Interviews
elaine.lipworth
Daryl Hannah’s played sexy, sassy, funny and dangerous, from the naive mermaid in Splash, to the vicious one eyed assassin in director Quentin Tarantino’s ultra violent Kill Bill films. Her leading men are among the all-time greats: Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Robert Redford in Legal Eagles, Michael Douglas in Wall St and Steve Martin in Roxanne. And it would appear that real life has been just thrilling for the alluring actress. She started acting at 11 and was a bona fide movie star by the time she was 23.
Her boyfriends would be on many women’s fantasy Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Michael Palin (b 1943) has had - is having - an amazing multi-pronged career. One of the original members of the Monty Python team, he has subsequently reinvented himself as a prolific author, a film and television actor and, more recently, a hugely popular and successful travel show presenter and writer. Palin has a lot to celebrate these next few weeks with the publication of the second volume of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, and, next month, Python's 40th birthday (can it really be possible?) Tomorrow Palin is giving a public interview in Ely Cathedral for the Cambridge Film Festival Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Richard Bean's monster mainstage play, England People Very Nice, was about immigration to London's East End - and was easily the most controversial play of 2009. He is a son of Hull (b. 1956). He is one of the most prolific and talented playwrights to emerge on the British new writing scene since the start of the new millennium. He is also a late developer: before becoming a playwright, he was a stand-up comic, and before that an occupational psychologist. As a writer, he first came to attention with his play Toast at the Royal Court in 1999, one of his gritty work plays, which he once Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Ballet's leading ballerina Tamara Rojo was holding a large and not old but already battered diary when we met, pages and dried flowers falling out of it, along with notes and photographs. It’s barely a book, more a pile of loose papers, but it is the 10-year diary with which this extraordinary performer, still only 35, intends to see out her dancing career, and move on to her next.She will spend next week nightly on stage at the Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre in a new ballet created for her at the Royal Ballet by Kim Brandstrup, set to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It will Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sir Tim Rice (b. 1944) will always be inextricably known as Andrew Lloyd Webber's original - and best - lyricist. They met in 1965 and promptly wrote a musical - The Likes of Us - which has never been professionally staged. Of the three which have been, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat turned 41 this year. After Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, lyricist and composer parted company when Lloyd Webber started working with T S Eliot. In 1984 Rice went on to collaborate with the male half of Abba on Chess. Though close to his heart, the show has never taken definitive shape. Until now Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.These transcripts come from 1997, before Artangel’s staging at London’s Roundhouse of what became instantly known as the white bouncy castle, Tight Roaring Circle, 2001 before the showing of two full-length ballet productions, Artifact and Eidos:Telos by his Ballett Frankfurt, then his company, and 2003, on the closing down by conservative civic authorities of Ballett Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The phenomenal French ballerina Sylvie Guillem (b. 1965) has always been a modern woman, for all her classical ballerina dress. She joined the Royal Ballet in 1989 from Nureyev's Paris Opera Ballet, on terms of strictest independence, hardly saying a word to the press, while her image as a brilliant but truculent "Mademoiselle Non" grew and grew. The image belies the person, though - once you meet her, what’s striking is her lack of side, unblinkered intelligence and polite but firm candour.This first of four interviews dates from December 1995 when the world’s most imitated classical Read more ...
elaine.lipworth
Michael Caine has made more than 100 films: from Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie and Get Carter to The Italian Job and Educating Rita. He won best supporting actor Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules. This interview dates from 2007 when his more recent films were the remake of Sleuth with Jude Law and The Dark Knight. A sharp dresser, in black trousers and polo shirt, he was slim and fit and did not look 75, despite the lines and thinning hair. The actor lives in Surrey with Shakira, his wife of more than 30 years. They have a daughter, Dominique, and Caine also has a Read more ...
robert.sandall
It’s pretty well understood that talent, good looks and hard work are not enough to guarantee you safe passage through the celebrity jungle nowadays. But for five years it looked as though they might be enough for Katherine Jenkins. Until recently the general view of Jenkins held that she was a nice, polite, touchingly naive, and unaffected young woman from Neath in South Wales, who just happened to be the most popular classically trained singer to emerge here in this century.Her reticence appeared almost saintly. Jenkins never talked in public about her boyfriends, never dissed less Read more ...