Richard Burton's diaries only sparkle occasionally, most notably when he's demolishing one of his illustrious contemporaries
Richard Burton died in August 1984 at the age of 58, shortly before the premiere of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which he gave his best performance for more than a decade as Orwell's totalitarian apparatchik O'Brien. His diaries cover some 44 years, from his early second world war schooldays in south Wales to the spring of 1983. In May that year he appeared on Broadway in a poorly received production of Coward's Private Lives with his ex-wife Elizabeth Taylor, and on 3 July he married his fourth wife in a Las Vegas hotel. A hefty brick-sized book, it brings to mind the telegram Warner Brothers boss Jack L Warner sent to the director Mervyn LeRoy, who'd inquired whether he'd got around to reading Hervey Allen's blockbuster Anthony Adverse. "Read it?" Warner replied. "I can't even lift it."
The...
Richard Burton died in August 1984 at the age of 58, shortly before the premiere of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which he gave his best performance for more than a decade as Orwell's totalitarian apparatchik O'Brien. His diaries cover some 44 years, from his early second world war schooldays in south Wales to the spring of 1983. In May that year he appeared on Broadway in a poorly received production of Coward's Private Lives with his ex-wife Elizabeth Taylor, and on 3 July he married his fourth wife in a Las Vegas hotel. A hefty brick-sized book, it brings to mind the telegram Warner Brothers boss Jack L Warner sent to the director Mervyn LeRoy, who'd inquired whether he'd got around to reading Hervey Allen's blockbuster Anthony Adverse. "Read it?" Warner replied. "I can't even lift it."
The...
- 12/16/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Versatile actor and writer often called upon to play toffs and bumbling clerics
The actor Jonathan Cecil, who has died of pneumonia aged 72 after suffering from emphysema, spent much of his career playing upper-class characters. That is hardly surprising since his father was Lord David Cecil, Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, and Jonathan's grandfather was the 4th Marquess of Salisbury. Although often typecast as a comic blueblood, there was infinitely more to Jonathan than that. He excelled in Chekhov and Shakespeare, and four times played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, always investing the character with a silvery pathos. In 1998 he had an outstanding season at Shakespeare's Globe, where he appeared in As You Like It and Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, in which he played Sir Bounteous Progress – "gazing benignly", as John Gross wrote, "on almost everything, even his own undoing".
I...
The actor Jonathan Cecil, who has died of pneumonia aged 72 after suffering from emphysema, spent much of his career playing upper-class characters. That is hardly surprising since his father was Lord David Cecil, Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford University, and Jonathan's grandfather was the 4th Marquess of Salisbury. Although often typecast as a comic blueblood, there was infinitely more to Jonathan than that. He excelled in Chekhov and Shakespeare, and four times played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, always investing the character with a silvery pathos. In 1998 he had an outstanding season at Shakespeare's Globe, where he appeared in As You Like It and Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, in which he played Sir Bounteous Progress – "gazing benignly", as John Gross wrote, "on almost everything, even his own undoing".
I...
- 9/25/2011
- by Michael Billington
- The Guardian - Film News
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