Latest news with #DramaCentreLondon
Scottish Sun
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Who is Alan Carr's ex-husband Paul Drayton?
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) ALAN Carr is adored by fans across the world thanks to his impressive career in TV and he's set to appear on BBC's Celebrity Traitors. Sadly in 2022, he revealed that he had split from his husband Paul Drayton. Here's what we know about him. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 2 Alan Carr with his husband Paul Drayton Who is Paul Drayton? Paul Drayton is a party planner and actor. He attended Drama Centre London, where his acting career lasted at least 20 years according to the caption of an Instagram post that he posted in April 2020. Alan has helped Paul through spells of alcoholism and rehab. The couple lived together in West London and have remained friends following their split. Read More on Alan Carr CURTAINS UP! Alan Carr's Interior Design Masters is replaced in fresh BBC shake up chaos When did he and Alan Carr split up? On January 21, 2022, Alan and Drayton announced in a joint statement that they were going their separate ways. The pair had been married for three years but were together for 13 years. A statement released by Alan's representative read: "After 13 years as a couple and three years of marriage, Alan Carr and Paul Drayton would like to announce they are separating. "They have jointly and amicably made the difficult decision to divorce and go their separate ways. We request that their privacy is respected at this sensitive time". In October 2024, the pair reunited for a tragic reason. They made the difficult decision to have their dog, Joyce, put to sleep as a kindness, as she hadn't been very well. Alan Carr has reunited with jailed ex Paul Drayton at a Eurovision party at his home The former theatre actor explained that their beloved Irish Red Setter was suffering from a heart condition, and although it was heartbreaking, they both cared for her deeply. Paul shared a series of throwback photos with his followers, showing himself and Alan alongside their beloved dog. He wrote: 'Her heart is failing. Ours are breaking! '4.30 tomorrow me and Alan are doing our last act of kindness and letting her go. 'Thank you for all your lovely messages.' The former couple also had to say goodbye to another of their much-loved dogs, Irish Red Setter Bev, back in May 2022, just a few months after announcing their split. What has Alan Carr said about Paul Drayton? Speaking on an episode of Lorraine in April 2022, Alan said the couple's marriage broke down during the covid-19 pandemic but they are looking ahead to the future. When host Lorraine Kelly asked about the split, Alan said: "I wrote the tour, and then our marriage broke down during Covid, because it was so stressful, everything ... 2 Alan and Paul came together for their dogs. "And then I was going on stage and I was just like, "Well this doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense." "So we're divorced now, he's excited about the future, I'm excited about the future. "We're still always going to be friends because we've been through so much together." Why did Paul go to jail? Shortly after their split announcement, Paul posted on Instagram telling his followers that he was in rehab for alcoholism. He stated after a "challenging couple of years" he had pleaded guilty in November 2021 to a drink-driving charge. He was arrested following a smash, which occurred just three miles away from the home he shared with Alan. Paul was sentenced to 14 weeks in jail after admitting drink-driving at Brighton Magistrates Court. However, he was freed after two days in prison.
The Sun
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Who is Alan Carr's ex-husband Paul Drayton?
ALAN Carr is adored by fans across the world thanks to his impressive career in TV and he's set to appear on BBC's Celebrity Traitors. Sadly in 2022, he revealed that he had split from his husband Paul Drayton. Here's what we know about him. Who is Paul Drayton? Paul Drayton is a party planner and actor. He attended Drama Centre London, where his acting career lasted at least 20 years according to the caption of an Instagram post that he posted in April 2020. Alan has helped Paul through spells of alcoholism and rehab. The couple lived together in West London and have remained friends following their split. When did he and Alan Carr split up? On January 21, 2022, Alan and Drayton announced in a joint statement that they were going their separate ways. The pair had been married for three years but were together for 13 years. A statement released by Alan's representative read: "After 13 years as a couple and three years of marriage, Alan Carr and Paul Drayton would like to announce they are separating. "They have jointly and amicably made the difficult decision to divorce and go their separate ways. We request that their privacy is respected at this sensitive time". In October 2024, the pair reunited for a tragic reason. They made the difficult decision to have their dog, Joyce, put to sleep as a kindness, as she hadn't been very well. Alan Carr has reunited with jailed ex Paul Drayton at a Eurovision party at his home The former theatre actor explained that their beloved Irish Red Setter was suffering from a heart condition, and although it was heartbreaking, they both cared for her deeply. Paul shared a series of throwback photos with his followers, showing himself and Alan alongside their beloved dog. He wrote: 'Her heart is failing. Ours are breaking! '4.30 tomorrow me and Alan are doing our last act of kindness and letting her go. 'Thank you for all your lovely messages.' The former couple also had to say goodbye to another of their much-loved dogs, Irish Red Setter Bev, back in May 2022, just a few months after announcing their split. What has Alan Carr said about Paul Drayton? Speaking on an episode of Lorraine in April 2022, Alan said the couple's marriage broke down during the covid-19 pandemic but they are looking ahead to the future. When host Lorraine Kelly asked about the split, Alan said: "I wrote the tour, and then our marriage broke down during Covid, because it was so stressful, everything ... 2 "And then I was going on stage and I was just like, "Well this doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense." "So we're divorced now, he's excited about the future, I'm excited about the future. "We're still always going to be friends because we've been through so much together." Why did Paul go to jail? Shortly after their split announcement, Paul posted on Instagram telling his followers that he was in rehab for alcoholism. He stated after a "challenging couple of years" he had pleaded guilty in November 2021 to a drink-driving charge. He was arrested following a smash, which occurred just three miles away from the home he shared with Alan. Paul was sentenced to 14 weeks in jail after admitting drink-driving at Brighton Magistrates Court.
The Irish Sun
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
Who is Alan Carr's ex-husband Paul Drayton?
ALAN Carr is adored by fans across the world thanks to his impressive career in TV and he's set to appear on BBC's Celebrity Traitors. Sadly in 2022, 2 Alan Carr with his husband Paul Drayton Who is Paul Drayton? Paul Drayton is a party planner and actor. He attended Drama Centre London, where his acting career lasted at least 20 years according to the caption of an Instagram post that he posted in April 2020. Alan has helped Paul through spells of alcoholism and rehab. The couple lived together in West London and have remained friends Read More on Alan Carr When did he and Alan Carr split up? On January 21, 2022, Alan and Drayton announced in a joint statement that they were going their separate ways. The pair had been married for three years but were together for 13 years. A statement released by Alan's representative read: "After 13 years as a couple and three years of marriage, Alan Carr and Paul Drayton would like to announce they are separating. "They have jointly and amicably made the difficult decision to divorce and go their separate ways. We request that their privacy is respected at this sensitive time". In October 2024, the pair reunited for a tragic reason. They made the difficult decision to have their dog, Joyce, put to sleep as a kindness, as she hadn't been very well. Alan Carr has reunited with jailed ex Paul Drayton at a Eurovision party at his home The former theatre actor explained that their beloved Irish Red Setter was suffering from a heart condition, and although it was heartbreaking, they both cared for her deeply. Paul shared a series of throwback photos with his followers, showing himself and Alan alongside their beloved dog. He wrote: 'Her heart is failing. Ours are breaking! '4.30 tomorrow me and Alan are doing our last act of kindness and letting her go. 'Thank you for all your lovely messages.' The former couple also had to say What has Alan Carr said about Paul Drayton? Speaking on an episode of Lorraine in April 2022, Alan said the couple's marriage broke down during the covid-19 pandemic but they are looking ahead to the future. When host Lorraine Kelly asked about the split, Alan said: "I wrote the tour, and then our marriage broke down during Covid, because it was so stressful, everything ... 2 Alan and Paul came together for their dogs. "And then I was going on stage and I was just like, "Well this doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense." "So we're divorced now, he's excited about the future, I'm excited about the future. "We're still always going to be friends because we've been through so much together." Why did Paul go to jail? Shortly after their split announcement, Paul posted on Instagram telling his followers that he was in rehab for alcoholism. He stated after a "challenging couple of years" he had pleaded guilty in November 2021 to a drink-driving charge. He was arrested following a smash, which occurred just three miles away from the home he shared with Alan. Read More in The Sun Paul was sentenced to 14 weeks in jail after admitting drink-driving at Brighton Magistrates Court. However, he was
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Fiction
Based on a story from pre-colonial Australia, A Piece of Red Cloth is a pioneering, 'real collaboration' between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal storytellers 15.00 CET Encompassing eugenics, euthanasia and terrorism, this dark, sprawling novel by a man of many talents is not for the easily offended 08.00 CET Author of books including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction, was known for his outlandish tales of sex, drugs and mysticism 10 Feb 2025 01.13 CET The Nobel prize-winner's strange and unsettling new novel takes its protagonist on a mission that ends up confronting terrible pre-war violence 9 Feb 2025 18.00 CET This intense tale of lives connected to the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990 is hardly conventional, but undoubtedly exciting 9 Feb 2025 16.00 CET The author and journalist on 'modern London corruption' and his Orwell prize-shortlisted novel Caledonian Road, how he helped Jonathan Franzen and the last book he gave as a gift 8 Feb 2025 19.00 CET Three years at the notorious Drama Centre London helped the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing understand how to create a character from the inside out 8 Feb 2025 12.00 CET An expat couple carefully curate their lives through plants and Radiohead LPs in this deliciously pessimistic chronicle of gentrifying Berlin 8 Feb 2025 08.30 CET Editorial: Hit novels by Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros offer more than sex and escapism. They have reclaimed the fantasy genre for women 7 Feb 2025 19.03 CET Old Soul by Susan Barker; Model Home by Rivers Solomon; Mother of Serpents by John R Gordon; Symbiote by Michael Nayak; Waterblack by Alex Pheby 7 Feb 2025 13.00 CET A baby washes up in a barrel in this warm-hearted and surprising debut 7 Feb 2025 10.00 CET An estranged mother and son confront their past, in the new novel from the author of Union Atlantic 5 Feb 2025 10.00 CET 4 Feb 2025 18.30 CET The subgenre helped increase the market share by 41.3% last year aided by bestseller Fourth Wing from Rebecca Yarros while food and drink topped nonfiction sales 3 Feb 2025 18.00 CET About 30,343 results for Fiction
The Guardian
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Eimear McBride: studying method acting taught me how to write
Making a person is no mean feat – especially in the absence of sex – and for a character-obsessed novelist, nailing it is everything. But when I started writing at the age of 23, all I seemed to possess was an increasingly urgent impulse in my head and an unaccountable blankness where I'd assumed the conduits of inspiration would be. The inner insistence began picking words and persistence required me to follow them up, but how to expand beyond those first fragmentary bursts? Although largely ignorant of what producing fiction might require, I didn't arrive at the page by myself. I brought Stanislavski with me. More precisely, three years' training in his acting method at the then notorious and now defunct Drama Centre London, where I'd been taught how to make a person, from the inside out. Initially, I didn't connect the worlds. Acting is action. Writing, words. Acting is necessarily collaborative, novels are not. Fiction tends to be made in private, while acting when all alone points to the psychiatrist's couch rather than the silver screen. On top of that, method actors are regularly mocked for their seemingly over-the-top efforts to inhabit their characters; Robert De Niro's 60lb weight gain to play the ageing boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull or Forest Whitaker learning Swahili for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. That said, whatever scepticism surrounds the method process, the proof remains in the performance and there's no denying it often produces emotionally intense, even revelatory experiences for the audience. Naturally enough, I wanted to take that possibility with me. I wanted to see the world through others' eyes. More, I wanted to experience their experience of life. Then share it, unmediated and from their perspective rather than from the difference, or distance, of mine. As an actor, voice and body had been the vehicle for this. As a writer, language would have to do the heavy lifting instead. But repurposing that same intimate, closed-circuit perspective has become the method's real legacy for me. Because, setting aside tales of self-indulgent actors insisting on being called their characters' names off set or getting roughed up to better simulate a physical state, the ambition to access another's unguarded humanity remains at the heart of it. Although Drama Centre taught me many things, the most important 'how to' of this technique was introduced right at the start and drummed in until the very end. Even now I hear it being said: 'Leave your instinct to judge at the door.' Which makes sense because characters, like people, are not constructed from moral positions. A character needs to be left alone to pursue their own ends. To hover above, directing attention to their flaws, is to make a mere puppet with no real life of its own. It cannot be filled with its own thoughts and repressed emotions or driven by irrational fears and self-sabotaging judgments. As with actors who delve no deeper than caricature, novelists who gloss over complexity for the sake of instruction make people no one else has ever known. Of course, not judging others is unnatural to us. People who do bad things are bad people. Except if they are us, or those we love. Then we punish, forgive or justify with finer gradations of thought, feeling, memory and belief. So this must also be the catalyst for understanding those unlike us, or whose behaviour is alien to our own. It's called 'substitution' and, I think, is most readily explained in the quote from the Roman playwright Terence: 'I am a human being, and I think nothing human is alien to me.' This means not only knowing who we are but who else, given a change of circumstances, might be found to be dwelling within. Rather than focus on points of difference, substitution attempts to identify similar or shared impulses, even if they spring from different roots. This intimate knowledge facilitates a richer understanding of what has led the character to become who they are and make the choices they have. Once found, it can be used as an imaginative springboard from which to extrapolate out into their entirely different actions and outcomes, while remaining embedded in truth. For example, I am neither Eily nor Stephen from my new novel The City Changes Its Face and my previous one, The Lesser Bohemians, yet the struggle against brokenness is something I understand. What it is to fail, to try, to need forgiveness, to want to be loved. It doesn't matter if that understanding derives from other sources because once a shared truth is spliced – or substituted – into the fictional story, its logic will remain intact. Same goes for the girl from my debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, who refuses passivity even when the outcomes of her decisions prove carnivorous. Anyone who has ever had to survive their own bad choices, made on the back of unhelpful circumstances, can find examples to work from within. Or my woman from Strange Hotel who wants to let no one – even the reader – in, but who life happens to anyway. Identifying my own attempts at control, and subsequent helplessness at its loss, created enough imaginative energy that she could grow out in wildly differing directions from me yet remain credible in her own right. More challengingly, of course, this also applies to characters who have harmed and subjugated others, for example Stephen's mother, or the uncle in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. I have never done what they did, but to write them I had to find the places of compulsion within myself. Make note of its insatiable selfishness and how easily it can run out of control. So, even in the terrible things those characters had done, there was something not alien to me. Essentially, substitution is about employing a kind of radical empathy. Without empathy, art is nothing more than a flapping mouthpiece for whichever aesthetic, ideology or political point has been placed above the duty to truth. Little wonder then that the method has become so unfashionable of late; in direct opposition to the many locked boxes of contemporary society, which claim we cannot know each other, even in imagination, the method suggests otherwise. That when we allow empathy to lead us down uncomfortable roads and accept that self-knowledge does not always set the heart aglow, we can come to recognise and know one another, deeply, through all the imperfect humanity we share. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion But it requires a beady eye, a steely nerve, the hide of a rhinoceros – and a working knowledge of Ionesco's play Rhinoceros probably won't do any harm. Because the obligation to make works of honesty is one all artists are bound to fulfil. For me, using an adaptation of the method has proved invaluable. Others get there in other ways. Ultimately each artist creates their own process. But the method taught me how to see in the dark, then to recognise the components of all kinds of other people in there. The City Changes Its Face is published by Faber on 13 February. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
