The Column....

today: Acting Heroes....

Acting Heroes…

Since I am a Damian Lewis fan I should have excellent taste when it comes to actors… :)) But really, one of my all-time acting hero’s was and is Ralph Fiennes. The British born actor is for sure on of the best English actors ever!!   

I owe him my first theatre experience in London.

I was a young girl when I came to the city and being utterly alone in such a place can be quite scary but even if I am normally full of doubts and anxiety thinking back, I felt like a hero myself to travel alone and unexperienced….

So I discovered the city on my own and made friends with a wonderful woman, from the States, she was an actress herself and came all the way to celebrate her birthday in London and to see Fiennes on stage.

We spent the week together and when I say we spent then I mean it.

Every minute we were together from sightseeing to shopping and talking. I had never seen her before and never after but the week was incredible.

And we enjoyed Ralph Fiennes on stage. He played the title role in an Ibsen play called Brand, a priest with strict views and a suppressed wife and unhappy with himself. A role made for Fiennes. He entered the stage with an intensity that captured audience and critics. It was a three hour play and Fiennes filled every minute with life and the sadness and broken illusions Brand had to deal with. I will never forget my first play in London.

 

After the play we went to the stage door because I was so flashed by the play that I wanted an autograph …a thing I almost never do because it seems a bit silly to me.

And everyone I talked around the theatre told me how shy and reserved Fiennes is and that he dislikes such things.  But I stayed… brave and with weak knees.

Ralph Fiennes came out and was friendly, shy and a bit reserved to everyone but nice all over. I remember that I stood a bit beside the rest of the crowd not sure what to do…. When Fiennes passed me I said politely Hello and asked for an autograph. He smiled at me and during he signed the program I mumbled that it was my first play in London ever! He stopped his signing looked at me and said: „your first play in London ever?! and you came to see me ?” I said yes and before I could say how much I loved the play he said: “well then I hope it was alright" and smiled again his shy but really beautiful smile.

I laughed and told him that I enjoyed every minute and he thanked me and said:  "well then I hope you will come again” I assured him I will (and I did) and thanked him for his time. I almost  float back to my hotel, the first week in London were entirely fantastic and unforgettable and I will also never forget how this nice man with the difficult reputation made my day by being so nice to me.

Ralph Fiennes gave the world a lot of brilliant moments on stage and screen. He made himself a household name with Spielberg’s Schindler's List and his amazing performance. As chilling Amon Göth which made him an international star and earned him his first Oscar nomination. He made me crying in Red Dragon as the serial killer Francis Dollarhyde. He made him extremely likable and vulnerable…one of my all-time favourites.

And a more recent work: Grand Budapest Hotel is beyond words.   Just an excellent film!!

If you have a lazy Sunday coming and no idea what to do….go and watch a Fiennes movie. 

You will never regret it.      

       

The Night of the Iguana

A couple of months ago during the Times Talks conversation in London,  Damian Lewis released the news that it seems likely that he will return to Broadway next spring for the Tennesse Williams' play The Night of the Iguana...

And even though we have no further news about it let's take the chance to have a look at the summary of the play....

Maxine has been a widow for less than a month. Her husband, Fred, snagged himself with a fishhook and died of blood poisoning. Maxine has no real option but to continue running Costa Verde, a small hotel that they owned and managed, perched high above the Pacific near the remote Mexican village of Puerto Barrio. The play is set in the period shortly before the United States entered World War II. The Costa Verde has Nazi guests who cheer at the bombing of London and other German victories.

On the scene comes T. Lawrence Shannon, always called Larry, a defrocked minister whose options are running out. He is a tour guide for Blake Tours and, in this instance, is shepherding a group of female Texans through Mexico. Miss Fellowes, seemingly the organizer and mother hen of this group, is agitated because Shannon refuses to take them to the hotel for which they had contracted. She also is disturbed by Shannon’s attentions to seventeen-year-old Charlotte, the youngest person in the tour group. Fellowes is indignant that Shannon made a play for Charlotte, but the subtext suggests that she is jealous because she herself has designs on the girl.

Larry comes into the hotel to see his old friend, Maxine. It soon becomes evident that Maxine lusts after him and, with her husband recently dead, she hopes for some sort of alliance with him: marriage, or the best she could get short of marriage. Her not insubstantial physical needs are being fulfilled through purely physical acts with her bellboys, a situation that makes her fear that she is losing their respect.

On this emotionally charged scene strides Hannah Jelkes, a New England woman slightly under forty years old, who is wheeling her poet-grandfather, Jonathan Coffin, whom she always calls Nonno, around the tropics. Nonno is ninety-seven years old. The two of them are as bereft of any real future as are Larry and Maxine. They have no money and had been turned away from every hotel in town. The Costa Verde is their last hope.

Maxine assures them that she has room for them and asks for payment in advance. Hannah informs her that they have no money but that they could earn their keep, Nonno by reciting his poetry to the other guests, Hannah by doing charcoal sketches of them and possibly by selling one of her watercolors. Maxine, unimpressed, agrees to let them stay, but for only one night. Meanwhile, a native boy delivers an iguana that is tied up and left to fatten beneath the veranda. When it reaches an appropriate weight, Maxine will cook it for dinner.

It becomes increasingly clear that Larry Shannon has no reasonable future to which to look forward. He speaks of rejoining the church, but the circumstances of his leaving it were such that he would not likely be welcomed back enthusiastically. His days as a tour guide for Blake Tours are definitely numbered and, when Blake Tours replaces Larry with Jake Latta, tempers run so high that it seems reasonable that Larry will be blackballed as a tour guide anywhere.

Larry’s problems began when his mother discovered him masturbating when he was an adolescent. She spanked him and told him that God deplored such self-abuse. Resentful of both his mother and God, Larry become an ordained minister who preached atheistic sermons and scandalized his congregations (his vengeance on God) and a lecher who sought out only girls below the age of majority (his vengeance on his mother). Now, with his options narrowing, he considers going back to preach in the church or swimming the Pacific to China, his way of threatening suicide.

Meanwhile, Hannah and Nonno are ensconced in the hotel. Hannah fears that Nonno suffered a slight stroke as they came through the Sierra. The old man is dying. Hannah says that she tried to persuade her grandfather to return to Nantucket, from which they originally came, but it is clear that she did not have the wherewithal even to get them as far as Laredo. Maxine makes arrangements for Hannah and Nonno to go to another hotel in town, one that would extend them credit. It is clear that Maxine does not appreciate Hannah’s presence because she senses a growing chemistry between Hannah and Larry. Larry has a confrontation with Charlotte during which it becomes evident that he had seduced her the previous night.

In this exchange, Larry is emotionally bankrupt. He tells Charlotte he loves her, but once he has his way with her, he turns mean and rejects any suggestion that the two of them might have more than the few hours of love they had recently experienced. Miss Fellowes, overhearing Charlotte’s encounter with Larry, immediately calls the authorities in Texas and gets them to issue a warrant for his arrest; Larry faces arrest if he crosses the border. One more option thus is closed to him.

Shortly after this encounter, Larry tells Hannah the story of how he seduced a young girl in his congregation in Pleasant Valley, Virginia. Hannah remains nonjudgmental, ever trying to see the good in people rather than dwelling on the bad. Larry is becoming intrigued by Hannah because, unlike his mother, she does not judge.

Maxine, sensing this, explodes at Hannah, but she soon realizes that jealousy is the reason for her outburst. A storm erupts, with a somewhat cleansing effect on the scene. Then Larry runs to the beach vowing to swim to China. Maxine dispatches her bellboys to drag him back. For his own protection, she has him tied up in a hammock. He has obviously lost his mind. She threatens to admit him to the Casa de Locos the following day.

Hannah comes in to comfort Larry and to try to soothe him with poppy seed tea. He begs her to undo his bonds, but she refuses. When Nonno calls Hannah away for a moment, however, Larry wiggles loose. When Hannah returns, she hears the iguana struggling to break free, at the end of his rope, as many of the play’s characters figuratively are at the ends of theirs. Hannah pleads with Larry to cut the iguana’s rope.

Shortly after that, Nonno calls Hannah, telling her that he finally finished his poem, which he dictates to her. As the play ends, Maxine urges Larry to stay with her to help manage the hotel, making it clear that their relationship could only be professional, not sexual. Larry tells Hannah that he had cut the iguana’s rope. She thanks him. She then turns to put a shawl around her grandfather’s shoulders and discovers that the old man is dead.

Learn more about Tennesse Williams...

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) was an American playwright and author of many stage classics.

After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944), closely reflecting his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth. His later work attempted a new style that did not appeal to audiences, and alcohol and drug dependence further inhibited his creative output.
Williams adapted much of his best work for the cinema, and also wrote short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Career

In the late 1930s, as the young playwright struggled to have his work accepted, Williams supported himself with a string of menial jobs that included a notably disastrous stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch outside Los Angeles. In 1939, with the help of his agent, Audrey Wood, he was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels which was produced in Boston in 1940, but poorly received.

Using the remainder of the Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which was created to put people back to work and helped many artists, musicians and writers survive during the Great Depression. He lived for a time in the French Quarter; first at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré. (The building is now part of The Historic New Orleans Collection.) The Rockefeller grant gained him attention and Williams received a six-month contract from the Metro Goldwyn Mayer film studio in Hollywood, earning $250 weekly.
During the winter of 1944–45, his "memory play" The Glass Menagerie was successfully produced in Chicago garnering good reviews. It moved to New York where it became an instant and enormous hit during its long Broadway run. The play tells the story of a young man, Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda, who tries to make a match between Laura and a gentleman caller. Williams' use of his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play is impossible to miss. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.

The huge success of his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1947 secured his reputation as a great playwright. Although widely celebrated and increasingly wealthy, he was still restless and insecure in the grip of fears that he would not be able to replicate his success. During the late 1940s and 1950s Williams began to travel widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. To stimulate his writing he moved often, to various cities including New York, New Orleans, Key West, Rome, Barcelona, and London. Williams wrote, "Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag."

Between 1948 and 1959 seven of his plays were performed on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.

His work reached world-wide audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. Later plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Summer and Smoke.

After the extraordinary successes of the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s brought personal turmoil and theatrical failures. 

Although he continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption as well as occasional poor choices of collaborators. Consumed by depression over the death of his partner Merlo, and in and out of treatment facilities under the control of his mother and younger brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward. Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (also called Out Cry, 1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) and others were all box office failures, and the relentlessly negative press notices wore down his spirit. His last play, A House Not Meant To Stand was produced in Chicago in 1982 and, despite largely positive reviews, ran for only 40 performances.

Critics and audiences alike failed to appreciate Williams' new style and the approach to theater he developed during the 1960s. Williams said, “I’ve been working very hard since 1969 to make an artistic comeback...there is no release short of death”(Spoto 335), and “I want to warn you, Elliot, the critics are out to get me. You’ll see how vicious they are. They make comparisons with my earlier work, but I’m writing differently now” (Spoto 331). Leverich explains that Williams to the end was concerned with "the depths and origin of human feelings and motivations, the difference being that he had gone into a deeper, more obscure realm, which, of course, put the poet in him to the fore, and not the playwright who would bring much concern for audience and critical reaction.” 

read the full bio here:

source: Wikipedia