehouse thing.a real mixed bag of approaches. as for the celebrities of it all, it was opening night and the people were there for tom hiddleston. it was irritating. it's always irritating. can we bully these people a bit more to get this screaming for the actors thing to stop? and i didn't die from being in the same room as hayley atwell, so that's nice.

jolene, redchurch street. i would be here every day if this was my local. every bakery should do a mean lemon meringue pie.

the dusty knuckle, dalston. i did not let the disgusting laneway put me off: the food was fucking incredible. grilled cheese with an onioniny jam was the best grilled cheese i've eaten in years, pip and nut turnover i will dream about. if you go, get their lemonade.

regency cafe, westminster. sometimes hipsters are right about things, and they are right about this. you should be a little afraid while you try to get some food. it's good for the blood or something. they sold me like a pint of orange juice for £2.70, which is a bar against which i will measure every restaurant forever now.

tate britain. i'd never been before, and that was a mistake! for years i have been thwarted in seeing turners whenever i am in a place that ordinarily has turners on display. why had i then never been to the tate britain? because i did not know! they have an entire wing of turners! as well as an entire wing of all the other things! @notabuddhist is a great art museum buddy, which is the best trait a person can possess. she even hurried through the last two rooms with me when i needed to leave to get a donut halfway across london.

something that did not happen: me getting my donut halfway across london. and it's all the fault of jeremy clarkson and his tory farmers, as the cab driver put it. fuck that guy, i wanted my donut.

barbican: including this feels like a lie, but i did wander through and feel awe and wonder. but i did not get very much time, because see next item.

something that did happen: so there i am going on a casual wander from shoreditch to bask in the brutalist glory that is the barbican. a song in my heart, a coffee in my hand, and a vague idea of where i'm going, but not much more than that. a great time for my phone to die. a perfect time for my power bank to be completely flat. first time since 2008 when iphones were first released in australia that i was abandoned in this way. thank you curry's, for taking me for an absolute ride while selling me a new power bank.

shout outs: the lizzy line (so nice, so clean, always got my back (because i am always going to and from an airport)), the afternoon lost to getting from stratford to dalston on a rail replacement bus through what i'm pretty sure was a crime scene, m&s salt and balsamic vinegar crisps (why are you the most delicious salt and vinegar chips i've ever eaten and why did i only buy one bag), love island and morley's.

#this week in ashleigh

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