EastEnders' Ali Osman star is unrecognisable after co-star's tragic death
Die-hard EastEnders fans will never forget Ali Osman. Nejdet Adamson, a member of the original cast of the much-loved British soap, played the character and became a household name in Walford some 40 years ago before he jetted off to chase his Hollywood dreams. During his time on Albert Square, Ali was embroiled in intense storylines involving marital breakdowns, the grief of losing a child, and a troubling gambling addiction.
He also ran the café, then-known as Al's Café, alongside his wife Sue, played by actress Sandy Ratcliff - and later started a taxi firm, OzCabs, alongside his brother Mehmet, running it from a corner table in the café. Sadly, Sandy – who was also an original cast member – died alone in sheltered housing from an accidental overdose, back in 2019. She was 70 years old.
After leaving EastEnders, 66 year old Nejdet made a dramatic career switch from Walford to Hollywood, landing a role as a short sailor in the blockbuster hits Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and its sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006).
Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl pulled in a whopping 654.3 million USD, while its sequel, Dead Man's Chest, amassed a global total of $1.066 billion. Post-EastEnders, he bagged a role in Carry On Columbus as Fayid, sharing the spotlight with comedy icon Rik Mayall.
But he hasn't been shy about discussing his professional struggles, confessing on the soap's 25th anniversary in 2010: "I have had to live with Ali for 25 years. I'm just trying to get on with my life." Maintaining a low profile, he added: "I don't give interviews. I am still acting but it is hard when everyone I'm still Ali from the café," reports OK!.
Nej also popped up in two episodes of TV comedy drama Auf Wiedersehen Pet, and has had parts in Doctor Who and Wall of Silence (2004). While juggling the life of a small-time actor, Nejdet even briefly moved to Hollywood in 1990.
However, Tinseltown wasn't all it was cracked up to be for the actor. His marriage to drama school love, Susan Stevens, ended in 1990, just a year after they tied the knot.
Before his marriage to Stevens, Nejdet had a fleeting romance with his EastEnders co-star Linda Davidson, who played Mary Smith. He remains active in showbiz, having starred in crime drama Sleep Warm a few years ago, and recently featuring in horror flick Heckle.
The actor boasts an estimated personal net worth between £1 million to £5 million. Originally known as Nej Salih, he adopted the name Nej Adamson after his stint on EastEnders ended in 1989. He continues to call London home.
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Spectator
39 minutes ago
- Spectator
Rattigan's films are as important as his plays
A campaign is under way to rename the West End's Duchess Theatre after the playwright Terence Rattigan. Supported as it is by the likes of Judi Dench and Rattigan Society president David Suchet, there's evidently a desire to right a historical wrong. Author of classics such as The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables, Rattigan was known for his poise, melancholy and restraint, all of which put him at odds with the coterie of upstart writers of the 1950s – still amusingly known as the Angry Young Men. It's an oft-repeated chapter of theatre history that arch-kitchen-sinkers such as John Osborne made the environment virtually impossible for Rattigan to work in. Rattigan joked about it at the 1956 opening of Look Back in Anger. It was as if Osborne were saying, 'Look, Ma, I'm not Terence Rattigan!' he quipped. However, the Rattigan-bashing was always an empty indulgence. Osborne himself admitted as much on these very pages in 1993, writing: 'I have been intrigued by the success of the current revival of Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan was under the general frown when I first joined the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, and both George Devine and Tony Richardson were appalled when I confessed to being moved by the play.' Perhaps a Rattigan Theatre would indeed lay some of the ghosts to rest. But on first hearing news of the campaign, another thought occurred: Rattigan deserves a cinema as well. Film was arguably much kinder to him than theatre ever was in the low ebbs of his career. It supplied him with constant work, saw some of his best adaptations, and allowed his writing to weather the storm. Without his breakout play French Without Tears (1936), British cinema wouldn't have acquired one of its classic rogues, Rex Harrison, whose name it thrust into the spotlight. But French Without Tears was chiefly important because its adaptation in 1940 was Rattigan's first collaboration with director Anthony Asquith – and the first success of his screen career. Few could match Asquith's ability to adapt stage classics for film. The son of liberal prime minister Herbert, Asquith junior had directed an Oscar-nominated Pygmalion (1938), with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, as well as the most celebrated version of The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), with Edith Evans as the definitive Lady Bracknell. Like so many British artists, Rattigan and Asquith were drafted into propaganda duties during the war. And it resulted in their first truly great work, The Way to the Stars (1945). The film had a Who's Who cast – Michael Redgrave, John Mills and Trevor Howard, all of whom would return to work with Asquith and Rattigan – and in its quieter moments, observing the grin-and-bear-it times of a British bomber base, hinted at their true creative potential. Postwar, Asquith returned to Rattigan's stage work with an adaptation of The Winslow Boy in 1948. It perfectly captured the it's-just-not-cricket mentality of the original play with its story of a boy unjustly expelled from naval college. Rattigan would take up these themes again (to lesser effect) in The Final Test (1953), but The Winslow Boy had the advantage of Robert Donat in the lead role at the height of his powers. Asquith's take on The Browning Version was another great example of his refusal to follow the growing spectacle – albeit much of it magnificent – of contemporaries such as David Lean and Michael Powell. Refraining from visual tricks or even much of a musical score, Asquith allows Rattigan's poise and melancholy to speak for itself. It may be one of the most quietly devastating English films ever made. And as the retiring classics teacher who may or may not be missed by his pupils, Michael Redgrave gives one of his most heart-wrenching performances as Crocker-Harris. Rattigan was not tied to Asquith, and pursued multiple projects outside of his preoccupation with upper-middle-class England. He created the original screenplay for Brighton Rock (1948), for example, Graham Greene's story of wide-boy knife gangs directed by John Boulting. It was reworked before reaching the screen but Greene crucially retained Rattigan's vision of the work as a thriller rather than an intellectual treatise. The Boultings kept Rattigan's change of ending, too, in which a gramophone recording of Pinkie (Richard Attenborough) jams on 'I love you…' before he lays into his love interest. Rattigan didn't generally shy away from the brutality of romantic relationships. The Deep Blue Sea (1955) is testament to that. Influenced by the relationship between Rattigan and actor Kenneth Morgan, the play's curtain-twitching portrait of a squalid postwar London is still one of his most unflinching of love stories. Vivien Leigh was cast as Hester, the spurned lover of RAF pilot Freddie, played by Kenneth More, who had transferred from the original play. More suggested that Leigh brought too much glamour to the part. Yet with Leigh's mental health deteriorating and her personal life crumbling, she appears in hindsight to have been all too right for The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan then teamed up with Leigh's husband Laurence Olivier on The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), but Rattigan's last great screen work was his collaboration a year later with Delbert Mann on the Oscar-nominated Separate Tables. Another of his tragic ensemble pieces, the film saw a wealth of stars gathered in a run-down Bournemouth hotel, all forced to examine their lives after the revelation of a scandal involving the retired Major Pollock played by David Niven. Niven has the film to thank for the only Oscar win of his career, and Rattigan for his second nomination. (He received his first in 1952 for scripting David Lean's The Sound Barrier.) What happened next might have been the apex of Rattigan's screen career yet turned out to be the beginning of the end. In 1960 he had started working with the Rank Organisation to adapt his T.E. Lawrence play Ross. It was to star Dirk Bogarde and Asquith was slated to direct. But there was a problem: another Lawrence film was already in the works. Out of respect to David Lean – and under some pressure from Lawrence of Arabia producer Sam Spiegel – the studio pulled the plug on the project. Bogarde called it his 'bitterest disappointment'. Rattigan and Asquith ploughed on, assembling star-studded casts for two further movies, The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), with all favours from friends called in. But even with Rattigan's work finding new audiences on television, the 1960s were relentlessly unforgiving. His last screenplay of note was the wonderful musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), with Peter O'Toole, before he fled into creative (and tax) exile to Bermuda. A knighthood in 1971 and a minor reconciliation with the theatre industry before his death in 1977 did little to remedy his unhappiness. The West End rediscovers Rattigan's work almost every decade. But the screen never forgot him. Terence Davies's hypnotic version of The Deep Blue Sea (2011) with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston converted a whole new generation. Rattigan no doubt deserves a theatre. His contribution continues to enrich the British stage – especially in its deeply English themes, its styling and restraint. But his dedication to the screen suggests a Rattigan cinema wouldn't go amiss either.
Metro
2 hours ago
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EastEnders' Patrick terrified with anxiety as he's released from hospital
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3 hours ago
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'Most harrowing film ever made' still available to stream as Netflix pulls it
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After premiering at Venice Film Festival, where it clinched the Special Jury Prize, The Nightingale screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival months later, where some cinemagoers revealed they had walked out over its intense and upsetting scenes. *Warning – descriptions of graphic scenes below* Alongside sequences depicting murder, assault and infanticide, there are also three visceral and horrifying rape scenes within the first 20 minutes, which according to local reports prompted protests and shouted criticisms at director Kent – who was sitting in the audience. Kent later defended the scenes, the breathtaking violence of which continues further into the film, as an 'honest and necessary depiction' of a particularly brutal moment in history in Tasmania, where the massacre of Aboriginals by British colonists intensified during the Black War. Critics and viewers also praised Kent for her unflinching take on things, with writer Michael Ouzas describing The Nightingale as 'essential viewing and an Australian classic' and @jesuevalle admitting on X that while he walked out 'to take myself away from that brutal space', he still recognised The Nightingale as 'an important film' and walked back in to finish watching it. We Live Entertainment's critic Scott Menzel called it a 'haunting and unforgettable masterpiece', while awarding The Nightingale 9.5 stars out of 10 and acknowledging its very dark nature. 'I don't think that any review can mentally, physically, or emotionally prepare you for what Kent has brought to life with this film,' he added. Meanwhile Alex Flood for NME branded it 'the most shocking film of the year' and advised that the film was 'not for the faint-hearted', while Little White Lies' Hannah Strong described it as a 'devastating, uncomfortable watch' while suggesting it needed to be 'exactly the film it is, bubbling with completely justified anger and pain'. The Nightingale holds an impressive 87% score from critics on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, while boasting a decent 73% from the smaller pool of audience members sharing their reactions. 'Genuinely one of the most harrowing pieces of cinema I have ever experienced,' shared Dan L, who said that there 'aren't words for how incredible this film is'. More Trending 'I watched this a few months ago and I still think about it all the time. It's one of those movies that really sticks with you,' wrote Laura M, adding: 'This movie made me WEEP.' Meanwhile, Amanda H said she was 'hooked from start to finish', which Hua M agreed with, chiming in: 'Had me completely riveted/shook from start to finish. Incredible performances all around (but particularly by Aisling), and a nightmarish, visceral experience that I will not soon forget.' 'Although some scenes were hard to watch, I couldn't tear my eyes off the screen,' wrote Maria D. The Nightingale is streaming now on Prime Video in the UK. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: This Wednesday season 2 filming location has a devastating haunted past MORE: Wednesday fans baffled by Lady Gaga's season 2 role as they beg for answers MORE: Another major Neighbours star exits months before show finale
