Latest news with #JamesandtheGiantPeach
Perth Now
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Perth actor selected to represent Australia in US festival
An aspiring theatre performer from Perth is the youngest of a WA contingent headed to the US to audition for a part in the Junior Theatre Festival in Atlanta. Emily Sweeney, 14, is one of five from WA selected to join the 40-strong Aussie All Star acting team preparing to embark on the overseas opportunity. 'When we get to America, they choose a show and we all have to audition for it. We get four days to learn the entire show and perform it at the JTF Atlanta; typically there is only five lead roles,' Emily told PerthNow. Your local paper, whenever you want it. 'There will be about 6000 kids from America so I am very nervous. If I mess up or don't do as well as I usually do, I won't be seen.' Emily — who as a young girl dreamed of being a florist — fell in love with acting four years ago after securing a lead role in a musical production of James and the Giant Peach. 'When I was 10 I had tried all the sports and was not good at any, so my Mum's final attempt was to let me audition for a show,' Emily said. Emily Sweeney from Perth is the youngest actor chosen as part of the Aussie Alll Stars team Credit: Emily Sweeney 'I fell in love after the first audition. I had a really good feeling about it and we went to the first rehearsal and everyone was so nice and welcoming. I felt so at home in the community.' After attending Parkwood Primary School, which did not have a drama club, Emily was set on attending Fremantle's John Curtin College of the Arts. She secured a lead role in Western Theatrics' Legally Blonde, which was successful enough to tour Newcastle last year. 'I played Brooke Windym and it was a hard role because I had to skip and sing at the same time,' she said. 'I thought performing in Sydney would be the biggest thing I ever do but when I was there I was asked to audition for the Aussie All Stars, the travel team that goes to America. 'I am very excited for the experience.' This trip will be Emily's first time travelling outside of Australia and is going to cost $12,000. She has started a GoFundMe to help pay her own way and avoid putting financial strain on her family. 'I will still be able to go to America even if we don't raise the money but when I get back I will have little money to support my parents and we will have to save for years to get back to where we are now,' she said. The two-week trip includes choreography workshops with industry professionals, New York City sightseeing and tickets to two Broadway musicals. 'I am so excited; even if I don't get a lead role it is going to be such a great experience,' Emily said. The theatre buff has dreams of attending the WA Academy of Performing Arts and landing a lead role in a Mamma Mia musical production one day. Emily expects she might have to leave Perth to make her acting dreams come true but said she was looking forward to that too. 'I am more excited than scared to leave Perth,' she said. 'It's definitely scary being away from everyone that has supported me but if I got the chance to be on Broadway, I would move in a second.'
Daily Mirror
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Miriam Margoyles' unconventional decision to live apart from long-term partner
There's a reason Miriam Margoyles doesn't live with her partner of almost six decades—and it's not due to her busy work schedule. Miriam Margolyes is one of the most famous actresses in the world and is renowned for her character Professor Pomona Sprout in the Harry Potter film series. However the Hollywood star has opened up about sadly not having long left on our screens after undergoing recent heart surgery. The actress, 84, is well known for starring in dozens of other films over the years, including Mrs Mingott in The Age of Innocence, which even bagged her a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress, and also appeared in James and the Giant Peach, Mulan, Happy Feet, Flushed Away, and Early Man. But when she isn't starring on our screens, she spends her time between Australia and the UK, and is in a long-term relationship with Australian retired professor of Indonesian studies Heather Sutherland. While Miriam tends to keep her relationship out of the public eye, she's been open about not living with Heather. Despite the couple having been together since 1968, Miriam explained how they live their lives separately due to their high-flying careers. Appearing on podcast Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware, Miriam confessed: "I'm in love with my partner and have been for 54 years. We don't live together because we're both professional women. "She is a historian and an academic and I'm an actress and a documentarian now. Her work is in Indonesian and Dutch and so she lives in Amsterdam, but we try to be together as much as possible." Miriam and Australian-born Heather only live together properly when they are staying in Italy, where they own a house. And although she visits her in Holland, she revealed Heather isn't a fan of London where she resides most of the time. The pair met when Miriam was introduced to Heather by a mutual friend in London and knew the minute she saw her that she "wanted her" but it wasn't an instant connection for the couple, as Heather didn't believe Miriam was gay at first and thought she was too noisy, which Miriam agrees with. However, she managed to win Heather over in the 1960s, and since then, the pair has been married in a civil partnership ceremony. But unlike Miriam, Heather prefers to stay out of the spotlight, so the couple has rarely been pictured in public together. Although they are happily married, it took Miriam a lot to come out to her parents, especially as her mother didn't take it well. Her mother later suffered a string of severe strokes and sadly passed away in 1974. Writing in her 2021 autobiography, Miriam said: "I always believed that my coming out in some way caused it. It was a horrendous time and I was very unhappy. I knew I couldn't change what I was. I should not have told them." Miriam and Heather have managed to keep their love alive despite being in separate countries, and Miriam previously said they speak on the phone every day but usually only see each other around eight times a year when they are on holiday together. When she was Vogue's Pride cover star back in the summer, Miriam confessed: "We were able to lead our lives without diminishing them. I didn't want her to have to give up anything and I didn't want to give up anything." ,, ,
Daily Mail
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Dark side of Roald Dahl: Author's anti-semitic views laid bare in blistering new play that serves as a reminder that the beloved author could be a cheat and a monster too
He inspired us to believe that somewhere inside we all have the power to change the world, and showed us that a little magic can take you a long way. But while Roald Dahl 's reputation as one of the great children's storytellers remains undeniable, his literary legacy forever secured by classics like Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, the darker aspects of the author's worldview have become barely less notorious since his death in 1990. In his novel The Twits, Dahl reflected on how external appearances can be deceptive. 'You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth,' he wrote, 'but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams.' The flip side of that sentiment, however, is that unwholesome thoughts can also be concealed beneath an outwardly respectable veneer. Dahl might have captured the imagination of millions of children with characters like Charlie Bucket, the 10-year-old boy who rises from poverty to become heir to Willy Wonka's confectionery empire in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but his toxic personal views stood in stark contrast to the family-friendly tales he produced. That is why the the Olivier award-winning play Giant, which deals with Dahl's noxious antisemitism and has just transferred to the West End, will make for uncomfortable viewing for those who view the author only through the lens of his classic tales. Infamously, Dahl's beliefs were laid bare in his musings on another author's work. In August 1983, he wrote a review of God Cried, an account of Israel 's invasion of Lebanon the previous year produced by the Australian author Tony Clifton. 'Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,' Dahl wrote in the Literary Review. 'Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.' When the New Statesman subsequently contacted Dahl to ask about the review, in which the author also stated that the US was 'dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions' to the point where they 'dare not defy' Israel, Dahl doubled down on his views. 'There's always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere,' the writer told journalist Michael Coren. 'Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.' Coren, who had anticipated that he would find Dahl in more contrite mood, was stunned by the author's intransigence. 'The assumption was that he would row back from his extremist stance and the story might make a few paragraphs in the next edition,' Coren wrote in this space last year. 'When I phoned him that day, I had no idea that our exchange would still be being talked about decades later. 'If I had expected him to apologise for some of what he'd written, or at least qualify the harshness and inaccurate generalisations, I was soon to be disappointed. The opposite happened. 'When I raised the tenor of [his] observations with the author, he was polite - not unfriendly - and spoke slowly and deliberately. But it was as if I'd opened the doors on some dark, deep hatred that had been waiting for years to be expressed.' The fallout from this reputation-puncturing episode provides the starting point for Giant, which premiered at the Royal Court theatre in London last September and has now transferred to the West End. Starring John Lithgow as Dahl, who stood 6ft 6in tall but saw his stature greatly diminished in the eyes of many as a result of the scandal, Mark Rosenblatt's play earned the American a best actor award at the Oliviers. The drama opens with Jessie Stone, an American Jewish sales executive dispatched by Dahl's publisher, attempting to persuade Dahl that a public apology would be in order. The to-and-fro that develops between the pair gradually throws light on the author's views until, eventually, they are illuminated with glaring intensity. In that sense, even the fictional elements of the drama find a counterpart in real events. Just as the darker side of Dahl's nature becomes ever plainer on stage, so it was in real life. In 1990, just months before his death at the age of 74, Dahl spelled out his bigoted beliefs in definitive fashion. 'I'm certainly anti-Israeli, and I've become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism,' he told the Independent. 'I think they should see both sides. 'It's the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren't any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media - jolly clever thing to do - that's why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.' In the aftermath of his death, the troubling nature of Dahl's personal views was initially overshadowed by his reputation as one of the foremost children's writers of the 20th century. In 2003, four of his books made the top 100 of The Big Read, a BBC survey to determine the 'nation's best-loved novel'. But the tide began to turn in 2018, when it emerged that a plan to honour his life and works with a commemorative coin had been rejected by the Royal Mint because Dahl was 'associated with antisemitism and not regarded as an author of the highest reputation'. Together with the Roald Dahl Story Company, the novelist's family later issued an apology for 'the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements'. 'Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations,' read a statement on the author's official website. Yet it remains far from clear that Dahl had a positive impact on those closest to him. His first wife, the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, who had previously been married to Hollywood legend Clark Gable, dubbed him 'Roald the Rotten', portraying him as an arrogant and irritable figure. It cannot have helped that Dahl was a serial womaniser, even cheating on Neal with her closest friends - one of whom, Felicity D'Abreu, became his second wife in 1983 after an 11-year affair. Dahl's marriage to Neal was scarred not only by his infidelities but also by tragedy and accident. Their baby son was badly injured when a taxi hit his pram, their eldest daughter died from measles at the age of seven, and Neal suffered a series of catastrophic strokes that put her in a coma for three weeks and left her temporarily paralysed. Dahl's daughter Tessa, the second of the couple's five children, found him remote and controlling. It is no coincidence that her 1988 novel Working for Love deals with a problematic daughter-father relationship. 'Daddy gave joy to millions of children,' Tessa has said, 'but I was dying inside. 'Even though he was present for me physically, he was not emotionally. It was just bad luck, jolly bad luck, that I had been present both for my brother's accident and my mother's strokes. That my older sister Olivia had been the love of Daddy's life. That both of us contracted measles, but that she had died.' If the picture that emerges seems largely removed from the fictional landscapes Dahl conjured, it should be acknowledged that even his writing for children was inflected with a darker side. Many have detected misogyny in his portrayal of characters like Miss Trunchbull, the headmistress of Crunchem Hall primary school in Matilda, while the ostensibly benign chocolatier Willy Wonka is one of numerous figures in Dahl's oeuvre who betrays a more sinister side. And even Dahl tempered his initial portrayal of Wonka's Oompa Loompas as black pygmies. Yet any consideration of the author's legacy should not overlook the personal trials he endured. Born in 1916, Dahl was just three years old when his father died. At the age of nine, he was sent to boarding school and hated every moment. He left at 17 and went adventuring in Africa. When the second world war broke out, he joined the RAF and crashed in the Libyan desert, sustaining what he described as 'a monumental bash on the head'. The injury would cause him pain for the rest of his life, and perhaps went some way to explaining his cantankerous nature. None of which excuses Dahl's unsavoury views, of course, and it is perfectly legitimate to wonder whether his barnstorming success as a children's author would have been achieved had his personal beliefs been public knowledge. Even Steven Spielberg, the Jewish director of 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler's List, was unaware of Dahl's past when he filmed The BFG. Notably, though, Spielberg refused to condemn the author on learning the truth. 'Dahl liked to say things he didn't mean just to get a reaction,' said Spielberg. 'All his comments about bankers, all the old-fashioned, mid-1930s stereotypes we hear from Germany - he would say for effect, even if they were horrible things.' How then should Dahl be remembered? Was he a monster, a magician - or merely a man of contradictions? Jeremy Treglown, the author of a 1993 biography of Dahl, inclined to the last of those possibilities. 'He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies,' Treglown wrote in Roald Dahl: A Biography. 'He was also a fantasist, an anti-semite, a bully and a self-publicising troublemaker.' As Giant hits the West End, audiences will once again have the chance to make up their own minds - but the man who plays him has no doubt. 'Dahl wasn't a monster covered in scales,' said Lithgow. 'He was a very complicated man damaged by terrible tragedies.'
Metro
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Joanna Lumley says she 'doesn't have much time left' after tragic loss
Joanna Lumley has admitted her 'time must be coming quite soon' after several of her friends died. The actress and presenter is best known for playing Patsy Stone in the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous from 1992 until 2012, a role that also saw her win two Baftas. Other notable projects include James and the Giant Peach, Ella Enchanted and The Wolf of Wall Street. However, the 78-year-old has now spoken about her mortality. In a new interview Joanna revealed that several of her 'beloved friends are beginning to leave'. 'As you near the top of the hill you suddenly think, 'Gosh, there's not all that amount of time left',' she said. 'My time must be coming quite soon, and I don't want to have wasted a minute of being on this beautiful planet.' Speaking to My Weekly she also urged young people to worry less, adding: 'I used to panic when I was young, but as I've got older I've started literally to live day to day. 'With age, you work out what matters. I always knew that good stuff would come along when I was older. When I was 18, I longed to be 30. When I was 30, longed to be 50. We mustn't be led into thinking getting old is bad. Growing old is good.' She also shared a 'big message' to younger generations about the impact of social media and said people 'need time in your head', before saying she was 'so afraid we're going to breed a generation who don't know the world and don't know how to talk'. Joanna's most recent screen roles have been in Fool Me Once, Amandaland, the upcoming third season of Wednesday and the travel series Joanna Lumley's Danube. Speaking to Metro in 2022, she spoke about delaying retirement. More Trending 'I will slow down when my body slows down and the jobs slow down — when everybody says, 'Can we have this show but without Joanna Lumley in it?' Then there'll be more books to read and a bit more pottering in the garden,' she said. 'But you mustn't ever see these things as a setback. You have to see it as a new opportunity.' Away from the screen, Joanna is married to conductor Stephen Barlow, 70 and is mother to son Jamie, 57. 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.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Vote for the beast that may be as ruthlessly predatory as us – the fen raft spider
Meet an Olympian among Britain's 660 spider species: a palm-of-the-hand-sized arachnid that hunts in three dimensions and can even devour fish. The fen raft spider (Dolomedes plantarius) is a magnificent ambush predator: harmless to humans but lethal if you're a pond skater, tadpole or even adult dragonfly. And, while it was almost driven to extinction in Britain like every other slightly scary species, this brilliantly ingenious hunter has made a remarkable comeback. The fen raft spider can run after prey. It can dive in pursuit of its quarry. And it can sprint along the meniscus, the tensioned surface of the water, to gobble up anything that dares cross its path. It uses the surface tension of the water to detect prey, before skating, rowing or even sailing across the surface of the water to find its meal. Araneae have been feared and discriminated against throughout history When diving, it traps bubbles of air within a layer of dense, velvety hair on its mahogany-coloured body (with bright-cream or yellow stripes). The spider uses these to dive and survive underwater for at least half an hour. This is useful for evading larger predators. The fen raft spider deserves your vote for its innovative lifestyle, athleticism and versatility alone. But a vote for this magnificent invertebrate is also a vote for the much-traduced Araneae, who have been feared and discriminated against throughout human history. As Miss Spider from James and the Giant Peach (a shining example of invertebrate awareness in our spine-sided culture) put it: 'I am not loved at all. And yet I do nothing but good. All day long I catch flies and mosquitoes in my webs. I am a decent person.' More than that, a vote for the fen raft spider is a declaration of hope in the midst of the sixth great extinction. It is a vote for the best side of humanity. The fen raft spider is found across Europe but was only discovered in Britain in 1956. Here, it has always been ultra-rare – confined to the Pevensey Levels in East Sussex, around Crymlyn Bog in south Wales, and on Redgrave Fen bordering Norfolk and Suffolk. Such isolated populations are highly vulnerable to extinction, with wetlands likely to become too hot or dry for the spider with global heating. So, since 2010, Dr Helen Smith has overseen a translocation programme (even rearing spiderlings in her kitchen) to reintroduce the fen raft spider to four new sites in Suffolk and Norfolk. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion The fen raft is now moving of its own volition into new suitable territory, thanks to the restoration of more appropriate boggy grazing marshes by conservation organisations including the RSPB, the Suffolk and Sussex Wildlife Trusts, Natural England, the Broads Authority, and the British Arachnological Society. As a result, the number of sustainable fen raft spider populations has increased from three to 12 in Britain. It is a popular nomination among readers, including Anna Maka, who is looking forward to a summer crawling through bogs searching for this spider as part of her PhD. So vote for hope, vote for a habitable planet for all species, vote to cast aside prejudice and vote most of all for a small, wondrous animal that may be as ruthlessly predatory and ingenious as we are – the fen raft spider. Between 24 March and 2 April, we will be profiling a shortlist of 10 of the invertebrates chosen by readers and selected by our wildlife writers from more than 2,500 nominations. The voting for our 2025 invertebrate of the year will run from midday on Wednesday, 2 April until midday on Friday, 4 April, and the winner will be announced on Monday, 7 April.
