Post by petrolino on Jun 16, 2018 1:47:03 GMT
Richard Harris (born 1 October 1930, Limerick, County Limerick, Ireland)
"The Irish actor Richard Harris was, to borrow from Seamus Heaney, a far-seeing joker posted far over the fog, or a wind-drunk lion-sun batting kites out of the sky. His performance technique had a studied carelessness or sprezzatura, antlerless and shin-deep in rage. The sixth of nine children, Harris attended a Jesuit school in Limerick and nearly became a professional rugby player before he caught tuberculosis in his teens, a brush with death that only increased his lust for life. Like his great friend Peter O’Toole, he played with his own picaresque mythology: one version is he started life as a ratcatcher and slept homeless for six weeks while he studied at LAMDA. Thanks to eye-catching bit parts on stage and screen, he soon became one of the first Irish actors to get lead Hollywood roles at a time when some boarding houses still specified “No Irishmen or black”."
- Ed Cripps, The Rake : The Modern Voice Of Classic Elegance
"A Clockwork Orange was just one of a trio of masterpieces with which a young Malcolm McDowell exploded into film consciousness in London in the early 60s and 70s. McDowell was a huge part of the late 60s film explosion in England – a scene that also spawned Michael Caine, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw and more. However, despite the talent of the new school of British actors, McDowell has always aspired to a long-term career more like one of the old masters of British cinema.
“Well, you always presume you will be [acting for many years],” McDowell says, “because acting in England is a profession and like a doctor or whatever you feel that you’ll do it until the day you drop. So, I presumed, but of course there are a lot of big pitfalls on the way to a long career. My hero, in terms of longevity and the way he conducted himself was John Gielgud. John really changed with the generations and managed to adapt his style. He never went out of style, really. He was amazing. And he learned late in life how to be a really powerful film actor. He always thought that he wouldn’t be a very good film actor, but it’s actually not true. When he was in his 60s he delivered some extraordinary performances on film.”
“It was amazing, we were making these classic movies. Michael [Caine] made his great share of them – my God; he made some extraordinary movies in that time. I’m thinking of Alfie and The Icpress File and things like that. And Get Carter was a brilliant movie. [For me] to make If, A Clockwork Orange and O, Lucky Man! – it came out of the gate rather fast. They were the movies of their time and they were great pieces of… not only box office, but they were artistic triumphs, certainly. So, you’ve got both – the hit with the art movie. So that was great. That was a terrific thing to get.”
It all came back to director Anderson, with whom McDowell quickly developed a rapport, starring not only in If, but also in the director’s films O, Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. “He was the enfant terrible of his generation of directors,” McDowell says, “an extraordinary talent, one of great, great geniuses of his time, really. He was a theater director primarily. His film work, I suppose is rather meager compared with the talent. He didn’t make that many movies, but when he made them, my God, they were unbelievable. I was lucky enough to be cast by him in my first movie If, which was about a revolution in a boy’s school. It’s a fantastic film and holds up very well today. It has not dated at all. It’s one of the classics of British cinema. I was lucky enough to be chosen by him. I went to an audition and he picked me out, so I was just very, very lucky, because I had done loads of auditions before and I’d always got to it’s either me or somebody else – and it was always somebody else who got it. So, I was very lucky, this time it was my turn. The thing was: I got a masterpiece. It could have been a Hammer Horror film, but it wasn’t, it was one of the great movies ever made in England.”
It was the performance in If that put McDowell on Kubrick’s radar for the starring role in A Clockwork Orange. The director was so impressed by McDowell’s work that he didn’t even have to audition for the role. In fact, McDowell recalls, he was essentially cast with a phone call. Kubrick was notorious as a director for his perfectionism and his occasional prickliness – his Paths of Glory and Spartacus star Kirk Douglas famously called Kubrick “a talented sh*t” – however McDowell enjoyed working with the man. McDowell does acknowledge it was a very dissimilar type of set than he had experienced with Anderson. “Kubrick was a very different type to Lindsay Anderson, who was very emotional, irascible and didn’t suffer fools lightly,” McDowell recalls. “Stanley was very self-contained, very quiet, very measured. Completely the opposite, really, but still extraordinary in his appetite and enthusiasm for everything connected with movies. It was amazing. He was a fantastic guy, really – and, of course, made some of the greatest films that have ever been seen on the big screen.” By the mid-70s, McDowell was on top of the acting world. And then the British cinematic tradition pretty much ground to a halt."
- Jay S. Jacobs, Pop Entertainment
“Well, you always presume you will be [acting for many years],” McDowell says, “because acting in England is a profession and like a doctor or whatever you feel that you’ll do it until the day you drop. So, I presumed, but of course there are a lot of big pitfalls on the way to a long career. My hero, in terms of longevity and the way he conducted himself was John Gielgud. John really changed with the generations and managed to adapt his style. He never went out of style, really. He was amazing. And he learned late in life how to be a really powerful film actor. He always thought that he wouldn’t be a very good film actor, but it’s actually not true. When he was in his 60s he delivered some extraordinary performances on film.”
“It was amazing, we were making these classic movies. Michael [Caine] made his great share of them – my God; he made some extraordinary movies in that time. I’m thinking of Alfie and The Icpress File and things like that. And Get Carter was a brilliant movie. [For me] to make If, A Clockwork Orange and O, Lucky Man! – it came out of the gate rather fast. They were the movies of their time and they were great pieces of… not only box office, but they were artistic triumphs, certainly. So, you’ve got both – the hit with the art movie. So that was great. That was a terrific thing to get.”
It all came back to director Anderson, with whom McDowell quickly developed a rapport, starring not only in If, but also in the director’s films O, Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. “He was the enfant terrible of his generation of directors,” McDowell says, “an extraordinary talent, one of great, great geniuses of his time, really. He was a theater director primarily. His film work, I suppose is rather meager compared with the talent. He didn’t make that many movies, but when he made them, my God, they were unbelievable. I was lucky enough to be cast by him in my first movie If, which was about a revolution in a boy’s school. It’s a fantastic film and holds up very well today. It has not dated at all. It’s one of the classics of British cinema. I was lucky enough to be chosen by him. I went to an audition and he picked me out, so I was just very, very lucky, because I had done loads of auditions before and I’d always got to it’s either me or somebody else – and it was always somebody else who got it. So, I was very lucky, this time it was my turn. The thing was: I got a masterpiece. It could have been a Hammer Horror film, but it wasn’t, it was one of the great movies ever made in England.”
It was the performance in If that put McDowell on Kubrick’s radar for the starring role in A Clockwork Orange. The director was so impressed by McDowell’s work that he didn’t even have to audition for the role. In fact, McDowell recalls, he was essentially cast with a phone call. Kubrick was notorious as a director for his perfectionism and his occasional prickliness – his Paths of Glory and Spartacus star Kirk Douglas famously called Kubrick “a talented sh*t” – however McDowell enjoyed working with the man. McDowell does acknowledge it was a very dissimilar type of set than he had experienced with Anderson. “Kubrick was a very different type to Lindsay Anderson, who was very emotional, irascible and didn’t suffer fools lightly,” McDowell recalls. “Stanley was very self-contained, very quiet, very measured. Completely the opposite, really, but still extraordinary in his appetite and enthusiasm for everything connected with movies. It was amazing. He was a fantastic guy, really – and, of course, made some of the greatest films that have ever been seen on the big screen.” By the mid-70s, McDowell was on top of the acting world. And then the British cinematic tradition pretty much ground to a halt."
- Jay S. Jacobs, Pop Entertainment
Rachel Roberts & Richard Harris
Richard Harris & Vanessa Redgrave
Richard Harris & Sean Connery
Charlotte Rampling & Richard Harris
Richard Harris on the set of Sam Peckinpah's 'Major Dundee' (1965)
"Richard Harris was cheeky, irreverent, funny. According to him he had to be, to be noticed. He was born into a family of seven siblings in Limerick. From day one, he was battling for attention. "I was lost in the middle of the Harris brigade," he told journalist Joe Jackson in 1987. "But this makes you fight for the affection of your parents, fight for their attention. You don't get it for free. You get it from the age of one day to two years; then have to fight for it. You had to put up a flag and say, 'Hey, I'm here, too, don't miss me', or you were passed over."
His family were well off. His father owned flour mills in the city where Harris would later work as a rat-catcher. In a 1973 interview, he informed Michael Parkinson that he didn't last that long because he organised a strike for the workers "against my own father". By his own admission, he was never good at school but was always interested in sports, especially rugby, a game he had to quit in late adolescence when he contracted tuberculosis. Consumption confined him to bed for three years, he claimed, but during this period he started to read. As people stopped coming to visit, he had to make up friends to keep him occupied and thus he started acting in his sick bed. "I used to invent people out of light bulbs," he said. "I'd come up with hundreds of conversations with people in light bulbs, and these hundreds of people would come in and I'd be the king of England or the Pope and that's how it started."
After recovering from his illness, he went to London and entered the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, to study acting. It was, he said, a "period of starvation" during which he spent six weeks sleeping in a coal cellar. In 1956, then aged 26, he joined the Theatre Workshop run by Joan Littlewood. "Everything I know or everything I'm supposed to know about acting," he later said, "I learnt from this marvellous lady." Harris appeared in a production of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow at the Theatre Royal in Stratford. He was seen there by Lee Strasberg, then the director of the Actors' Studio, who found him impressive. A small part in the 1961 war classic The Guns of Navarone, starring Gregory Peck, was followed by a strong supporting role as mutineer John Mills in Mutiny on the Bounty, which starred the superb but supremely difficult Marlon Brando. Harris was a fan but by the end of filming that had changed. In one scene Brando's character, Fletcher Christian, strikes Mills. On the first take, Brando's attempt was a damp squib. Harris responded with a mock curtsy but Brando didn't get the joke. After a similar effort on the second take, Harris thrust his chin forward and said, "Come on, big boy, why don't you f***ing kiss me and be done with it!" Harris kissed Brando on the cheek, hugged him, and asked him to dance. The lead man's ego had been dealt a blow and he stormed off the set. A year later the Limerick man was nominated for an Academy Award and won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his gritty portrayal of rugby league professional Frank Machin in This Sporting Life."
- Jonathan DeBurca Butler, Irish Independent
"Barbara Windsor was born on August 6, 1937 in Shoreditch, London, England. Her mother was a dressmaker who decked her out in fancy outfits and encouraged her daughter to perform. During intense bombing raids on London in the 2nd World War - raids that came to be known as the Blitz - many children were evacuated. Windsor was sent north to Blackpool, Lancashire where she studied dance. She attended convent school where nuns revealed a gifted student, a student who was later to become noted for her high IQ, and though she considered becoming a nun herself, the dance bug had bit her. She took elocution lessons and enrolled in acting classes, adding to her growing skill set which included a unique singing voice. She became a professional dancer and worked on the chorus line. She worked as a glamour model, cut vinyl records, acted in numerous films and became a leading light on the London stage.
Windsor was a member of experimental director Joan Littlewood's influential company, Theatre Workshop. She performed roles in London's West End, and when the Theatre Workshop took 'Oh, What A Lovely War!' to Broadway, New York, Windsor received a Tony nomination. Her film career was diverse and she became a major television star in the U K, culminating in a recurring role on one of the nation's top rated soap operas, 'Eastenders'.
Barbara Windsor is a working class icon who inspires kids to believe they can make it, regardless of background and no matter what obstacles they face. She's a symbol of fresh-faced British optimism, a beautiful, intelligent, rhythmic, upbeat musical star. She's performed the classics on stage, from William Shakespeare to Anton Chekhov, and become a pillar of the pantomime community."
"Barbara Windsor was born on August 6, 1937 in Shoreditch, London, England. Her mother was a dressmaker who decked her out in fancy outfits and encouraged her daughter to perform. During intense bombing raids on London in the 2nd World War - raids that came to be known as the Blitz - many children were evacuated. Windsor was sent north to Blackpool, Lancashire where she studied dance. She attended convent school where nuns revealed a gifted student, a student who was later to become noted for her high IQ, and though she considered becoming a nun herself, the dance bug had bit her. She took elocution lessons and enrolled in acting classes, adding to her growing skill set which included a unique singing voice. She became a professional dancer and worked on the chorus line. She worked as a glamour model, cut vinyl records, acted in numerous films and became a leading light on the London stage.
Windsor was a member of experimental director Joan Littlewood's influential company, Theatre Workshop. She performed roles in London's West End, and when the Theatre Workshop took 'Oh, What A Lovely War!' to Broadway, New York, Windsor received a Tony nomination. Her film career was diverse and she became a major television star in the U K, culminating in a recurring role on one of the nation's top rated soap operas, 'Eastenders'.
Barbara Windsor is a working class icon who inspires kids to believe they can make it, regardless of background and no matter what obstacles they face. She's a symbol of fresh-faced British optimism, a beautiful, intelligent, rhythmic, upbeat musical star. She's performed the classics on stage, from William Shakespeare to Anton Chekhov, and become a pillar of the pantomime community."
- Umberto Petrolino reviews 'The Barbara Windsor Story' (2018), Outside Pressure
"Richard Harris was the hardest big man I ever seen, boy. Everybody called him the big man, baby, you know, the big man. Oliver Reed couldn't stand up straight most days, Harris was just hard, permanent hard like Robert Shaw, that's hard, damn hard."
- Tyron Kellis, 'Street Tough And Over'
"Well indeed, freedom is freedom."
- Richard Harris
Brothers in Arms : Richard Harris & Peter O'Toole
Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal
Barbara Windsor
'Friendship' - Ray Charles & Ricky Skaggs