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Posted: |
Aug 27, 2014 - 2:10 AM
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By: |
CinemaScope
(Member)
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His widow, Sheila Sim, is best remembered as the female lead of Powell and Pressburger's eccentric but lovable A CANTERBURY TALE (1944). She's the young woman attacked by the "glue man" at the start of the film. She married Attenborough soon afterward, and their union lasted nearly seventy years.
In 1948 he made a film called The Guinea Pig (it used to be on the telly all the time when I was growing up). In the film he plays much younger than he is, a working class schoolboy who gets a scholarship to a posh school, & his wife played the kindly school nurse (I think she was a nurse, it's many decades since I've seen it). And in an interview he said it was really odd, in the day he was calling her miss, & she was the grown-up feeling sorry for this schoolboy, & then they went home as husband & wife.
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Posted: |
Aug 27, 2014 - 12:17 PM
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By: |
johnjohnson
(Member)
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Tributes have been paid to British actor and Oscar-winning director Richard Attenborough, who filmed classic Brighton Rock at the former Welwyn Studios.
Affectionately known as ‘Dickie’ by colleagues and fans, Lord Attenborough died aged 90 yesterday (Sunday), just five days before his 91st birthday.
The film legend starred as psychopathic teenage hoodlum and sadistic anti-hero Pinkie Brown in 1947 movie Brighton Rock, which was based on the novel of the same name by Graham Greene.
One of the most celebrated British films of its era, Brighton Rock was shot at Welwyn Studios in Broadwater Road, Welwyn Garden City.
It was screened last year at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield as part of the UH Arts film season.
Howard Berry, who runs The Elstree Project, a county-based screen heritage venture, tweeted: “RIP Sir Richard Attenborough. He filmed the brilliant Brighton Rock in Hertfordshire’s ABPC Welwyn Studios.”
Hertsmere Borough Council leader and chairman of Elstree Studios, Morris Bright, knew the Jurassic Park star and Oscar-winning director of 1982 epic Gandhi.
Councillor Bright tweeted: “Sad to hear Richard Attenborough has died. I was privileged to visit his home twice and to welcome him to @ElstreeStudios. A giant of cinema.”
Film director Edgar Wright, who shot Simon Pegg sci-fi comedy The World’s End in Welwyn Garden City, also paid tribute to the brother of TV broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough.
He tweeted: “If you only know the cuddly Attenborough in Jurassic Park, see him be just terrifying in Brighton Rock & 10 Rillington Place. Amazing actor.”
Prime Minister David Cameron also paid tribute to the giant of British cinema.
In a statement, he said: “His acting in ‘Brighton Rock’ was brilliant, his directing of ‘Gandhi’ was stunning – Richard Attenborough was one of the greats of cinema.”
Originally opened in 1928 as British Instructional Films, Welwyn Studios ran in Welwyn Garden City until the early 1950s.
During this time it produced a number of important British features starring such luminaries as Bela Lugosi, James Mason, Peter Ustinov, Alec Guinness and Margaret Rutherford, as well as a range of educational films.
Alfred Hitchcock also directed a couple of war propaganda shorts there.
http://www.whtimes.co.uk/what-s-on/tributes_to_richard_attenborough_who_filmed_brighton_rock_in_welwyn_garden_city_1_3741065
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Posted: |
Aug 30, 2014 - 5:50 PM
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By: |
Ralph
(Member)
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I've always liked 'Shawdowlands'. I thought it was beautifully shot and well acted, and also touching in parts. It always felt a bit Merchant Ivory to me, which is no bad thing. And it has a lovely score by Fenton. Underrated film in my book.
Agree. Some additional musings:
1993 ranks in movie annals as one of the richest years for major male actors to have engaged in catharsis: Jeff Bridges in “Fearless”; Liam Neeson in “Schindler’s List”; Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in “Philadelphia”; Anthony Hopkins in Attenborough’s “Shadowlands.” As C.S. Lewis, the triple threat writer of highly admired Christian apologetics, Christian-based science fiction and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” Hopkins is the most surprising on the list, not because he couldn’t deliver the kind of acting he does but that he did. This is a performance long coming — one as self-exposure finally connecting emotionally with the audience that his lengthy affair with the bottle had kept from us. While William Nicholson’s script lacks the more appealing of Lewis’ championship of Christianity — the best we get is that “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world” — Hopkins gets us to respond very quickly to the ipse dixit: wearing his superiority, exasperation and wariness less on the sleeve than on his Oxford-Cambridge vestments, he’s fully capable of slicing away his opponents’ arguments or snobbishness or his students’ indifference and does so by carrying the aura of the presumptively profound without sanctimony or the eventual superciliousness of Malcolm Muggeridge. Yet in private he’s filled with indecisiveness and the fear of the sensuous, he’s wobbly in committing to anyone or anything other than God and not sure why. This is set up for us as Lewis is waiting to meet Joy, played by Debra Winger: when she calls out his name for the first time, the look of anxiety on his face comically and poignantly mirrors universal vulnerability. (We’ve all been there.) No performance Attenborough gave and no performance by an actor he directed equaled what he achieved in guiding Hopkins to emerge from the shackles of insobriety, to facilitate the joy in acting. Sir Dickie earns our eternal thanks.
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