News

The veteran British actress Brigit Forsyth has died aged 83, her agent has shared.

Mark Pemberton reported that Forsyth, best known for her roles in a string of British TV comedies, died in her sleep, with her family by her side.

The actress was best known for her role in the 1970s hit comedy Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, where she played disapproving Thelma, wife of Bob, played by Rodney Bewes.

Other credits included TV dramas Playing the Field and Boon. She also appeared in 1980s sitcoms Tom, Dick and Harriet, and Sharon and Elsie, later appearing as a doctor in short-lived ITV soap opera The Practice.

From 2013 to 2019, she was in the BBC reboot of Open All Hours, playing Madge in Still Open All Hours.

Her agent said in a statement that she “had a varied and notable career in stage, screen and radio”, including roles in theatres “from...

Patricia Neal ca. 1950. Patricia Neal movies: 'The Day the Earth Stood Still,' 'A Face in the Crowd' Back in 1949, few would have predicted that Gary Cooper's leading lady in King Vidor's The Fountainhead would go on to win a Best Actress Academy Award 15 years later. Patricia Neal was one of those performers – e.g., Jean Arthur, Anne Bancroft – whose film career didn't start out all that well, but who, by way of Broadway, managed to both revive and magnify their Hollywood stardom. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” series, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating Sunday, Aug. 16, '15, to Patricia Neal. This evening, TCM is showing three of her best-known films, in addition to one TCM premiere and an unusual latter-day entry. 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' Robert Wise was hardly a genre director. A former editor (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons...

Mark Harrison Sep 13, 2016

From James Bond to Willy Wonka, Matilda to The Witches, we chart the big screen work of Roald Dahl...

Roald Dahl has often been referred to as one of the greatest storytellers for children in the 20th century. His books have delighted children for generations, with their dark and inventive sense of humour and their eccentric, dastardly adult characters.

Likewise, his written work for adults has just as much wit and creativity, and over the years, he also worked as a screenwriter on a number of projects, including TV work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and his own anthology series, Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected.

Given how it doesn't even take the likes of J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer five years to have their popular works adapted by Hollywood, there has inevitably been an extensive crossover between Dahl's written work and the big screen. His work...

Feature Mark Harrison 3 Mar 2014 - 07:02

From James Bond to Willy Wonka, Matilda to The Witches, we chart the big screen work of Roald Dahl...

Roald Dahl has often been referred to as one of the greatest storytellers for children in the 20th century. His books have delighted children for generations, with their dark and inventive sense of humour and their eccentric, dastardly adult characters.

Likewise, his written work for adults has just as much wit and creativity, and over the years, he also worked as a screenwriter on a number of projects, including TV work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and his own anthology series, Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected.

Given how it doesn't even take the likes of J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer five years to have their popular works adapted by Hollywood, there has inevitably been an extensive crossover between Dahl's written work and the big screen.

This kaleidoscopic compilation of soundtracks by Bernard Herrmann scored for film, television and radio presents a feature-length overview of this incredibly unique composer's wide-ranging and distinctive style. Working with directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, during a career that spanned over forty years, Herrmann created scores of such innovative and emotional magnitude that notions of sound and music in cinema have never been the same. The breadth and scope of Herrmann's ingenious composing, arranging and orchestrating talent is on full display here, from the use of the theremin in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), to the all-string "black & white" sound for Psycho (1960), and the whistled main title of The Twisted Nerve (1968). Despite a well-charted, stormy history of personal and professional battles, Herrmann could work effortlessly in many musical idioms, seemingly without pause, whether it be within the Romanticism of Jane Eyre (1943) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir...

Above: A rack focus in Bullitt.

Trespassers Will Be Eaten

Perhaps a less eye-grabbing, but still “driving” title for this third Mubi soundtrack mix should be Shifting Gears...as such, it’s a free-falling, propulsive survey of scores focusing on the thriller in all of its manifestations: detective procedurals, bank heists, neo-noirs, spy films, psychodramas, giallos, chases, races, and sci-fi mind-games. Featured also are a few composers better known for their more famous musical projects. Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s metallic, rhythmic score for Rumble Fish, gamely taunts the self-conscious black and white street theatre of Francis Ford Coppola's film. So-called fifth Beatle, producer George Martin’s funky Shaft-influenced Live and Let Die score ushers in a more leisurely 70s-era James Bond, as incarnated by Roger Moore. Epic crooner visionary Scott Walker’s fatally romantic melodies for Leos Carax’s inventively faithful Melville adaptation Pola X is remarkably subdued and lush.

Above: Image from Maurice Binder's title sequence for Diamonds Are Forever (1971).

Sleep Little Lush

This follow-up to the previous soundtrack mix, Hyper Sleep, is very much the same animal: a chance gathering of mesmerizing music tracks, carefully arranged to focus on the interstitial character of film music—its ability to distill into hallucinatory moments, the most sensual or emotional qualities of a film’s nature, and amplify these sensations to increase their temporal impact. With this idea of music as intoxicant in mind, the passing this year of John Barry was a loss of one of the great “perfumers” of film composing (for more on music as perfume, see Daniel Kasman’s “Herrmann’s Perfume”). The beautiful themes that Barry scored for the world of 007 that open this collection set the spell for a kaleidoscopic (largely) 60s and 70s sample of some of the best film music written by Ennio Morricone,...

W Stephen Gilbert writes: I first met Alastair Reid (obituary, 10 September) in 1972 when I was a trainee script editor at the BBC and shadowing a Penelope Mortimer play called Three's One under his direction. It was an awkward beast, centred on therapy sessions in which the analyst (the dapper Fulton Mackay) went unseen. Alastair got away with it – as I would now reckon – in the way he did much else, for he was he was fleet of foot, always pulling an eye-catching trick if he thought a script was flagging.

When later in the 70s I wrote about television, especially drama, in the London listings magazine Time Out, I would refer to Alastair in print as Flash Harry, which made him roar with laughter. I was thinking particularly of how he applied his inventiveness in his ghastly, lurid, modish feature Baby Love (1968).His later work matured into something lucid, judicious and humane.

Patricia Neal, the Oscar-winning actress whose life was as dramatic and inspirational as anything she did on stage and screen, died Sunday of lung cancer at her home in Edgartown, Mass. She was 84.

Most identifiable playing characters of strong will and resilience, Neal won her Academy Award for her portrayal of a demoralized housewife in "Hud" (1963), opposite Paul Newman, then earned another nomination for "The Subject Was Roses" (1968), playing the pitiful mother of a returning war victim (Martin Sheen).

In February 1965, after the first day of filming "Seven Women," Neal -- then 39 and three months pregnant -- suffered three strokes caused by a brain hemorrhage as she was bathing to her 8-year-old daughter, Tessa. She was in a coma for three weeks.

She emerged unable to speak, her memory erased and her right side paralyzed. Neal was confined to a wheelchair at first, but her husband, British writer Roald Dahl,...

Hermann joking with frequent collaborator Alfred Hitchcock.

Cinema Retro reader and film historian Bruce Crawford gave us the head's up that he recently collaborated with Robert Osborne on a month-long tribute to composer Bernard Hermann. Films relating to the maestro will be presented every Tuesday in September on TCM. Here is a look at the schedule:

12 August 2009Tcm (USA) - Spotlight on HerrmannSource: Bill Huelbig, Bruce Crawford Every Tuesday in September Turner Classic Movies (Us Version) will show several Herrmann scored films.

The spotlight will be hosted by Robert Osborne.

The Herrmann consultant is Bruce Crawford.

The schedule:

1. Sept:

Hangover Square

Devil and Daniel Webster

Citizen Kane

The Magnificent Ambersons

On Dangerous Ground

8. Sept:

Five Fingers

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Beneath the 12-Mile Reef

The Naked and the Dead

3 Worlds of Gulliver

15. Sept:

The Trouble With Harry

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Vertigo

The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad

Mysterious Island...