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justforbooks · 1 year ago

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The word “great” is somewhat promiscuously applied to actors. But it was undoubtedly deserved by Sir Michael Gambon, who has died aged 82 after suffering from pneumonia.

He had weight, presence, authority, vocal power and a chameleon-like ability to reinvent himself from one role to another. He was a natural for heavyweight classic roles such as Lear and Othello. But what was truly remarkable was Gambon’s interpretative skill in the work of the best contemporary dramatists, including Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and Simon Gray.

Although he was a fine TV and film actor – and forever identified in the popular imagination with Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise – the stage was his natural territory. It is also no accident that, in his private life, Gambon was an expert on, and assiduous collector of, machine tools and firearms for, as Peter Hall once said: “Fate gave him genius but he uses it as a craftsman.”

Off-stage, he was also a larger-than-life figure and a superb raconteur: a kind of green-room Falstaff. I have fond memories of an evening in a Turin restaurant in March 2006 on the eve of Pinter’s acceptance of the European Theatre prize. Gambon kept the table in a constant roar, not least with his oft-told tale of auditioning for Laurence Olivier as a young actor in 1963 and cheekily choosing to do a speech from Richard III; but the next night Gambon gave an explosive rendering of Pinter’s poem American Football that threatened to blow the roof off the Turin theatre.

However, Gambon’s bravura was also mixed with a certain modesty. In the summer of 2008 I met him for tea in London and found him eagerly studying the script of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, in which he was scheduled, several months later, to play Hirst. He told me that he had started work on it so soon because he found it difficult to learn lines at his age.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I sleep with a script under my pillow, or just carry it around in my raincoat pocket, in the hope the lines will rub off on me.” I think he was genuine; but with Gambon, one of life’s great leg-pullers, you were never entirely sure.

Gambon achieved greatness without either the formal training or genetic inheritance that are often considered indispensable.

He was born into a working-class Dublin family that had no artistic background; his mother, Mary (nee Hoare), was a seamstress, and his father, Edward, an engineer. When the family settled in Britain after the second world war, the young Gambon went to St Aloysius school for boys, in Somers Town, central London. On leaving at the age of 15 he signed a five-year apprenticeship with Vickers-Armstrongs, leading to a job as a tool-and-die maker. With his mechanical aptitude, he loved the work. But he also discovered a passion for amateur theatre and, having started by building sets, eventually moved into performing. “I want varoom!” he once said. “I thought, Jesus, this is for me.”

With typical chutzpah, he wrote to the Gate theatre in Dublin, creating a fantasy list of roles that he had played in London, including Marchbanks in Shaw’s Candida; in the end, he made his professional debut there in 1962 as the Second Gentleman in Othello. His best decision, however, on returning to London, was to sign up for an improvisational acting class run by William Gaskill at the Royal Court.

Gaskill was about to join the newly formed National Theatre company at the Old Vic and recommended Gambon for an audition: hence the celebrated story of Gambon’s first encounter with Olivier, which ended with the young actor, in his excess of zeal, banging his hand on a nail in an upstage column and bleeding profusely. Far from being the nail in Gambon’s coffin, this led to a productive four years with the National in which he progressed from walk-ons to substantial roles such as that of Swiss Cheese in Gaskill’s revival of Mother Courage.

On Olivier’s advice, however, Gambon left the National in 1967 to hone and pursue his craft at Birmingham rep – a shrewd move that saw him, at the astonishingly early age of 27, playing his first Othello. He moved on later to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 1968 made his first foray into television with the leading role in a BBC adventure series called The Borderers.

However, it was through working on another TV series, The Challengers, that he made a contact that was to transform his career. His fellow actor Eric Thompson was moving into directing, and in 1975 was set to do an Ayckbourn trilogy, The Norman Conquests, at the Greenwich theatre. He cast Gambon, against type, as a dithering vet.

He revealed, for the first time, his shape-shifting gifts; and the sight of him, seated at a dinner table on a preposterously low stool with his head barely visible above the table’s edge, remains one of the great comic images of modern theatre.

This led to a highly productive working relationship with Ayckbourn including key roles in Just Between Ourselves (Queen’s theatre, London, 1977) and Sisterly Feelings (National, 1980).

At the same time, Gambon began an association with Gray by taking over, from Alan Bates, the role of the emotionally detached hero in Otherwise Engaged (Queen’s theatre, 1976).

That was directed by Pinter, for whom in 1978 Gambon created the part of Jerry in Betrayal at the National. It was a production beset by problems, including a strike that threatened to kibosh the first night, but Gambon’s mixture of physical power and emotional delicacy marked him out as a natural Pinter actor. That power, however, manifested itself in the 1980s in a series of performances that staked out Gambon’s claim to greatness.

First, in 1980, came Brecht’s Galileo at the National: a superbly triumphant performance that brought out the toughness, obduracy and ravening intellectual curiosity of Brecht’s hero. It was a measure of his breakthrough that, as Gambon returned to his dressing room after the first night, he found the other actors in the National’s internal courtyard were shouting and roaring their approval. Two years later, Gambon returned to the RSC to play both a monumental King Lear and a ravaged Antony opposite Helen Mirren’s Cleopatra.

But arguably the finest of all of Gambon’s 80s performances was his Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, directed by Ayckbourn at the National (1987). It helped that Gambon actually looked like Miller’s longshoreman-hero: big and barrel-chested with muscular forearms, he was plausibly a man who could work the Brooklyn docks.

Gambon also charted Eddie’s complex inner life through precise physical actions. He stabbed a table angrily with a fork on learning that his niece had got a job, let his eyes roam restlessly over a paper as the niece and the immigrant Rodolpho quietly spooned, and buckled visibly at the knees on realising that a fatal phone-call to the authorities had ensnared two other immigrants. In its power and melancholy, this towering performance justified the sobriquet once applied by Ralph Richardson of “the great Gambon”.

When you consider that the decade also saw Gambon playing the psoriasis-ravaged hero of Dennis Potter’s TV series The Singing Detective (1986), you realise his virtuosity and range.

And that became even clearer in 1990 when he played the mild-mannered hero of Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment (Globe theatre, now Gielgud, London), had another crack at Othello for Ayckbourn in Scarborough and appeared, in 1989, as a romantically fixated espionage agent in Pinter’s TV adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day: that last performance, alternately sinister and shy, was one of Gambon’s finest for television and deserved a far wider showing.

In later years Gambon successfully balanced his stage career with an amazingly prolific one in film and television. In Hare’s Skylight at the National in 1995 he combined the bulk and weight of a prosperous restaurateur with a feathery lightness – a skipping post-coital dance across the stage with the balletic grace often possessed by heavily built men.

Gambon was equally brilliant as a disgusting, Dickensian, accent-shifting Davies in a revival of Pinter’s The Caretaker (Comedy theatre, 2000), as a perplexed bull of a father in Churchill’s A Number (Royal Court, 2002), as a Lear-like Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame (Albery, 2004) and as a brooding, alcoholic Hirst in Pinter’s No Man’s Land (Duke of York’s, 2008). Even if Gambon’s Falstaff in a 2005 National Theatre production of Henry IV Parts One and Two did not quite match expectations, his work for the theatre revealed an ability to combine volcanic power with psychological depth and physical delicacy.

Ill health and increasing memory problems forced him to retire from stage acting in 2015, but not before he had given memorable performances in two Beckett plays: Krapp’s Last Tape (Duchess, 2010) and All That Fall (Jermyn Street theatre, 2012), where he played, opposite Eileen Atkins, the sightless but stentorian Mr Rooney.

He also continued to work in television and film for as long as possible. He belied the whole notion of the small screen by giving large-scale performances as the black sheep of a big family in Stephen Poliakoff’s Perfect Strangers (2001) and as a reclusive plutocrat in the same writer’s Joe’s Palace (2007).

He was nominated for awards for his performances as Lyndon Johnson in an American TV movie, Path to War (2002), and as Mr Woodhouse in a BBC version of Jane Austen’s Emma (2009). Later TV series included The Casual Vacancy (2015), Fearless (2017) and Little Women (2017).

In film, he had a rich and varied career that ranged from the violent hero of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), to a heavyweight mafia boss in Mobsters (1991), the aged Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (2008), a cantankerous old director in Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet (2012) and the bearded Hogwarts headteacher (whom he privately referred to as “Dumblebore”) in six of the eight Harry Potter films, taking over the role for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) following the death of Richard Harris.

He also provided the narration for the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016) and voiceovers for the two Paddington films (2014 and 2017).

But Gambon brought to everything he did, in life as well as art, enormous gusto, a sense of mischief and a concern with precision: he was almost as happy restoring old firearms as he was working on a new role.

In 1992 he was appointed CBE, and six years later was knighted.

He married Anne Miller in 1962, and they had a son, Fergus. From a subsequent relationship with Philippa Hart, whom he met on the set of Gosford Park, he had two sons, Michael and William.

He is survived by Anne and his three sons.

🔔 Michael Gambon, actor, born 19 October 1940; died 27 September 2023

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

#just for books #Michael Gambon #in memoriam

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xisco-lozdob · 9 months ago

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What do we know of Dark Gallifrey?

So, yesterday Big finish finally announced a new range titled Dark Gallifrey. The initial reveal left me underwhelmed because it didn't look as Gallifrey-oriented as I'd at first thought, but some of the comments the creators have posted afterwards are making me warm up to the idea.

So, first of all, it's going to be "a brand-new series showcasing the most chaotic, mischievous and evil Time Lords the planet has ever produced" and it consists of 8 different trilogies, each focusing on one these dark children of Gallifrey. The fact that three of those were given to three different incarnations of the Master who all already have their own ranges gave me pause, but it could be alright if the themes and focus is distinct enough.

However, the Monk and the Nun and, more importantly, Morbius (the incarnation played by Samuel West from the 8DAs 16 years ago) also have their own trilogies. Morbius' one is actually the opening act of the series, though we don't know exactly when it's set. But Morbius is always a great character to delve into Gallifreyan lore.

First thing I want to point out is that they chose to use the same Gallifrey logo as the Gallifrey series, so at the very least they think it should be branded the same way. So we don't only have a link through the title choice but also the same visual identity.

Now, even if John Dorney, writer and script editor for the Morbius trilogy, said this:

It’s completely disconnected from regular Gallifrey.

It doesn't have to mean it's disconnected from Gallifrey the planet, and its history, which, for me, is the most important part, just that it's disconnected from the main cast of the series: Romana, Leela, Narvin and Braxiatel.

So let's see what the other creatives are saying. Rob Valentine, who serves as producer for the series, had this to say:

Dark Gallifrey is a sprawling, multi-story event in which all the most dastardly Time Lords are being let out of the box in various unexpected ways. [...] ...and, behind it all, something massive is brewing.

That means there's some overarching theme or threat in the shadows, probably to be resolved in the last trilogy. What I think is that, more likely than not, it's not going to be a big crossover kind of deal. Maybe some characters and even a couple of the trilogy protagonists are going to be there, but, from what is know, I surmise that we'll be looking at a... Rassilon? trilogy which ties together things that have been set up during the others, but we won't know they have been until we have all the pieces. Let me explain.

Firstly, and something which I really like the sound of, from the Big Finish Talk Back panel at Gally1, they want to do more experimental stories and Dark Gallifrey is part of that.

Dorney, again, said that these are:

Writer led concept albums full of bold creativity. [...] these are not your standard stories.

Whereas Scott Handcock, director and script editor for the War Master trilogy, teased that there are "baffling surprises" and that he doesn't know how his trilogy pieces together with the other ones.

I do like that this range seems to be based on allowing the creators freedom to tell the story they want to tell, so they can experiment with the storylelling and the format. Valentine also says there are all sorts of stories, from darker ones to some that are more comic. But, while Handcock seems to confirm he wasn't privy to all the plans for the range, I read that as implying he did know there was something that linked the trilogies together, but that due to his involvement being with just this trilogy in particular, he didn't need to know every detail.

Still, one last piece of information from Dorney, tells me it's particularly not necessary for the individual creators to know how it all pieces together (if the producers did a good job in keeping tabs):

Just to repeat what I said on the panel this series is influenced by things like Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests, the old Transformers comic strip Aspects of Evil and Chris Ware’s magnificent Building Stories. [...] it inspired the entire series.

All of these have one particularity in common: they're stories that build a bigger tapestry if put together, with multiple layers of storytelling. But they still work as your basic anthology.

But why do I think it'll all come together with a Rassilon story? Well, for that let's go to writer Tim Foley's blogpost with some visual clues. All the pictures are really interesting, but two in particular piqued my interest. (Btw, Foley seems to have worked at least on the Morbius trilogy with Dorney.)

The first illustration comes from the DWM story The Tides of Time. This story features Rassilon (actually his first appearance in any medium) and the Matrix, as well as the Higher Evolutionaries, a group of ancient and powerful time-aware beings. Basically, they're to Gallifrey's Temporal Powers what Division sorta is to the CIA.

The other image is a rendition by Daryl Joyce of Ancient Gallifrey, from the Lungbarrow ebook. You all know what kinds of implications this has. I really hope we take a long overdue trip to other episodes in Gallifrey's History. This is what I'm expecting (hoping) from this series and, in a way, the Fugitive Doctor's one.

Will we have references and nods to other stories that built on the mythology and history of Gallifrey (and not just those two, Morbius being a main character has the potential to link with some more obscure things)? I don't know but I hope so.

I think that's all the information we have. I don't even really know what I want to say with this post, just wanted to collect all this somewhere, and I guess speculate a bit there at the end.

I really hope this series ends up being as special as it promises.

#doctor who #big finish #big finish gallifrey #dark gallifrey #rassilon #lungbarrow #ancient gallifrey #the master #the monk #morbius #long post

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dannyreviews · 1 year ago

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Frasier (1993 and 2023)

The 1990s was probably the last great era for the American Sitcom and the majority of television viewers would probably pick "Seinfeld" as their favorite. As much as I love "Seinfeld" and its brand of famous gags, one liners and character quips, "Frasier" is in a class of its own above. For 11 seasons, Frasier maintained its Moliere/Alan Ayckbourn wit and farce without missing a beat. Nearly 20 years after the perfectly written series finale, "Frasier" has been rebooted and things have changed, some for the better and the rest for the worst. Here is the rundown about what made the original series a classic and the reboot (so far) a shadow of its former self.

TV Spinoffs are usually a hit or miss affair. The hits like "Laverne and Shirley" and "The Jeffersons" managed to remove themselves from their origin and create their own brand of humor. Others like "After MASH" and "Phyllis" were tedious affairs that forgot their roots and sailed into the sunset of mediocrity. And then you have "Frasier" which took the spinoff to brand new heights. Having already been an established supporting character in another massively successful series "Cheers", Frasier Crane was engrained in the collective consciousness of the prime time audience, so that was one notch in watching the pilot of the original "Frasier". The first thing was to reinvent Frasier as a radio psychiatrist which becomes the foundation for jokes about the human mind. But then you add supporting characters that are so multi-dimensional that they have to compete with the title character for the most laughs. That came in the form of David Hyde Pierce as Frasier's equally pompous psychiatrist brother Niles and John Mahoney as their blue collar, retired, disabled policeman father Martin. Watching the difference between tasting wine and singing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to drinking beer and watching the ballgame on TV and you have a dynamic that is another foundation of excellent writing. At the same time, there's Peri Gilpin as Frasier's producer Roz who beds every man (single or married) in town and Jane Leeves as Daphne, Martin's in-house nurse and Niles' crush. When you have several running gags all synchronized in 11 amazing seasons that never jumped the shark, the possibilities are endless. Even recurring jokes like the rivalry between the Crane brothers, the elusive identity of Niles' wife Maris, or the random actions of Martin's dog Eddie, were add ons to an already colorful mosaic of wit and wisdom. Like the Sistine Chapel, or Bach's Goldberg Variations, Frasier is several fine tuned sequences that make up a Leviathan of a presentation. What can possibly go wrong?

The reboot of "Frasier" in hindsight should never have happened because in the series finale, the viewer wanted Frasier to have a happy ending and fine true love with his last girlfriend Charlotte. That hope goes out the window and instead what we get is another chapter in our titular character's hapless life when he becomes a lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard. In the original pilot, we got to know each character's strengths and flaws in only 22 minutes. With the reboot, it takes 2 episodes just to establish each character's back story. Now that Martin is dead and Niles & Daphne are MIA, the majority of the new characters are generic, paint by numbers creations. Frasier's son Frederick (Jack Cutmore-Scott) is blue collar like his grandfather and the deja vu dynamic is not played up for laughs. You have a storyline written in about Frederick's roommate Eve (Jess Salguero) that gets too convoluted and ends up like a subplot in a cheesy soap opera. Most unforgivably, there's Niles and Daphne's son David (Anders Keith) who is supposed to be an amalgam of his parents, but instead of having headstrong principles and acerbic banter, he's just obnoxiously atrocious. This isn't the offspring of a fascinating couple, it's a clone of Screech from "Saved By The Bell". The only thing that somewhat works and has any relevance to the original series is Frasier's scenes with his new colleagues at Harvard which includes his old college friend Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst) and department head Olivia (Toks Olagundoye). Alan is the new Niles in how he and Frasier exchange intellectual topics and if you can close your eyes, you'd think it was the Crane Brothers. Olivia is tolerable only when she's in the same room as Alan. Otherwise, her scenes with Frasier border on cringeworthy, which goes against the original formula of all the characters mingling with indefinite punchlines. Finally, Kelsey Grammer is at the helm of a rocky boat trying to steer it through choppy waves. He hasn't lost any of his charm but he can only do so much with what's written in the script.

Only three episodes of the reboot have aired as of now (10/22/2023), and the show has a lot to live up to its source material. Roz and Frasier's ex wife Lilith are supposed to make appearances in future episodes. What will they bring to the table and will it rival the classic episodes? I'm not holding my breath, but do hope that the show improves itself.

Original: 10/10

Reboot: 6/10

#dannyreviews #frasier #frasier crane #kelsey grammer #frasier reboot #david hyde pierce #niles crane #john mahoney #martin crane #jack cutmore scott #anders keith #nicholas lyndhurst #jess salgueiro #toks olagundoye #jane leeves #peri gilpin #eddie the dog #daphne moon #roz doyle

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hellotom14 · 8 months ago

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„Erfahrungen sind wie Fotos: Aus Negativem wird etwas Positives.“ Alan Ayckbourn

Ein schönes Bergfest wünsche ich, euch.

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do-you-know-this-play · 6 months ago

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#confusions #alan ayckbourn #theatre #theater #plays #tumblr polls

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mikaelarebel · 1 year ago

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La cosa peggiore nella vita sono le tentazioni a cui non si è ceduto.

(Alan Ayckbourn)

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dominickeating-source · 5 months ago

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Dominic Keating Interview (2002)

British actor Dominic Keating hails from a mid-sized city in the middle of England called Leicester (pronounced "Lester"). Although now on a hit U.S. TV show, he hasn't forgotten his roots and the city of his birth. "Well, you can take the boy out of Leicester ?! I go to Leicester quite a lot. My mum still lives there. She's actually coming out this Christmas for the first time. She's going to visit me in LA. I love living in Los Angeles, but I'll never say never anymore."

With ten weeks off during the show's hiatus, did he have a chance to visit his homeland? "I did, yes. I also went to Germany to do a convention. It was my first Star Trek convention abroad — huge amount of fans. There were around 6,000 people there. And, officially, they haven't seen the show there. I told them I was the captain!"

Premature captaincy aside, he's not doing too badly for a boy from the midlands with no formal acting training. Instead, his education was on the job. "Pretty much, yes. I didn't go to an 'official' drama school. I didn't get in, actually," he confesses.

But persistence pays off and, like most actors, he started out small and worked his way up. "I got my first job at the Man in the Moon pub theatre at the bottom of King's Road in Chelsea. I did a play there called 'The Best Years of Your Life,' which got quite a bit of notice. It's a very moving play about an apprentice soccer player for Chelsea who was struck down with spinal cancer. I played his brother, and got a bit of notice from that. I then got my first proper agent and kicked off from there. Went off to [the] Edinburgh [Festival] with Timothy Spall and did a play up there that got a lot of notice in the summer of the following year. From that I met the writer of a sitcom called Desmond's (Trix Worrell), who cast me in the show, which ran six years. Meteoric rise!"

Citing influences such as James Bond or the "Carry On?" movies — a franchise of innuendo-laced British comedies — Dominic also points to an actor whose legendary career spanned several decades: Rod Steiger. "I was in my sitting room watching him in one of those movies, I think it was 'No Way to Treat a Lady,' where he played something like eight characters and I definitely remember a moment, as a ten or eleven-year old, thinking 'I wonder if I could do that?'" Ironically, this particular influence later became a professional contact. "I got to work with Rod a few years ago on a film called 'The Hollywood Sign,'" Keating says. "It was a great honor to meet him. He wasn't that pleased, though, when I reminded him how long ago it was that he made that movie."

His one other big influence dovetails nicely into what he does now. "I did watch the first Star Trek series pretty religiously."

Entertainment wasn't all TV and movies for Keating. "My mum took me to the theatre at an early age. I think the first play I ever saw was an Alan Ayckbourn play, 'How the Other Half Loves.' I remember a man in the audience in front of us turned around and told me to be quiet because I was laughing so hard! Typical, eh?"

Without the conventional drama school life, Dominic faced something many actors fear: a regular job. His r?sum? is nothing if not a bit unconventional. There were the typical bartending and waiting jobs, most of which he claims to be fired from, but there were also other odd jobs that seem miles away from an actor's calling. "I've done a plethora of things. I worked in a knitting factory in Nottinghamshire; I've worked in a rubber molding factory in Colville, making rubber moldings for car doors. I did a lot of work for the Manpower Services. One of my favorite tasks was going along to the schools where the coal cog had been blocked up by some part of a metal chair that some kids had stuck down the coal chute. My mate and I used to show up in my first VW Bug and then bury ourselves down in this coal chute and unclog the offending article and get that cog working again! I also did a bit of painting and decorating, the usual thing."

When stateside success finally landed, in the form of his Enterprise role, what did Dominic do with his first paycheck? "Good question! I did take a photograph of the first check, actually. Because it was a double episode for the pilot, it was the largest check I'd ever been paid in one lump sum."

Showing good monetary sense, he claims to be fiscally responsible. "I'm pretty good with money. I don't know that I went out and bought anything, because I knew what I was going to do," he pauses. "I'm sitting in it now, my beautiful Hollywood home out here in the canyon looking out on a beautiful summer's day. I knew I wanted to buy this house, or a house like it. The first season I literally just socked it away and I didn't buy a new car. I drove my old '87 Bronco, and I only just got rid of that about a month ago. I put money away for a down payment on the house. Six months ago, my girlfriend and I moved in and we love it!"

Surely he celebrated when he got the part on Enterprise? "You know what I did? I was with John Billingsley (Phlox) — we were the first two cast — and we went out and had a coffee together and called a bunch of our friends on our cell phones while we were supping on our double-latte mochas, or whatever. I came home to the two rooms that I was renting in Beachwood Canyon and I put on a CD on my portable player and went out for a walk up around the canyon. I went to look at some of the houses that I could now afford to buy and noticed the nice cars that were driving past me, thinking, 'Ah, I could probably get one of those as well,'" he says. "I went for a long walk and let it all soak in. Then on the way back down the hill, I popped in at my friend's house — his mother was over from England — and he could tell by the cheesy grin on my face. He knew I had been in the auditioning process for this job and he went, 'You got it didn't you? You bloody got it!'

"I've taken a few people to dinner since then."

One of the great luxuries about being cast in a Star Trek show is there is a good chance you won't be cancelled after 13 episodes. But even so, the threat will always be there. "Well, one hopes not. As long as you keep your nose clean and don't piss anyone off too much!"

Even with a job like this, an actor's dream, there is still a certain amount of anxiety in taking the part. "I had a brief moment on the Bridge in the first couple of days when I was pressing button 502 over and over again. The thought crossed my mind, 'I'll never do Ibsen.' Then the first check arrived and I thought, 'Ibsen, Shmibsen!' There was some trepidation. You are signing yourself up for a long haul playing one character. But I was at a time in my life where I wanted the security that a job of this nature was going to offer me. I was very excited about the prospect of being able to afford actually having a family, an educated child."

Keating's character, Malcolm Reed, is also someone he is grateful for. "They've given me so much to do on this show — like "Shuttlepod One." To be honest, it's the best work I've ever done in front of a camera," he says proudly. "They've given me another episode like that in the second season, episode three — "Minefield" — myself and Scott [Bakula] in a two hander on the exterior of the ship and floating in space. It's a fantastic piece of writing that Brannon [Braga] came up with."

But there may be more in store for the Starfleet officer. "I talked briefly with Brannon about this, and I know that the one thing he appreciates about the way Malcolm Reed's developed is that he is truly at odds with his character and he is quite enigmatic. You cannot pigeonhole this character. You can, but he does have the ability to play at odds with himself and not have the audience say, 'That's not in character.' I think the one thing Brannon appreciates, and I certainly do, is that Malcolm Reed is very human. 'Shuttlepod One' allowed the audience to see that. I think he can take this character any which way. I would love to see them explore a very dark side to Reed, something in the way of a Laurence-Harvey-tortured-man. And if anyone can write that for this character, it's Brannon Braga."

Working on a show like Star Trek can be taxing if you are in every scene in every episode, but for most, that isn't really a problem. "It's such a great job and because it's an ensemble piece, we don't work every day. The days I have off, I so appreciate now. I've got a bit of money now so I can go for sushi or take my girlfriend someplace nice. I also love body boarding and I've just started taking up surfing. I just graduated to standing up on the wave. And I adore golf. And there it is — I get back and I've got four wonderful scenes with great actors and such camaraderie. It truly is a dream, dream job. I'll sorely miss it when it's over. And it'll come about too soon. Seven years seems quite a long time, but you know what, it'll fly by and it will be sad when it's over."

In the meantime, occasional brushes with celebrity are bound to happen. "It happened the other night for the first time. Two weekends ago, my neighbors took me and my girlfriend out with some friends of theirs. They rented a limo and we went to the opening of this rather swanky, new, swish restaurant here in LA, opened by this trendy chef called Fred. The limo pulled up and I didn't realize what a circus it was going to be when we got there. We took our steps on to the red carpet and as we were walking down the red carpet — and I've been to Star Trek events and UPN events before, where I understood there would be people there who would want to take pictures of me but I didn't expect this for a second — all these photographers started shouting out my name. I was absolutely bowled over! I've got Beck in front of me, Gwen Stefani two back from me and they're shouting, 'Over here, Dominic, over here!' It really took me by surprise. I can't say that I didn't like it, but it really did take me by surprise. I had a bit of the recognition thing back in England after doing [the sitcom] Desmond's for a few years. I don't want to say I'm used to being recognized, but I'm certainly not phased by it. I was prepared. That moment coming out of the limo was definitely like, 'Oh, I've arrived.'"

His future bright, Dominic Keating can wonder comfortably what it holds. "Who knows? Certainly for the foreseeable future, I can't see why I would want to move back to England full-time. I still have a flat there. Nothing would thrill me more than to come back to London during the hiatus and do a really good play. Or maybe live in London for a couple of years after the show finishes ? do some guest roles on other shows, maybe.

"I'm really happy with the way things have panned out. I'm still a young man, [I'll] still be fairly fresh when I come out the other end. I think I'm pretty versatile."

Source: startrek.com

#dominic keating #the keating cult #star trek enterprise

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achillean-archives · 2 years ago

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"Ironically, Kaye would sometimes lament that he himself was ‘no oil painting’, which explained, he said, why he didn’t have a partner: ‘I wouldn’t want somebody to be with me just because they wanted to be with Gorden Kaye the actor. I do believe in love, but it’s only happened to me three times . . . which is two times too many.’

He was born Gordon Kaye (the spelling ‘Gorden’ came much later) in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 1941, the only child of working-class parents who regarded him as their little miracle: his mother was 42 when he was born. His father, Harold, was an engineer, and an air raid warden.

A sensitive boy, he worried that his parents were so much older than other children’s. ‘I was sure that I would come home and find them dead,’ he admitted.

When he was three, he crept downstairs when his parents were having a Christmas party. He watched his mother, Gracie, talking and smoking a cigarette. When she put it down in an ashtray, young Gorden picked it up and took a drag.

Whether red-hot ash flew up from the tip, or he accidentally poked himself with the burning end, he was never sure. All he could remember was throwing himself on the floor, screaming and howling, and an agonising pain in his left eye. Next morning, the pupil was swollen, and he could barely see out of it. He later regained about 20 per cent of his vision in that eye, but for the rest of his life it stared off to the side.

At 16, he took a job as a salesman at a textiles firm, for £4 7s 6d a week. But he wanted to work in showbiz, and volunteered on Huddersfield’s hospital radio, playing rock ’n’ roll. When The Beatles performed at the town’s cinema in 1963, Gorden interviewed them. His instinctive humour brought out the best in the Fab Four, who showered him with silly jokes.

At 22, Kaye was engaged to be married, but he had known since his teens that he was gay. That was why he had proposed to his girlfriend: ‘I thought that’s how you made the feelings go away.’

But they did not go away and, feeling increasingly lonely, he sought out a pen-friend through the small ads. A sailor called Peter in the New Zealand merchant navy got in touch, and they exchanged long, confessional messages, recorded on cassettes.

When Peter visited Britain, Gorden took him to meet his parents. Afterwards, his mother guessed there was ‘something going on’ and though Gorden denied it at first, he eventually told her the truth.

‘Don’t tell your dad,’ she warned. ‘It’ll kill him.’ He never said anything to his father and, for a long time, thought if his secret was exposed he would have to kill himself.

He threw himself into amateur dramatics. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn, then a BBC radio producer, urged him to turn professional. He applied for a job with a Bolton repertory company: the audition was so successful that the director fell off his chair laughing and had to be helped up. But the company wanted him for character work, and his first role was as an 80-year-old man.

Bit parts on TV followed, and then he was cast as Elsie Tanner’s nephew, Bernard, in Coronation Street. By now his name was ‘Gorden’, thanks to a spelling error by the actors’ union, Equity. Before he could correct it, he was taken to hospital with kidney stones.

The registrar misspelled his name, too, so the clipboard at the end of his bed also said ‘Gorden’. ‘I took that as an omen,’ he said. ‘Or possibly an emon.’ Those sorts of mangled vowels were the mainstay of his role as Rene.

At the outset in 1982, the show by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft was accused of mocking the heroes of the French Resistance. In fact, it was a send-up of BBC television wartime dramas such as Secret Army and Colditz. The show became hugely popular.

But in 1989, warned that a Sunday tabloid was about to reveal his sexuality, Gorden decided to come out as gay: ‘I was born this way and I’ve never pretended to be anything other than what I am.’

He was terrified of the public response but, when the news broke, he was in panto at the London Palladium, and got a standing ovation.

Other reaction was less kind. One MP, Geoffrey Dickens, demanded the BBC sack him, for impersonating a ladies’ man on prime-time TV.

‘That was a horrible time,’ Gorden remembered.

‘It was a bit like the Nuremberg trials. I don’t care what my greengrocer does in bed and I don’t see why the public should have to know what I do. But of all the letters I got from the public, only two of them were nasty.’

Worse was to come. During a storm in January 1990, part of a wooden advertising hoarding was blown through his car windscreen and a piece of wood nearly 11in long was embedded in his skull.

The injury left scars mental and physical from which he never fully recovered. He returned to record a final season of ’Allo ’Allo!, but rarely worked on TV again after that. The shock of the accident left him nervous and irritable, and clumsier than ever. ‘If I try to open a packet of biscuits,’ he admitted, ‘I spill them. And then I shout at them.’

He involved himself with charity work with the Grand Order of Water Rats, which supported entertainers and their families in hard times, and was proud to be elected Chief Rat in 1999.

But he took little joy in life, and said he didn’t want to live into old age. Invitations were declined on the excuse that he was expecting to go to a funeral — his own.

But he never regretted a day of his time on ’Allo ’Allo! If his ability to make people laugh was a gift from God, as he believed, then Rene was his greatest stroke of luck — one other actors would kill to have, ‘and might probably put ground glass in my Diet Coke,’ he laughed.

‘I loved playing Rene. ’Allo ’Allo! enabled me to work with some of the finest comic performers in Britain. We did it for ten years . . . and even Hitler only managed six.’ " Source:

"Retired college lecturer Raymond, 86, said Gorden, who grew up in Moldgreen , had become isolated and very lonely - despite being loved by millions of fans.

“He had no brothers or sisters, just a few cousins. He never married and was a lone survivor till the end.

"It was just a case of surviving and he was very lonely. That is all very sad.”

Raymond praised his famous relative as “a brilliant actor, a comic genius, who brought a lot of joy to many people. He is still making people laugh today.”

Kaye was best known for his role as Rene Artois in the 1980s BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! which made light of the Nazi occupation of France.

BAFTA nominated, he also appeared in Last of the Summer Wine, Are You Being Served?, Coronation Street and Emmerdale.

Raymond added: “He always appreciated his fans saying ‘They’re my bread and butter’ and he always stopped to sign autographs in the street.”

Gorden, an only child, had described himself as a “shy, gay and overweight boy.”

[...]

Raymond, a father of two, said many of Gorden’s friends from London rarely visited him once he was in a care home.

He said: “Just one or two but not recently, they just seemed to forget about him.

“Me and my wife went up when we could but we’re too old to drive and it’s difficult by train and taxi.”

Raymond told how the teetotal star, who cheated death in a horrific car crash in 1990, “smoked a bit but never touched alcohol.”

He added: “I like to remember sitting and talking to him and what a brilliant actor he was.

“Allo ‘Allo was his best role. He was in 84 episodes which have been shown across the world.

[...]

Raymond fondly recalls being invited to screenings with Sheila: “We were in the audience a lot at one time. He did he make us laugh.

“He may have been forgotten by his acting friends but he’ll never be forgotten by us, his family, and his legions of fans." " Source:

#rest in peace #rip #gorden kaye #'allo 'allo #rene artois #rené artois #gordon kaye

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