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MichaelB wrote:British acting stalwarts Hywel Bennett and Robert Hardy.

It was interesting to note from imbd that Robert Hardy was apparently in a 1961 BBC version of Rashomon in the role of the husband! Lots of TV (including The Age of Kings and The Spread of the Eagle series of Shakespeare adaptations. He also turns up playing the obviously unsuitable suitor Sir Tony Belch in the 1980 version of Twelfth Night in that massive BBC Shakespeare cycle that produced film versions of all the plays) and of course the All Creatures Great and Small TV series and a few Harry Potter entries. He's also in a few period films in the mid to late 90s: Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1997's Mrs Dalloway, the 1998 version of The Titchbourne Claimant and the 1999 Rupert Everett version of An Ideal Husband.

He also was in Nikita Mikhailkov's film The Barber of Siberia and had supporting roles in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and 10 Rillington Place.

But I might best celebrate him for his role as the deranged "Baron Zorn" (!) tormenting his children in the underrated Hammer film Demons of the Mind (a rare starring role for him). And he turns up as a police inspector in that wonderful 'suicidal young bikers returning from the grave to terrorise local shopping centres' film Psychomania!
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In terms of Hywel Bennett, he had his best run in the mid 60s to early 70s, doing lots of sexually tinged, youth oriented films: I'd highly recommend The Family Way directed by Roy Boulting and starring Bennett and Hayley Mills as a married couple with consummation issues. Its sort of the previous generation's attempts to catch up with the whole 'grim up north' kitchen sink trend of the 60s (Room At The Top, Taste of Honey) and do a less bleak southern comic take on frank relationship issues in recognisably mundane locations.

Then that's followed by the other Hywel Bennet and Hayley Mills collaboration under the direction of Roy Boulting: the horror Twisted Nerve (with Tarantino approved theme tune!)

The Virgin Soldiers was probably Bennett's biggest role, headlining a large cast of a celebrated novel about squaddies trying to get their end away in 1950s Singapore. That sort of began a run of sexy-comic roles: in the 1970 version of the Joe Orton play Loot, Anyone For Sex? (against Nanette Newman!), and most notoriously the recipient of the world's first penis transplant from Denholm Elliot's doctor in the sex comedy (what were they thinking?) Percy!

(Though of course Bennett had the sense to miss out on the cruder sequels Stand Up Virgin Soldiers and Percy's Progress!)

Later on it was more television: he turned up in the 1979 Play For Today about homosexuality, Coming Out, was in the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy mini-series and in a couple of Dennis Potter pieces - a small role in Pennies From Heaven and a much larger one as the thuggish club owner Arthur 'Pig' Malion in Potter's final TV series Karaoke (part of Bennett's 'thug' period as a kind of a proto-Ray Winstone! He turns up in an episode of the Lock, Stock spin-off TV series too around this time). He's also in that same year's BBC adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. (Neverwhere was controversial because it was apparently going to get heavily digitally tinkered with in post-production (presumably in the vein of something like Lars von Trier's The Kingdom) but it was decided to just put the series out as it was, which led to a rather obviously stagey quality in the final result. Although at least the opening titles were memorably haunting! (It's only taken twenty or so years since this time for American Gods to get adapted. I have my fingers crossed that it leads to better results!)

The thing I'm most interested to get around to seeing from Bennett's back catalogue though is the sci-fi television drama Artemis '81, which sounds kind of Gaiman-esque in its own way, involving battles between demons and angels! Plus its got Sting and a very early role for Daniel Day-Lewis in it!

Composer Daniel Licht

colinr0380 wrote: The thing I'm most interested to get around to seeing from Bennett's back catalogue though is the sci-fi television drama Artemis '81, which sounds kind of Gaiman-esque in its own way, involving battles between demons and angels! Plus its got Sting and a very early role for Daniel Day-Lewis in it!

I remmeber Bennett being particularly good in a TV adaptation of Malice aforethought - a handy manual for would be wife-murderers
Colin re Artemis out little exchange from 3 years back -

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:

colinr0380 wrote:

I was glad to see that you voted for Monsieur Hire, Nabob of Nowhere! I went back and forth on whether to include it and it eventually just dropped off the bottom of my own list. Its a great film about the persecution of weirdo loners (hence why I can identify with it!), voyeurism and fantasy. It has been a while since I last saw it but isn't the majority of the film told in flashback as the main character falls/is pushed from the top of his block of flats?

I don't recall it being in flashback but being quite linear and without pulling it out again can't categorically say that that particular flashback reading is out of the question. Despite my best intentions to devote more time to strictly 80's stuff I went off on a Simenon bender which also resulted in Chabrol's Les Fantomes du Chapelier getting a foot in the door at number 50. If you revisit M.Hire it's well worth contrasting and comparing with Duvivier's even more acerbic version 'Panique', where Michel Simon plays the part far more aggressively than Blanc's rather self-hating nebbish.
One other orphan of mine, which in hindsight I should have spotlighted, is Artemis 81 directed by Alastair Reid but is David Rudkin's baby (He of Penda's Fen). It is a totally supersaturated bonkers affair with Rudkin's trademark obsessions of the folkloric supernatural, cinephilia (Hitchcock in this instance), psycho-analysis and low-rent sci-fi/parallel realities.
A lazy thumbnail sketch would be a Doctor Who episode where the script writers had hung out for a week round R.D Laing's place. For better or worse Sting is in it. Anyway I have a feeling it might be up your strasse and is available on DVD in a store near you.

So that's where I remembered the name from! Thanks for the recommendation, and I promise that I'll get around to watching it at some point!

colinr0380 wrote:So that's where I remembered the name from! Thanks for the recommendation, and I promise that I'll get around to watching it at some point!

Sadly the DVD is missing some of the Hitchcock stuff, presumably due to rights problems. Still a fascinating film though, as most of David Rudkin's work is.

Ty Hardin.

bearcuborg wrote:Glen Campbell.

I have no great affection for his big country hits (tiresomely inescapable when I was a kid), but 'Wichita Lineman' is an absolute classic, and he sang one of Brian Wilson's most exquisite songs and productions, 'Guess I'm Dumb':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4L15-ImCyE" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

He also sang the lead on Sagittarius' gorgeous psych classic 'My World Fell Down':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs-oGEhDP0E" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's three more stabs at immortality than most artists get.

zedz wrote:

bearcuborg wrote:Glen Campbell.

I have no great affection for his big country hits (tiresomely inescapable when I was a kid), but 'Wichita Lineman' is an absolute classic,

There used to be a great series on Radio 4 ( So great I have forgotten the title) which was an hour long and went into the genesis of certain songs and how they evolved. Apart from the Pogues 'Fairytale in New York' the one that stuck in my mind was Jimmy Webb talking about the wind in the telegraph wires that gave him the idea of Linesman. It is also one of Richard Thompson's all-time favourites

antnield wrote:Ty Hardin.

One of the Warner Bros. stable of hunks from the late '50s - early '60s, and not a bad actor. He reportedly had 8 wives and 10 kids... and was a Republican! (That ties Mickey Rooney on wives and beats him by one kid.) According to actress Suzanne Pleshette, his nickname on the WB lot was, not surprisingly, Ty 'Hard-on'.

Ray Charles and Dwight Yoakam do fine covers.
But I'm partial to Cassandra Wilson's slow, mournful version.

Barbara Cook.

Spanish auteur Basilio Martin Patino
and Alex de la Iglesia's fav actress Terele Pavez

The very talented Joe Bolonga has passed.

rohmerin wrote:...and Alex de la Iglesia's fav actress Terele Pavez

When you mentioned her, I immediately thought back to perhaps the best scene in The Day of the Beast in which Álex Angulo's priest, trying to prevent the apocalypse by raising the devil on his terms, and having just struck out with a busty dimwit in the opposite flat, decides in frustration to siphon some 'virgin blood' for a ritual from the young daughter of the family he's lodging with, only to have not reckoned with the wrath of Terele Pávez's matriarch dispensing some vigilante justice!

As you say, she's all over Alex de la Iglesia's films (300 Bullets, The Baby's Room, La communidad. Even in de la Iglesia's film released this year: The Bar), but she's also worked a few times with Agustí Villaronga - I've heard a lot about Villaronga's 1997 apparent mother-daughter extreme incest/ghost/torture film 99.9, in which she plays the mother, but have not had the opportunity to see it as yet (its one of the major titles that I've been looking for an opportunity to see for almost two decades now), and interestingly Pavez has just appeared in Villaronga's latest film Uncertain Glory, also released this year.

colinr0380 you knew more than me. Terele was the daughter of the man who arrested and killed Lorca the poet in Granada and said that famous sentence banned in the forum. Her two sisters are also actress. Emma Penella (who died) was the best of them, she is in The Executioner. Villaronga is quite good but the two pictures you mention I've not seen them.

Eric Zumbrunnen, A.C.E.

Bruce Forsyth, at 89. He had occasional acting roles, but he was a household name in the UK as a television presenter and entertainer. He was recognised by Guinness for the length of his career - he appeared on British TV in 1939 at the age of ten or eleven, making him one of the last remaining people to have appeared on television before World War II.

He's in small roles in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and in the Julie Andrews musical Star!. And bizarrely in an episode of Magnum P.I., doing his gameshow host bit!

Its difficult to understate the longevity of his career in light entertainment. The Generation Game ran on and off for decades on the BBC (and carried on with different host long after he moved on, to variable success) and his stint at the commercial ITV channel led to him hosting shows like The Price Is Right and Play Your Cards Right ("Higher! Lower!"). And then he came back in a big way hosting Strictly Come Dancing in the last decade.

Then there's his hosting appearance on Have I Got News For You which he used to hijack (in the best possible way) the show into being all about his career highlights!

not forgetting his memorable role in this work of genius/madness, still waiting for the Criterion blu...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5y2FMLGyc

Is it safe to call Forsyth an old school vaudevillian? A lot of his style would seem to have come from the musical hall stage (involving the audience with a nod and a wink; musical-comedy acts, and so on), just transferred into television variety shows and gameshow formats.

Dale Spina, WB marketing exec (from Chariots of Fire to Batman (1989))