#dame harriet

[chocolatecakesandperioddrama]

Harriet Walter / TV Bafta Awards 2024

[camillasgirl]

King Charles III and Queen Camilla host a reception to mark the centenary of the Film and TV charity, Buckingham Palace, London, 13.11.2024

[knowthatiloveyou]

Hannah Waddingham with Dame Harriet Walter at the BAFTA TV Awards

(This is Rebecca and Deborah at a Richmond Gala)

[unsightlymuse]

This video is literally every friend group ever:

And it is also the epitome of British popular culture.

[mariacallous]

Until I came to play her I did not understand why Lady Macbeth is supposed to be such a great role. She is out of the action for huge chunks of the play, has far fewer speeches than Macbeth and therefore fewer opportunities to explain herself. Macbeth on his own is unquestionably a great challenge for an actor, while Lady Macbeth on her own is less complex. But once you see her as dark twin, mirror, partner-in-crime to Macbeth, she becomes the great role of repute.

A year after playing the part I am left with the feeling of having made a fist-sized dent in a battleship. I had concentrated on finding the extremes to which a 'normal' person can be driven rather than personifying an 'abnormal' psychopath. In the context of our production that was the coherent path. There are many others.

The 'normal' person approach takes you on a bumpy ride. I had to dig around for anything I might have in common with Lady Macbeth, which is not a happy pastime. There is a fury inside me somewhere, there is a hunger and maybe even the capacity to kill. Am I unusual? I don't think so. The point is that the condition of my life does not feed and sustain these qualities. Rage erupts and dies down. Hunger is kept at bay by a mostly satisfying life, and if I ever want to kill, the feeling lasts for a second and is quickly quelled by thinking of the consequences.

So is it only our circumstances that separate me from Lady Macbeth, or does the difference lie in the murkier area of our basic nature? And is as an actress I am able to remould my personality and even to some degree the inner workings of my imagination, how resilient is that basic nature of mine? In order to understand Lady Macbeth's motives I had begun to empathise with her, and empathy blurs moral judgment.

The major difference is that I only thought about the things she activated. In that sense perhaps we are all Macbeths, our criminal potential safely dormant until circumstances or a Lady Macbeth whips us up out of our law-abiding complacency.

Dame Harriet Walter's "Post Mortem" of analyzing Lady Macbeth, in Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare's Roles for Women

[lovetgr76]

Saskia Reeves and Dame Harriet Walter attend The National Theatre's "Up Next" Fundraising Gala 2024 on May 1, 2024 in London, England

Saskia Reeves and Damne Harriet Walter starred in the play "Sweet Panic" performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, UK 1996.

[amagnificentobsession]

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A post shared by Lissy Kins (@lissy_kins347)

Brilliant! ♥️

[frivolling]

I certainly didn’t have the magnificent and rightly popular AF right now Dame Harriet Walter starring in a YUNGBLUD music video on my 2024 bingo card, but I am so here for it!

[tedbecca]

i love ted lasso and the cast. and i will scream cry throw over any win they get. but phil (!!!!) and hannah were the only ones who deserved those noms (IMO). and frankly nick deserved the nom over brett. but what do i know

[frivolling]

Look. At. Her. 🙌🏻😍🔥

[angel-princess-anna]

Tributes to Maggie from the Downton Cast and Crew (Part 2):

Part 1

Hugh Bonneville (in addition to his previous comment):

Elizabeth McGovern:

Joanne Froggatt: "Today we lost a true legend. It’s hard to find the words to pay tribute to the iconic Dame Maggie Smith. I shared a screen with her on very few occasions but was fortunate enough to be in her company on many. She truly was a trailblazer, with the sharpest wit, the greatest talent, the naughtiest sense of humour, she was a force to be reckoned with. She had a charisma that you felt would live for ever (in many ways it will) and underneath all of that a huge heart. Thank you Maggie, for always being supportive and kind to me, for putting many a smile on my face with that sharp wit that no one could match, and for showing the rest of us just how it’s done.

Rest in peace Dame Maggie, my thoughts are with your beautiful family. 🖤"

Lily James:

Tom Cullen: "I remember a very specific part of the conversation Maggie and I were having when this photo was taken. Maggie had been doing a big and challenging scene where she is reunited with her old flame played by Rade Serbedzija. I was stood at the back, out of frame and able to observe these incredible actors at their work. But for whatever reason Maggie felt like she wasn’t getting the scene right. Maggie took the smallest moment, came back and next take, simply, effortlessly, delivered a masterclass. She was extraordinary. The director called “cut” and we moved on. I was spellbound. During our conversation at the window, I asked Maggie what she did in order for her to so swiftly and precisely produce such an elevated performance. I remember her looking me in the eye and saying “Oh darling! I was just holding in a fart!”. I remember us both bursting out laughing. I really wished that she had been just holding in a fart but of course that wasn’t the real truth, the real truth was that she worked tirelessly her entire career to make that scene look easy.

I only worked with her for a short while, but I feel so blessed to have had that experience. She was tough, demanded the best but making Maggie laugh felt like winning the lottery.

My heart goes out to her family, friends, her Downton family and all those she touched with her sharp, agile and acerbic brilliance.

We lost an absolute giant today 💔"

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Lesley Nicol: "It's a very close group of people so we're all devastated to think she's not around any more.' [...] "I'd never worked with someone of that calibre, and I thought, I don't know what I'll say to her, it will be really tricky, God she'll probably be really grand. She was not looking for anyone to be scared of her, or in awe of her, she just wanted to be in the gang [...] she was in with the crowd, and just very happy to be part of it all."

Jeremy Swift: "An honour to serve you Maggie."

Lady Carnarvon: "I never saw her on set with a little script, she knew it before she got here [to Highclere]. She worked so hard, to get up at silly o' clock... and to wear corsets for hours on end." [Highclere Castle's post]

Harriet Walter: "She was a true comedian, but also I've seen her playing some incredibly heartfelt, deep, sad roles, which is the huge range of an actress like her. If she was merely funny or merely tragic, she wouldn't quite have made that sort of impression."

Anna Mary Scott Robbins: "I C O N 🤍 Oh Maggie you will be missed 💔"

(special thanks to @lovelikewildness for helping to compile)

[chocolatecakesandperioddrama]

fashion queen by MarcellaStylist

[butchhamlet]

"But there is something particular about Cleopatra and the imaginative escape she offers for white performers. She presents a fantasy of a stately queen with an erotic power that white actresses can inhabit and take pleasure in without facing any of the difficulties faced by Black women. Like white European colonial settlers, they occupy her character though only briefly. And this is nothing new. In the seventeenth century, one aristocratic woman had her portrait painted as Cleopatra—a performative act in which it was possible to pretend to be the kind of woman she could never actually be within the chaste and virtuous bounds of Renaissance white womanhood. The sitter is identified as Lady Anne Clifford. A Jacobean lady in Egyptian regalia, according to seventeenth-century orientalist notion of national costume, holds an asp above her breast, iconically invoking Cleopatra. For a long time, it seems, white women have stepped into the fantasy of the dark queen. It seems odd that Antony and Cleopatra was not always viewed as one of Shakespeare's race plays. That is changing, finally. If theatre directors continue to centralise whiteness in their readings of the play, however, it in many ways replicates Caesar's triumph over Egypt. We relive Cleopatra's defeat every time we watch a white woman play her—due respect to Dames Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Harriet Walter, and Eve Best. But we begin to see more clearly the Egyptian Queen's own prophetic vision as she chose to end her life on her own terms. She imagined herself being performed for years to come by actors who do not resemble her in any way—and that is, for the most part, what has happened."

—Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (emphasis mine)

[emotinalsupportturtle]

I guess you can say that I’m a massive nerd by how much I lost my mind when I first saw this.

This still cracks me up after all these years.

[mariacallous]

Whether in classical or modern drama, I fight for the right to portray women who are as contradictory, complex and diverse as the women I see all around me, and I uphold my right to present ordinary, flawed women at the heart of a play.

Dame Harriet Walter, from Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare's Roles for Women (specifically from her section about playing Helena in All's Well That Ends Well)

[pynkhues]

literally sooo fascinated by logan and caroline's marriage tbh. give us all your thoughts!! (if you want ahah)

Oh, man, I could talk about them all day, haha. I kinda feel like people can sometimes rob both Caroline and Logan of any nuance, because yeah, sure, they’re often the central antagonists of the series, and their abuse and neglect of their children permeates the series, but the show’s always also been careful to show that the cycle of violence never started with Logan, and Harriet Walter’s talked in interviews too about the cycle of neglect not starting with Caroline either. They’re victims and perpetrators in the same way that Kendall, Roman and Shiv are victims and perpetrators, and the fact that neither of them were able to break that cycle is the exact sort of tragedy that's at the broken heart of this series.

It makes it really fascinating to me in that sense that Caroline and Logan found each other at all, and I think really slots into what we know about his three marriages – namely, that he marries women who are in some ways as damaged by life’s cruelties as he is. We understand that explicitly with Marcia, who pretty much says out loud that their connection has been born out of the fact that they’re both survivors, but I think it’s implied in his relationships with both Caroline and Connor’s mother too. At least Marcia and Connor’s mother became somethink like partners for a while too – Marcia was a co-conspirator with Logan for the bulk of season 1, and the RECNY Ball episode I think also showed that Connor’s mother, for at least a while, was the sort of socialite who could lubricate and work politicians alongside Logan.

We don’t really know what role Caroline played in that sense, but she’s obviously intelligent and savvy enough to have worked to secure the kids real power in the divorce, something we see her give back to Logan in 3.09. We also know that her title gave Logan the class elevation that he wanted (even if its one he also seems to bitterly resent), and that his money gave her security, and in a lot of ways, that’s a strategic match that sees them both step forwards in power together.

I was actually listening to an old episode of Vanity Fair’s Succession podcast recently where they interviewed Dame Harriet Walter, and she talks quite a lot about Caroline’s backstory.

She says that Caroline was born into a neglectful aristocratic family, an only daughter who due to the social structures of British aristocracy, wouldn’t have inherited her father’s estate as a result of her gender. Instead, his estate would’ve gone to a distant male cousin, which ties into what Connor says in 1.09 to Willa about the house being the ancestral home Caroline didn't inherit.

She was disregarded by her family but encouraged to marry rich, and she sees Caroline as having gone through a bit of a wild child phase, that she partied, used drugs, tried to escape herself. That she was probably featured frequently in the social columns ‘in disgrace’, and then married young to a rich British man who bored her. She sees Caroline as having escaped to New York on a trip, and met Logan who dazzled her. Who was the opposite of the men she’d grown up with, the men who’d cut her out of her own inheritance, and that he was exciting and creating something and married too, and that they likely left their spouses for each other. That he married for a title, but he also married her because he found her fun and funny and different from the other women of her class and station.

I actually love that backstory a lot, and in particular I think it feeds into the themes of cycles on this show, both with Shiv, but also in Caroline being cut out by her own family, and then cut out by the one she tried to make for herself, and the damage that likely caused her. It also I think really beautifully depicts this idea of legacy and succession which is so crucial to the show – that Logan can spend a childhood brutalised by a man who’d give him just enough to build an empire on and that Caroline can spend a childhood in luxurious neglect with parents who will leave her with nothing.

What that meant for their relationship - - I think they did love each other, as much as they could love anyone, and I think that vulnerability between them was something that probably allowed them as true an intimacy as they’d ever have for a while. I also think that that vulnerability and that intimacy gave them power over one another that they’d use often and likely cruelly, and that the final years of their marriage were probably torturous for both of them.

After all, at the end of the day, Logan had the wealth Caroline could marry but never inherit, and Caroline had the title Logan could marry but never inherit, and what is that if not a reminder of the poisoned soil they sprung from?