Latest news with #LaurenceOlivier
BBC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Sir Laurence Olivier's former house in Sussex on sale for £1.75m
Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Joan Plowright's former West Sussex home is up for born in Dorking in Surrey, and Plowright bought the property at The Malthouse near Steyning together in the property - still owned by family of the acting greats and used as a holiday let - has an asking price of £ agent Toby Brown told BBC Radio Sussex: "We are wanting someone to buy into the legacy as much as they love the house." The family has owned the property for over 60 years according to Mr Brown, of TLC Estate Agents in London."In my 20-year career of doing this I've never sold something like this before," he couple bought the farmhouse not long after marrying in 1961 and added extensions and outbuildings throughout their time in the property, according to property features a tennis court and indoor swimming Brown said: "It's just so private and I think that was the big thing for them, being very well-known actors."Olivier died while living at the property in 1989. Plowright died in January aged 95. According to TLC, the property has hosted several celebrities over the years, including Sir Ian McKellen while he rehearsed for Macbeth with Olivier, who had also performed the Shakespeare play's lead 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame, featuring Plowright with Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith, was filmed at the Brown said: "If walls could talk, these really could."I really wanted to romanticise and dramatise what is a very dramatic house with so many stories within it." Plowright first appeared opposite Olivier on stage in The Entertainer at the Royal Court in was married to Gone With The Wind star Vivien Leigh at the time, and Plowright was married to her first husband Roger was knighted in 1947 and awarded a life peerage in 1970. He won an Oscar, Emmy Awards and Golden Globes for his on-screen actor became the first ever director of the National Theatre as well as the first artistic director at Chichester Festival Theatre in accolades include two Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award, and she was made a dame in 2004.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gawn Grainger obituary
The actor and writer Gawn Grainger, who has died aged 87, had an extraordinary career that spanned more than 70 years. Even if rarely the star, he had the resilience and versatility of the born character actor and was the product of a now vanished regional repertory system. Above all, he was an indispensable team player and a pillar, along with Michael Bryant, of the National Theatre. He began his career there under Laurence Olivier in 1972 when the company was situated at the Old Vic and worked under successive directors before making his final appearance in 2017 during the tenure of Rufus Norris. He worked regularly in the West End and in TV and in the 1980s sidelined his acting career to focus on writing scripts for the small screen. He soon returned to the stage, however, which was his natural habitat. As an actor he had a powerful physical presence, a superb voice and the consummate adaptabilityimparted by rep training. Off-stage, he also had an instinctive charm that made people like and trust him. During his early years at the National, he not only came under Olivier's wing, but became a lifelong friend of the actor, whom he regarded as a surrogate father, and his family: he eventually went on to ghost-write Olivier's book On Acting (1986), and, along with Maggie Smith, was present at the great man's deathbed. Having temporarily abandoned acting, Grainger was persuaded to return by Harold Pinter to appear in two plays of his at the Almeida theatre, and was rewarded with Pinter's eternal friendship. His ability to relate to people extended even to critics. He and his wife, Zoë Wanamaker, were passionate theatregoers and whenever I ran into Grainger at first nights he would want to exchange opinions about whatever we had recently seen. What he did have in common with many actors was a slightly ramshackle upbringing. He spoke openly about the fact that he was the result of an affair between his Scottish mother, Elizabeth (nee Gall), married at the time to another man, and a lodger, Charles Grainger. Although his parents went on to marry, his mother felt obliged to leave puritanical Glasgow, where her son was born, to live in London. At the start of the second world war, the young Gawn was evacuated to Northern Ireland. Returning to the capital, he got a scholarship to Westminster City school but soon found himself drawn to public performance. As a boy scout, he took part in the Ralph Reader gang-shows. But it was a sign of his self-confidence that, as a 12-year-old, having read that Ivor Novello needed an actor to play the boy-monarch in his West End musical King's Rhapsody, he turned up at the stage-door, feigned a non-existent appointment with Novello and immediately got the job. After that an acting career was inevitable and in the early 60s he benefited from a still flourishing regional repertory system. He started in weekly rep at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, playing opposite an equally young Vanessa Redgrave, graduated to fortnightly rep at Ipswich, where Ian McKellen was in the company, and finally moved in 1964 to Bristol Old Vic where the productions changed every three weeks. There he played a succession of leading parts, including the title roles in Sartre's Kean and John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, and was Romeo to Jane Asher's Juliet. It is a sign of Bristol's prestige that Romeo and Juliet was one of three of its productions chosen to go on a world tour, winding up in New York in 1967. That led to Grainger spending a year on Broadway in There's a Girl in My Soup and, in another testament to his versatility, becoming a regular on an American version of the TV panel-game What's My Line? Back in London, Grainger found a new stability by marrying the actor Janet Key (his first, brief, marriage had ended in divorce) and when he joined Olivier's National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1972 it was as if he had found his destiny: he loved the company and the company loved him. His debut was in Michael Blakemore's dazzling production of The Front Page and he went on to appear in Macbeth, The Misanthrope, The Bacchae and Trevor Griffiths' The Party – in which Olivier made his last National appearance – before playing the lead in Jonathan Miller's production of Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro. I described him as 'eagle-eyed but humanly vulnerable'. Grainger was one of the few actors to make the transition from Olivier's National to that of his successor, Peter Hall. It is also a sign of Grainger's status and dependability that, in his Diaries, Hall records frequently turning to him to gauge the company's mood during periods of industrial strife. While loyal to Hall, Grainger was a key member of the Bill Bryden company that created its own distinctive style and aesthetic under the umbrella of the National Theatre. The Bryden approach was based on team-work, vocal prowess and uninhibited physicality, and Grainger, who appeared in productions of Tony Harrison's The Passion, O'Neill's The Long Voyage Home and The Iceman Cometh, and Lark Rise and Candleford, among many others, was perfectly suited to the gutsy ensemble ethos. In the 1980s, however, Grainger decided to devote himself to writing. His first stage play, Four to One, had already been performed at the Young Vic in 1976 and been well received. Set in the back-room of an Islington pub during a game of pool, it suggested an adroit mix of Robert Ardrey and Pinter, in that it combined territorial possessiveness with hostility to intruders. A handful of stage-plays followed, including Jubilee, starring Peggy Mount, but in the 80s Grainger worked mainly for TV and radio. There were single plays such as Clowns, produced by Bryden for BBC One, long-running series including The Big Deal, with Ray Brooks, and Trainer, the horse-racing drama. It was a fruitful period, but in 1991 Grainger was invited by Pinter to appear at the Almeida in London, in productions of Party Time and Mountain Language, which later led to performing alongside Pinter himself in No Man's Land. David Leveaux's production of the latter reminded us that the play is a string quartet and that the servants, superbly played by Grainger and Douglas Hodge, are just as important as Hirst and Spooner, played by Pinter and Paul Eddington. Grainger remembered that Pinter loved the camaraderie and back-chat of the dressing-room. One night Grainger said to Pinter 'Here you are in this tatty dressing-room in Islington – one of the great writers of the 20th century.' Pinter replied, with mock-fierceness – 'What do you mean, one of?' This period of renewal for Grainger was shattered by the death of his wife, Janet, in 1992, but in 1994 he married Wanamaker, to whom he was deeply devoted. Over the next three decades he rediscovered his appetite for acting and did a massive variety of work: West End plays including Amy's View, Don Juan in Soho and The Entertainer, where he caught perfectly the grumbling disillusion of the aged Billy Rice; numerous shows at the Donmar and the Young Vic, including a touching performance as the aged Firs in Katie Mitchell's production of The Cherry Orchard; and, inevitably, a return to his spiritual home at the National Theatre, where he was a bullish publican in Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, a sprightly elder in Really Old Like Forty-Five and the vigorous father of the hero's champion in Saint George and the Dragon. In his later years he had problems with macular degeneration, but he remained, whenever I met him, invincibly cheerful and left behind imperishable memories: of an engaging raconteur, a fine writer and the kind of dedicated ensemble actor who is the backbone of British theatre. He is survived by Zoë and two children, Charlie and Eliza, from his second marriage. Gawn Grainger, actor, born 12 October 1937; died 17 May 2025
Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Times Daily Quiz: Wednesday April 30, 2025
1 The political party Plaid Cymru has its headquarters in which capital city? 2 Which brand's tomato ketchup is made to exit its 'iconic' glass bottle at 0.028 miles per hour? 3 The Scots words 'wean' and 'bairn' both refer to which people? 4 To secure England's frontiers, which king invaded Scotland in 1072 and Wales in 1081? 5 Which chart-topping Welsh singer (b 1940) first performed as Tommy Scott? 6 What did Laurence Olivier call an 'anaemic little medium which could not stand great acting'? 7 A line in the Rolliad, 'A kingdom trusted to a school-boy's care', refers to which prime minister? 8 The next transit of which planet will not take place until 2117? 9 The idea of which children's book
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
North Yorkshire's film-star castle set to earn its keep by hosting paying guests
Laurence Olivier's elderly Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited died in it and a pair of hot young newlywed aristocrats in Bridgerton made out in it. Now someone with deep pockets may be able to occupy that same 18th-century canopy bed at Castle Howard. In the morning they might take breakfast in a room with Canaletto paintings on the wall and Meissen plates on which to butter their toast. The custodians of a place that is arguably England's grandest, most beautiful country house are considering next year bringing in high-end hospitality packages. It comes as the North Yorkshire house on Thursday revealed the results of a major restoration project, five years in the planning, which included updates to rooms, a rehang, a transformation of its Long Gallery and a fabulous recreation of a Tapestry Drawing Room destroyed in a fire in 1940. The house is already well known from being used in TV and film, including Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, the 1981 ITV series and the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited and more recently in Netflix's Bridgerton, where characters played by Regé-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor turn a fake courtship into a blissful marriage. It has also been occasionally hired for private hospitality events such as Ellie Goulding's wedding reception. The idea of it being used as a kind of expensive, exclusive Airbnb would appear to be the next step. 'We've always referred to this as a living house,' said Nicholas Howard, a descendant of Charles Howard, the third Earl of Carlisle who commissioned the house in 1699. 'It's not a museum. And if you're going to call it a living house, you've got to make it a living house. And that involves having people in it.' There is also a more practical reason, said his wife, Victoria Howard, a former chief executive of HarperCollins. 'We need income for the next burnt-out room. We've got quite a few more.' Having people pay to stay is a likely project for next year, she said. 'We would probably do it no more than a couple of times a year because it would interfere with the day visitors.' Those day visitors number nearly 300,000 a year. They come to marvel at not only the notable architecture, conceived by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, but to enjoy acres of sweeping parkland filled with lakes, fountains, statues, temples and pyramids. One of the bleakest moments in the house's history was the 1940 fire, which took place while it was being used as a wartime girls school. It destroyed Castle Howard's incredible dome and more than 40 rooms. The dome was restored by George Howard in 1962 and income from Brideshead Revisited allowed the reconstruction of the Garden Hall and New Library. The recreation of the lost Tapestry Drawing Room is arguably the star attraction of the latest restoration project. The tapestries were woven for the room in 1706 by John Vanderbank and depict the four seasons in scenes taken from the work of David Teniers. Luckily, when the fire happened they were not in the room. 'They had been on a sort of trek around the house to various places, each of which was more inappropriate than the last,' said Howard. Now they are back where they should be, in the newly restored and furnished room, for the first time in centuries. 'This is the first time I've seen them really because you can now get up close to them and that's important,' he said. 'You can see the detail. 'In some ways, I'm sort of getting to know them properly for the first time in my life, which is really nice.' The renewal project has not been without its difficulties along the way, not least the choice of painting to hang over the mantelpiece. 'I said that I felt it ought to be definitely some sort of classical scene, an allegory or a historical scene or whatever,' said Howard. Auction sites were scoured and the ideal painting was found in Barcelona – a work by the Italian baroque painter, Sebastiano Ricci. It was successfully bought. 'We then discovered that, actually, it had been sold from this house in 1991,' said Howard. 'For a lot less than we bought it for.' Castle Howard's 21st Century Renaissance opens to the public on 25 April.
