Latest news with #characteractor
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Terence Stamp, face of 60s British cinema and star of The Limey and Superman, dies at 87
Terence Stamp, one of the stellar faces of British 60s cinema, who had a second act from the late 1970s onwards as a character actor in the likes of Superman: The Movie, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and The Limey, has died aged 87. His family said in a statement that Stamp had died on Sunday morning. 'He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come,' the family said. 'We ask for privacy at this sad time.' Stephen Frears, who directed Stamp in the 1984 thriller The Hit told the Guardian: 'He was a fine man and a fine actor. It was an honour to have directed him.' Stamp became one of British cinema's glamour figures in its most fashionable decade, scoring early high profile roles in Billy Budd and The Collector (for directors Peter Ustinov and Willam Wyler respectively). His relationship with model Jean Shrimpton in the mid-60s ensured both were key faces of the the decade, and Stamp became one of its most photographed people as well as a significant part of the new wave of working class actors and musicians that fuelled Britain's pre-eminent position in the entertainment industry. Born in the tough working-class district of Bow in London, Stamp grew up the son of tugboat sailor in the slightly less tough area of Plaistow, and won a scholarship to drama school. His brother Chris also became a high profile figure, as manager of music acts including the Who and Jimi Hendrix. After meeting during a tour of The Long the Short and the Tall, Stamp shared a flat will fellow up-and-coming actor Michael Caine, who Stamp later described as his 'guru'. Stamp's first major screen role was in 1962 in Billy Budd, for which he received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor; this broight him to the attention of Hollywood and he was given the lead role in Wyler's 1965 adaptation of John Fowles' serial killer story The Collector. Stamp's subsequent acting career in the 1960s was erratic. He lost out to Sean Connery as James Bond, and was replaced in the lead role of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup by David Hemmings. However he starred opposite Antonioni favoured star Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise (directed byJoseph Losey), appeared in Ken Loach's hard hitting debut Poor Cow, and starred opposite former girlfriend Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd, adapted from Thomas Hardy's novel. In 1968 Stamp then appeared in two films for Italian auteurs: Federico Fellini cast him in his section of the three-part omnibus film Spirits of the Dead adapted from Edgar Allan Poe, while Pasolini gave him the lead role in his allegorical masterpiece Theorem. Stamp later told the Guardian: 'Pasolini told me: 'A stranger arrives, makes love to everybody, and leaves. This is your part.' I said: 'I can do that!'' However Stamp's profile declined sharply at the end of the decade and work dried up; he told the Guardian: 'It was a mystery to me. I was in my prime. When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: 'They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp.' … I couldn't believe it.' Stamp went to India and stayed on an ashram – and was eventually recalled by the film industry with an offer to play the villainous General Zod in Superman: The Movie, released in 1978. Stamp later said he had to come to terms with no longer being the lead actor. 'I had transmuted myself. I no longer saw myself as a leading man. What had happened inside of me enabled me to take the role, and not feel embarassed or depressed about playing the villain. I just decided I was a character actor now.' Stamp returned to British cinema in the 1980s, starring opposite John Hurt and Tim Roth in Frears' The Hit, and had a cameo as the Devil in Neil Jordan's literary horror film The Company of Wolves. He subsequently alternated safe-bet Hollywood roles with more adventurous work. In 1994 he played trans cabaret performer Bernadette Bassenger in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (receiving Bafta and Golden Globe nominations), followed by a lead role in Steven Soderbergh's revenge thriller The Limey. The subsequent decades saw more high profile castings as interest grew in his earlier work, including roles in Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Wanted and The Adjustment Bureau, while another juicy British cinema role came his way opposite Vanessa Redgrave in Song for Marion. More recently he appeared in Big Eyes and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children for Tim Burton, and his most recently released film credit was Last Night in Soho, the retro-inspired horror-thriller directed by Edgar Wright. Despite a string of high-profile relationships, including Christie and Shrimpton, Stamp married once in 2002 to Elizabeth O'Rourke; they divorced in 2008.
The Guardian
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kenneth Colley obituary
Kenneth Colley, who has died aged 87, after suffering from Covid and pneumonia, was a character actor widely admired by both the press and public for his screen roles over 60 years, from the Imperial officer Admiral Piett in two of the original Star Wars films and Jesus in Monty Python's Life of Brian to historical figures such as Nelson and Napoleon, and two Adolfs, Hitler and Eichmann. He described his parts as 'mad and bad', while critics variously commented that the sad-eyed actor had 'a defeated look if ever there was one' and he could 'make your spine tingle with pleasure'. He is embedded in the minds of sci-fi film fans as Firmus Piett, a role he landed after Irvin Kershner, director of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second in the first Star Wars trilogy, said he was 'looking for someone that would frighten Hitler'. Piett was the commander of Executor, Darth Vader's flagship super star destroyer employed in the Empire's quest for galactic control. George Lucas, the Star Wars creator and producer, had not intended to feature an Imperial officer twice in the first trilogy, but Colley made the character of Piett human – 'You can't just play a uniform,' he said – and Star Wars fans wrote in demanding to see him again. So Lucas brought him back for Return of the Jedi (1983), adding scenes to the original script. But Colley's run ended there, with Piett commanding the entire Imperial fleet at the Battle of Endor and perishing when a Rebel starfighter destroys the Executor's command bridge. He remained a firm fan favourite at Star Wars conventions over the following decades. Colley also gained cult status as Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount in the 1979 film Monty Python's Life of Brian. He had previously appeared with individual members of the Monty Python team in the movie Jabberwocky and on TV in Ripping Yarns (both in 1977). He was also much admired by Ken Russell and was part of the flamboyant director's unofficial repertory company for 22 years. Colley started as Hitler in Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a BBC musical biopic that outraged Richard Strauss's family with its sex scenes and depiction of the composer as a Nazi sympathiser. Then came film parts as Modest, Tchaikovsky's younger brother, in The Music Lovers; Legrand in The Devils, brilliantly cinematic, but controversial – and censored – for its tale of a philandering 17th-century French Catholic priest, witchcraft, nudity and sexually repressed nuns; and a bearded king for a fantasy sequence in The Boy Friend (all 1971). In further Russell musical biopics, Colley was Krenek, a journalist posing challenging questions, in Mahler (1974) and Frédéric Chopin in Lisztomania (1975). He played the dour teacher Mr Brunt in Russell's film version of The Rainbow (1989) before returning to TV as Alfred Dreyfus, a wrongly jailed 19th-century French officer, in Prisoner of Honor (1991) and the composer John Ireland in The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (1992). Colley was born in Manchester, to Jessie (nee Hughes) and Ernest Colley, a labourer. When he was 14, a teacher at South Hulme secondary modern school asked him about his career ambitions, and he said he wanted to act. On leaving school, he went through jobs as a commercial art assistant, bus conductor and warehouse operative, but his dream never faded. 'One day, I told myself that I was 23 and I had to stop wasting my time,' Colley recalled. In 1961, he headed for London and knocked on theatrical agents' doors, but failed to impress. Nevertheless, he landed his first theatre job as an assistant stage manager with Bromley repertory company, where he started acting. He also made his screen debut, as a corpse, in the BBC sci-fi series A for Andromeda (1961) in the middle of an actors' strike that meant most Equity members were not available for work. Moving on, he joined the newly formed Living Theatre company in an old school building in Leicester (1961-63), alongside actors such as Jill Gascoine. His performance as Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's anti-establishment play Look Back in Anger led one critic to write: 'Kenneth Colley burns with sardonic rage.' While television quickly recognised his talents as a character actor, with appearances in dramas such as The Avengers (1963), as well as the role of a fellow steel worker playing pranks on Dennis Tanner in Coronation Street (1964), Colley continued on stage with the company at the Unity, a London East End venue with roots in the workers' theatre movement. He played Wick there in another 'angry young man' play, Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1965), written by David Halliwell and directed by Mike Leigh. He reprised the role at that year's Dublin theatre festival and in the West End of London the following year at the Garrick, before taking small parts with the National Theatre company at the Old Vic in 1968. Later stage roles included Cleet in Cromwell (Royal Court, 1973) and Benedick on tour with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Much Ado About Nothing (1979). In films, he played Michael Crawford's chauffeur in The Jokers (1967) and a Soviet colonel in Firefox (1982), alongside Clint Eastwood. He first played Hitler on television in Jean Benedetti's BBC play These Men Are Dangerous (1969). His other small-screen parts included Charles I in Revolution: Cromwell (1970), the 'accordion man' in Pennies from Heaven (1978), an SS officer in the 1983 TV movie The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck, Eichmann in Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985), and the title roles in I Remember Nelson (1982) and Napoleon's Last Battle (1990). Colley also gave a standout performance as the manipulating Duke of Vienna in the 1979 BBC Shakespeare production Measure for Measure and enjoyed a starring role as Ken Uttley, owner of a removals firm, in the comedy-drama Moving Story (1994-95). In 2016, he played the doomed mob boss Vicente Changretta in Peaky Blinders. In 1962, Colley married Mary Dunne; she died in 2018. Kenneth Colley, actor, born 7 December 1937; died 30 June 2025
New York Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Jon Bernthal Became Hollywood's Most Dependable Bruiser
When Jon Bernthal was cast as a petty drug dealer in 'The Wolf of Wall Street,' Martin Scorsese's 2013 white-collar crime epic, the actor wasn't even supposed to have many lines. But Bernthal went into that film intending to take his shot. So he came in for a wordless B-roll scene in which the script had him lifting weights in a backyard, asked the second-unit director to mic him and riffed for 45 minutes. Scorsese wasn't there that day, but here's what he saw in the footage: a shirtless Bernthal curling dumbbells, tormenting some teenage boys with a baseball bat and peacocking his virility. 'Bring some of them chicks around here sometime,' he says. Then Bernthal makes a brilliant little decision about his tough guy's whereabouts. 'Hey, Ma, we got chicken or what?' he yells toward the house. 'Ma!' There was no 'Ma' in the script. No one even said he lived with his mother. The role introduced Bernthal as an excellent character actor. Since then, he has become the guy who shows up onscreen unexpectedly, delivers the most memorable performance in a scene or two and then vanishes. This is perhaps why he's so often playing dead men in flashbacks. He's the dramatic center of gravity in FX's 'The Bear,' appearing just once or twice per season as the deceased family patriarch, and the tragic romantic in the 2017 Taylor Sheridan film 'Wind River.' Bernthal was so good in 'The Accountant,' an improbable 2016 Ben Affleck-led movie about an autistic accountant turned gunslinger, that the filmmakers made this year's sequel a two-hander. Bernthal has had leading roles too, most notably in 'We Own This City,' the HBO miniseries about Baltimore police corruption in which the actor's performance was criminally overlooked. But for the most part, he has carved out a career of supporting roles. So it made perfect sense when he told me that one of his favorite movies is 'True Romance,' Tony Scott's 1993 adaptation of Quentin Tarantino's first script. Christian Slater may have been the lead, but it was the supporting characters played by Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt and Dennis Hopper who stole the film. 'There are so many people who are in it for a scene or two,' Bernthal said, 'but you could have made a movie about any one of those characters.' We were having breakfast in Ojai, Calif., where Bernthal lives. The previous day, he returned from New York where he was promoting 'The Accountant 2.' Before that he was in Greece and Morocco, filming a role in 'The Odyssey' with Christopher Nolan, which is perhaps the greatest honor that can be bestowed on a dramatic actor these days. In front of him was a pile of egg whites, spinach, fruit and gluten-free toast. 'I'm like a gorilla,' he said. 'I eat a lot.' Most actors, once they get lead roles, are advised to turn down anything smaller. But Bernthal is allergic to strategizing about how to become a leading man or listening to agents and managers who want to find him a 'star vehicle.' The only real mistake he made in his career, he told me, happened because he let that sort of thinking get in his head. But he has switched agents since then. He knows he has become the guy who everyone calls for a favor, but then again 'The Bear' was a favor. And that turned into one of the most rewarding experiences of Bernthal's career. The intensity he brought to the role won him an Emmy, and now he has even co-written an episode in the upcoming season. 'I can't imagine deciding what you're going to do in this super-tenuous field while being so dependent on some businessman's strategy,' he said. Image Jon Bernthal, right, with Jeremy Allen White and Abby Elliott in the 2023 episode of 'The Bear' that earned him an Emmy. Credit... Chuck Hodes/FX, via Everett Collection Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
