Latest news with #GosfordPark
Daily Mail
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Shock split for society beauty... for the second time. Plus the incredibly entitled comment TV star made when given a £5k Hermes blanket and a bishop's bitchy comment to his clergy: RICHARD EDEN'S DIARY
Camilla Rutherford was devastated when she and her husband, publicist Rufus Abbott, separated just three months before she was due to give birth to their second child. Now, the Gosford Park star is nursing a broken heart again after splitting up with Dominic Burns, the father of her two younger children.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Laurence Fox pleads not guilty over 'intimate' photo of broadcaster Narinder Kaur
Laurence Fox has pleaded not guilty to sexual offence charges over an upskirt photo of TV star Narinder Kaur which was posted on social media. The actor turned activist was charged last month after a Metropolitan Police investigation into his April 2024 post on social media site X. It is said Fox shared an image of the Good Morning Britain and former GB News broadcaster 'in an intimate state', without her consent, and allegedly 'intending to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation'. At the time of the incident, Ms Kaur, 52, said the image was 'unimaginably mortifying'. Fox, 46, stood in the dock at Westminster magistrates court on Friday afternoon to enter not guilty pleas to two charges. He is accused of sharing a photograph or film of person in intimate state intending to cause alarm distress or humiliation, and a second charge of sending a photograph or film of genitals to cause alarm, distress or humiliation. Both charges are dated April 30 last year. Fox's fiancé Liz Barker was among those watching court proceedings from the public gallery. Prosecutor David Burns told the hearing: 'This relates to a post on X, posted by Mr Fox on April 30, 2024. 'That post shows a picture of the complainant in an intimate state, showing parts of her genitals.' Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring said he was happy to deal with the case at the magistrates court, but Fox elected a crown court jury trial. In the immediate aftermath of the social media post, Fox wrote online at length and said he 'would like to apologise' to Ms Kaur. He then added 'it's not my fault' that the TV star was pictured in the compromising image more than 15 years ago. After the criminal charges were announced, he wrote online: 'This is yet another deeply concerning example of the two-tier British 'justice' system in all its Soviet glory. 'I will deal with this untrue, ridiculous, vexatious and malicious nonsense just like last time they tried it on. 'How much more time, effort and tax payer money are the @metpoliceuk going to spend ignoring actual crimes in their efforts to silence ordinary British people? Fight! Fight! Fight!' Fox, of Church Road in Peldon, Essex, was fired from GB News in October 2023 after an on-air rant about journalist Ava Evans. He was formerly a successful actor, appearing most notably in long-running TV series Lewis and award-winning film Gosford Park. In recent years, he has become an outspoken and controversial activist, a failed London mayoralty candidate, and the leader of the Reclaim political party. The case was adjourned for a preliminary hearing at Woolwich crown court on May 23. He is on bail with a condition not to contact Ms Kaur.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Laurence Fox faces criminal charge over 'upskirt X post of TV presenter Narinder Kaur'
Laurence Fox has been charged by police with a sexual offence after allegedly sharing an upskirt photo of TV star Narinder Kaur on social media. The actor turned activist is accused over an April 2024 post on social media site X, allegedly posting an image of the Good Morning Britain and GB News broadcaster. At the time of the incident, Ms Kaur, 52, said the image was 'unimaginably mortifying'. Fox, 46, has been charged after a Metropolitan Police investigation, and is due to appear in court next month. 'A man has been charged with a sexual offence following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police', a force spokesperson said. 'Laurence Fox, 46, will appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on April 24 charged with an offence contrary to section 66A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. 'The charge relates to an image that was posted on a social media platform in April 2024.' In the immediate aftermath of the social media post, Fox wrote online at length and said he 'would like to apologise' to Ms Kaur. He then added 'it's not my fault' that the TV star was pictured in the compromising image more than 15 years ago. Fox had taken a recent hiatus from social media, but returned today to write: 'This is yet another deeply concerning example of the two-tier British 'justice' system in all its Soviet glory. 'I will deal with this untrue, ridiculous, vexatious and malicious nonsense just like last time they tried it on. 'How much more time, effort and tax payer money are the @metpoliceuk going to spend ignoring actual crimes in their efforts to silence ordinary British people? Fight! Fight! Fight!' Upskirting, taking pictures of people under their clothes without their permission, became a specific criminal offence in 2019. Offenders can face up to two years in jail and be placed on the sex offenders register. Fox, of Peldon, Essex, was fired from GB News in October 2023 after an on-air rant about journalist Ava Evans. He was formerly a successful actor, appearing most notably in long-running TV series Lewis and award-winning film Gosford Park. In recent years, he has become an outspoken and controversial activist, a failed London mayoralty candidate, and the leader of the Reclaim political party. He is due to appear at Westminster magistrates court to face the charge on April 24.
Los Angeles Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘The Residence' and ‘Ludwig,' charming detectives are tapped to resolve a mystery
There's nothing funny about murder, but it's a handy device on which to hang a comedy. To be sure, there are those who like their mysteries dark and — ugh — 'gritty.' But the tenderhearted like their puzzles too, and the whole rigmarole of eccentric sleuths, colorful suspects and solve-along-at-home stories; for them — and I mean us — the world is troubling enough without adding invented psychopaths and serial killers to the heap. A spoonful of sugar helps the homicide go down. Two new mysteries full of comedy, or comedies full of mystery, premiere Thursday. 'The Residence,' on Netflix, stars Uzo Aduba as a sleuth with a passion for bird-watching; 'Ludwig,' on BritBox, offers David Mitchell as a professional puzzle maker impersonating his missing twin brother, a police detective. They're tonally distinct, but both are fun and easy to recommend. Created and written by Paul William Davies, 'The Residence' is essentially a blown-out version of an Agatha Christie country-house mystery — a fact it acknowledges with a shot of a Christie paperback — set in the White House, among its many chambers, public, private and practical. (There are some cute dollhouse representations of the layout, and the life-size re-creations are impressive.) With its upstairs-downstairs dynamic — the 'us' and 'them' of it is explicitly laid out — large cast and grand beehive setting, it suggests a wackier contemporary American 'Gosford Park.' The victim is White House head usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), who keeps things running smoothly around the place, found dead in the family quarters as a wingding is underway in a ballroom below. The party is celebrating Australia, which makes possible a guest shot from Kylie Minogue, who will perform, and a running joke involving Hugh Jackman, whose face is never seen, as the actor is not Hugh Jackman, which is part of the joke. Unless, it actually is Hugh Jackman, which would be an even better joke. The discovery of the body, an apparent suicide — though anyone with any experience of TV mysteries will spot problems — brings in representatives from the FBI, the Park Police and the local constabulary, whose chief (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) arrives with 'world's greatest' Det. Cornelia Cupp (Aduba). 'Wow, it's a lot of dudes,' she says, eyeballing the assembled lawmen, including FBI Special Agent Edwin Park (Randall Park), who will become her doubting partner through the investigation. There are no lack of suspects. Is it assistant usher Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson), tired of waiting for Wynter's job; the president's shiftless brother Tripp Morgan (Jason Lee) and dipsomaniac mother-in-law Nan Cox (Jane Curtin); his best friend and advisor Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), who yells a lot; or First Gentleman Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa)? (In this fantasy world, America has elected a gay president, played by Paul Fitzgerald.) Could it be the disgruntled Swiss pastry chef (Bronson Pinchot); the ambitious new head chef (May Wiseman); the social secretary (Molly Griffs), who wants to 'reinvent the White House as a concept'; the drunk butler (Edwina Findley); the tall butler (Al Mitchell); the gardener (Rebecca Field); or the engineer (Mel Rodriguez)? Or one of too many others to mention? The plot is framed by testimony developed at a subsequent congressional investigation, chaired by a senator played by Al Franken, formerly a real-life senator, with Eliza Coupe as an opposition troublemaker. Marino's character will accuse Franken's character of turning the hearing into 'a murder mystery.' 'Murder mysteries are so popular right now,' replies Franken, getting meta for a moment. Few of the characters represent more than an attitude, but the actors are having a contagious good time, and Aduba's detective seems deep by virtue of being something of an enigma; her preferred method of interrogation is to stare and say nothing. (She will get a bit of broadening backstory, or side-story, eventually). Things in her head are always clicking, though she is liable too to go off birding, for which the White House grounds are apparently quite good. Aduba's an imposing presence in any case, and one would hope to see her character enlisted in further Cornelia Cupp adventures — the name itself seems too good to waste — if perhaps shorter than the current season's eight episodes, which are by temporal necessity here and there padded. ('It's hard to keep track of everything,' Cupp says at one point, as if in sympathy with the viewer.) There could be twice as many stories if they made them half as long, and four times as many at a perfectly generous two hours. In the wonderful, Cambridge-set 'Ludwig,' David Mitchell, best known here for 'Peep Show,' 'Upstart Crow' and as an irascible team captain on the panel show 'Would I Lie to You?,' plays John Taylor, a professional inventor of puzzles — awkward, timid, with no social life and a disconnect from and disdain for modern times that Mitchell's own self-presentation sometimes suggests. (No one expresses disdain quite as hilariously.) 'Ludwig' is how John signs his puzzles, which allows for a score borrowed from Beethoven; there's no deeper meaning, unless I missed it. When his twin brother, Det. Chief Inspector James Taylor, disappears, John's sister-in-law, Lucy (the divine Anna Maxwell Martin) enlists John to impersonate James in order to search his office for clues; but John, mistaken for James, is drafted into an investigation, and because he has a talent for seeing abstractly and solving things, he finds himself stuck in the role. His greater challenge, and the source of the series' comedy, is impersonating a more-or-less normal person — even though John's been rated 'two points above' genius, 'I find that never helps when it comes to chatting.' He calls a medical examiner's report a 'how-did-they-die test,' he can't park a car properly, and, having lived largely inside his house, has a limited understanding of ordinary human concourse. The six-episode show combines episodic mysteries with a seasonal plotline surrounding the whereabouts of James, which Lucy takes up — a fast-slow rhythm that keeps things lively in the short term and intriguing in the long. It's a dramatic given that John, who begins this adventure unsure of himself, will become more confident as the job goes on and become closer to his adopted colleagues, especially partner Det. Inspector Russell Carter (Dipo Ola), just as by moving in with Lucy and teenage nephew, Henry (Dylan Hughes), he'll gain a richer experience of family. Mitchell is really the sole comic figure here, but on his own he's enough to call 'Ludwig' a comedy. Still, some deep drama — amplified by the Beethoven quotes on the soundtrack — surrounds him, and involves him, as John reckons with his past and present. Every mystery sets its own level of emotional depth, but even those in which murder is little more than an excuse for the detective to get out of bed and the story no more profound than a game of Clue can turn sad as motives are revealed and hapless killers taken away. 'Ludwig' plays its minor and major chords, its darker and lighter passages, with equal clarity and force.
The Independent
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Robert Altman at 100: The enduring legacy of ‘the pirate king of American filmmaking'
No one has ever made a good movie,' said Robert Altman. He had, of course, made a dozen or so great ones himself – Nashville, M*A*S*H, Gosford Park among them – and many others that are, by most metrics, good. What the Oscar-winning filmmaker meant, he later explained, is that cinema as he saw it was indebted to other artforms; that, at that time in the 1970s, cinema had yet to step out of the trappings of theatre and become its own inimitable thing. And yet, Altman's oeuvre is as purely cinematic as they come. His films – often ensemble-led patchworks of American life – were singular and forward-looking, imposing his signature style onto genres as diverse as antiwar satires, detective noirs, psychological thrillers, and westerns. He was an independent filmmaker through and through – one with a company of first-rate, idiosyncratic collaborators and a near-mystical ability to get an unlikely project financed; The New York Times once branded him the 'pirate king of American filmmaking'. Altman died in 2006, and would have turned 100 this month. His influence, though, continues to be seen in many of the best American films of today. Compared with some of the other filmmakers to emerge from the New Hollywood revolution, however, Altman is relatively underappreciated. M*A*S*H* (1970) – his breakthrough film and a commercial success he would never quite replicate – gave him some level of celebrity at a time when filmmakers were just starting to achieve the sort of profile only previously afforded to stars. But it wouldn't last, and while contemporaries such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese remain iron-clad household names, Robert Altman is a name only really spoken by cinephiles. Age may well be a factor: Altman was 20 years the senior of many New Hollywood filmmakers, the Scorseses and Spielbergs who have continued making popular films well into the 21st century. But this age differential is also what set him apart from many of his peers. His films were humanist and world-wise; they were, almost always, films for adults. Before M*A*S*H, Altman – who'd been a bomber pilot during World War II – had enjoyed a few early forays into the film industry (a script credit on the 1948 noir Bodyguard; a James Dean documentary and his obscure drama debut The Delinquents in 1957), but had mostly cut his teeth working on industrial films and TV shows, as well as directing theatre. He was far from the only director to get his start in this way (Spielberg famously made his debut on an episode of Columbo), nor did he award it any undue significance: in later years, he credited his time in television with teaching him the technical fundamentals while producing little of creative note. But these early years, in many ways, laid out the blueprint for what followed. It's noteworthy that Alfred Hitchcock spotted something in him, hiring him to direct two episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. Altman's work on industrial films saw him experiment with unconventional sound mixes – including the naturalistic 'overlapping dialogue' that would later become his signature. Meanwhile, his work as a theatre director would inform much of his mid-career period, when, in the Eighties, he started adapting stage plays for the screen. When he did make the jump to films in earnest, it was a rocky transition. He was fired from the 1967 sci-fi Countdown after filming was complete: studio executives baulked at the overlapping dialogue, believing it to be technical incompetence on his part. His next film, the psychological drama That Cold Day in the Park, did at least see Altman complete the project, but reviews were mostly damning. Then, in 1970, came M*A*S*H. An irreverent war dramedy starring Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt, and Elliott Gould, M*A*S*H satirised the Vietnam war through the lens of the Korean one. Several directors had turned down the project before it fell at Altman's feet; no doubt they later regretted it. The decade that followed this produced one of the all-time great directorial runs. McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), which starred Warren Beatty as an enterprising gambler and Julie Christie as a brothel madam, has endured as one of the finest revisionist westerns ever made; The Long Goodbye (1973), a languid take on noir starring Gould (a frequent Altman collaborator) as Philip Marlowe, is likewise revered within its own genre. Nashville, a slow, sprawling look at the US country music scene, is a work of staggering social, political and emotional depth. What's more, it took Altman's ensemble-cast ethos – the eschewing of a protagonist in favour of a web of interweaving supporting characters – to new heights. Those films – plus the dark, disturbing 3 Women (1977) – may be the most well-known of Altman's Seventies trove, but there's gold, too, in the margins: the bizarre, ambitious Brewster McCloud (1970), for instance, in which Bud Cort attempts to fly using mechanical wings, or the hypnotically watchable gambling drama California Split (1974), another Gould-fronted venture. All films were different, but all immediately identifiable as his handiwork – as much as, say, a Wes Anderson film might be today. 'Once [Altman's style] is understood, it can be recognised in almost any one part of any film he makes,' wrote Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness. 'He stands with [Stanley] Kubrick as one of the few American filmmakers to confirm the fragile legitimacy of the auteur theory with such a visible expression of coherence in his work.' That golden run – and indeed Altman's standing in the film industry at large – hit a roadblock in 1980, with the release of Popeye. The film, a musical adaptation of the classic nautical cartoons, starring Robin Williams as the spinach-gulping strongman, was a tricky proposition: Altman's predilection for muffled, authentic dialogue went against the very fundamentals of screen musicals. Though it has now been reappraised by many critics and fans of Altman, Popeye was, at the time, a disaster, and the 1980s saw the director assume a markedly lower profile in Hollywood. It would be wrong, though, to attribute this solely to Popeye. Even at the peak of his powers, Altman's uncommercial, independent-minded films were not an easy sell for many studio executives; when negotiating a deal for a movie in the late 1970s, Altman was told by an exec that 'we don't want this to seem too much like a Robert Altman movie'. His 1980 film HealtH was produced as part of a multi-film deal with Fox, but the studio refused to distribute it; Altman ended up taking it to screen at colleges and festivals himself. In the doldrums, he remained prolific, even if most of his 1980s films are dimly remembered. He increasingly turned back to the small screen, for TV movies and the 1988 political mockumentary miniseries Tanner '88. Then, in 1992, film-industry satire The Player catapulted him back into the affections of the industry and the public. The following year, Short Cuts – a brilliant adaptation of several Raymond Carver short stories – proved it wasn't a fluke. And while the final stretch of Altman's career may have had a few misses, he went out on a resounding high: Gosford Park (2001), a period murder mystery, is among his most acclaimed films, while A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film, was a fittingly sophisticated meditation on death. For the making of A Prairie Home Companion, Altman was shadowed by the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, who was hired as a standby director should Altman die during production. This in itself was testament to Altman's hallowed-elder-statesman status at the time: the fact that one of Hollywood's buzziest young filmmakers would be willing to simply play backup. Of course, Altman carried particular weight with Anderson; Altman's creative influence is all over Anderson's early work, particularly the ensemble-led LA odyssey Magnolia (1999), and the electric porn-star drama Boogie Nights (1997). Anderson's films – including the elegiac stoner noir Inherent Vice and the thorny age-gap romance Licorice Pizza – are among the best modern films to pull from Altman's bag of tricks. But the vestiges of Altman's style can be seen everywhere these days, in films such as Knives Out, The Big Short, even The Menu – or any of the ensemble-led works of Wes Anderson. Indie drama Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, a quiet contender for one of the best films of 2024, is thoroughly Altmanesque. This legacy extends, too, beyond just movies, and into some of the finest television around. HBO western Deadwood, one of the very best TV shows ever made, would not exist without McCabe & Mrs Miller; Altmanesque touches can be seen in The Wire and, more recently, in Nathan Fielder's phenomenal The Curse. Altman may have had an on-and-off relationship with TV himself, but it wouldn't be quite the same without him. It may still be true that no one has 'made a good movie', in the sense that Altman meant it – perhaps, outside of the experimental sphere, cinema will always be indebted to other artforms: to theatre, and music, and visual art. But this doesn't matter. Altman's films were themselves rich in music and a sense of theatre – and boy, were they good.
