A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
Born February 7, 1946 actor Pete Postlethwaite was best known perhaps for his Oscar-nominated role in the 1993 film In The Name of the Father. He died January 2, 2001 after a long battle with cancer. He was 64.
By Julian Upton | May, 2014
When Brookside started in November 1982, it instantly revolutionised the British TV soap opera. Cheaply videotaped with outside broadcast equipment in and around real, purposely built houses in a faceless modern suburb of Liverpool, it had the unglamorous hue of a local news report, an ugly and slightly jarring visual quality that it shared with contemporary TV dramas such as Boys from the Blackstuff and Auf Widersehen, Pet. And Brookside showed societal ugliness in a way no soap opera had done before. Bad language, unemployment, urban disillusionment, militant politics and domestic violence — all had controversially hijacked the storylines within weeks of its beginning. What made all this watchable, indeed endearing, was a constant thread of humour and the quality of the writing and acting.
The cast of Brookside‘s early years is a roll call of talented actors, many of whom went on to find genuine success in the UK, albeit on the small screen: Sue Johnston, Ricky Tomlinson, Amanda Burton, John McArdle, Alexandra Pigg. And unique amongst this initial line-up was Katrin Cartlidge.
Even in the company of other good actors, there was something more intense and unflinching about Katrin Cartlidge. Playing Lucy Collins, the troubled daughter of the neighbourhood’s petit bourgeois family, she constantly bristled with an insolent ennui and a mild subversiveness. Somewhat portentously, she drifted through storylines that dealt with promiscuity, disillusionment, and petty theft with the cool detachment of a character in an arthouse film. Thin-lipped, unsmiling, and angular-featured, Cartlidge as Lucy Collins was never conventionally pretty, but she was gracious, controlled, and deep, and underneath her cool contempt boiled a defiant sexuality. These were the very qualities that the actress was later to hone for uncompromising works of the cinema.
In retrospect, given the strength of her future choices and performances, Cartlidge seems to have stayed with Brookside rather longer than was necessary. By the time of her departure in 1988, the soap was already betraying elements of the outrageous farce it later became. Murders, sieges, kidnappings, confrontational lesbianism — all went on to afflict this supposedly unremarkable cul-de-sac. It was quite clear, as the eighties closed, that as far as Brookside‘s producers were concerned, bums on seats were much more important than social comment.
This regrettable transition may have spurred Cartlidge onto new things, but initially she seemed a little directionless. She had a small role in Eat the Rich (1987) and, on television, Funseekers (1988) but these seemed like odd choices for someone so intense and intelligent. It took a few more years before it was clear that Cartlidge — cool, perceptive, self-aware — had her eye on the bigger picture.
While the best of her Brookside contemporaries were launching themselves into lucrative contracts in higher-profile television dramas, Katrin held back, got more stage experience and did her research. When she next made a splash on the screen, in 1993, it was with a small but haunting performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked. Cartlidge’s intensity was ideally suited to the desolate brutality of Naked. As Sophie, the druggie flatmate, she brings the right level of emotional distance her part, a darkly moulded background eccentric typical of Leigh’s serio-comic work. But the aftermath of her sexual brutalisation is played with a primal force that is unflinching, and betrays a powerful investment in the character.
Naked achieved much domestic and international acclaim, and the exposure it afforded Katrin could have propelled her to leading roles in more mainstream British film and television, perhaps even to the U.S. But the actress instead took the path that came to define her. Eschewing the “easier projects,” she instead chose to work next with Macedonian director Milcho Manchesvki in Before the Rain (1994). In one of three stories that sets the emotionally draining metropolis of London against the increasing volatility of rural Macedonia, Cartlidge plays a complicated, seemingly unsympathetic character. Although not fully successful, Before the Rain provides an early confirmation of her willingness to risk alienating the casual viewer. This was certainly not the characteristic of a star in the making, but key to her development as an actress.
When, in 1996, she appeared as Emily Watson’s sister-in-law in Lars von Trier‘s Breaking the Waves, it seemed that Katrin’s talent for identifying provocative, edgy, progressive projects was becoming more sophisticated. Although, arguably, Lars von Trier later became something of a Dogme prankster, Breaking the Waves is an emotionally grating and visually striking piece of work, laced with jet-black comedy and playful subversion. And, dominated as the film is by outsiders, extremists, and fantasists, Cartlidge, as Watson’s protective, buttoned-up sister-in-law, brings a necessary, if dourly humourless, touchstone of practical realism. She later claimed that working with von Trier had transformed her way of thinking as an actor.
Cartlidge then reunited with Mike Leigh to co-carry his Career Girls (1997), but that film and her performance suffers from a directorial lapse in character development. This is a pity, because the contemporary scenes in Career Girls showed a new side to Cartlidge, one that was adept at one-liners and serio-comedy. Sadly, the flashback scenes — where the actress plays her character in her younger days, all nervous tics and immature bravado — are excessive and overindulgent, and fall wide of the mark. (Although the jury of the 1997 Evening Standard Awards clearly thought otherwise, and voted her Best Film Actress of the Year.)
The following year, however, Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan (1998) afforded Cartlidge the opportunity to give the ultimate “arthouse” performance. Detached, damaged, and degraded, she pushed herself to new extremes here, as the emotionally stunted prostitute paying for her sick mother’s care by whoring herself unsmilingly around New York.
Cartlidge may have been too old now for the Samantha Morton/Kate Winslet roles that might have started to come her way, but she was already carving her niche in world cinema. As the nineties closed, she was journeying around the world, picking and choosing to work with directors who, in her own words, “I feel will produce something original, revealing and provoking.” Significantly, she was also being called upon, increasingly, to sit on judging panels at international film festivals. She had, somewhat uniquely for an ex-soap supporting actor, ascended to a level of artistic fulfillment that is usually reserved for the lionesses of European cinema.
As the new millennium began, Cartlidge was in a position to fluctuate between small parts in more commercial pictures (Dark Annie Chapman in From Hell, 2001 ) and central roles in provocative international films. Her last major impact was as the mercenary TV correspondent in Danis Tanovic’s extremely black Bosnian war comedy No Man’s Land (2001), a film that went on to beat the popular favourite Amelie to the Best Foreign Film Oscar.
But Cartlidge’s career was then cut short by a tragedy that was as shocking and as unexpected as anything she had been involved with onscreen. In early September 2002, she began complaining of flu symptoms, which became so pronounced that her partner later took her to hospital, near her home in North London. There she was diagnosed with pneumonia, and very soon septicaemia (blood poisoning) set in. She fell into a critical condition and died on 7th September. She was forty-one.
A few years before, Cartlidge had said “I actually like getting older. I hated my twenties; I couldn’t wait to be thirty. I’m really looking forward to turning forty, if I get there.” Although it is with a tragic irony that we now read that, it also goes some way to explaining the slow-burning impact of her career and her growing power as an actress. There were many more films to come; some would have been broader in appeal, but all would doubtless have been interesting, if only for the very reason that Cartlidge had chosen to be in them. One thing was pretty certain, she was never likely to turn up in the latest Austin Powers movie, however well known she might have become.
It is highly likely that, in her forties, Katrin would have chosen roles that would have consolidated her importance in international cinema. She may have become comparable to the great Isabelle Huppert — she certainly had the same passion, commitment, and cinematic courageousness. Her loss has been keenly felt by a legion of serious film-makers and fans.
Selected Filmography
1985: Sacred Hearts (UK)
1987: Eat the Rich (UK)
1993: Naked (UK)
1994: Look Me in the Eye (UK)
1994: Before the Rain (Macedonia)
1996: Breaking the Waves (Denmark/Sweden/France/Netherlands/Norway}
1997: Career Girls (UK)
1997: Saint-Ex (UK)
1998: Claire Dolan (France/US)
1998: The Lost Son (GB/France)
1998: The Cherry Orchard (Greece/Cyprus/France)
1999: Topsy-Turvy (UK)
2000: The Weight of Water (France)
2001: No Man’s Land (Slovenia)
2001: From Hell (UK/US)
2002: Dogville
Source: Her Brilliant Career: Honoring Katrin Cartlidge (1961-2002) – Bright Lights Film Journal
The great British actor Terence Stamp shares his thoughts on Fellini, Brando, George Lucas, the swinging 60s, and his own brilliant life and career.
By Sam Wigley [ Originally published 30 April 2013 ]
Born in East London to a merchant seaman, Terence Stamp was Oscar-nominated for his screen debut in Peter Ustinov’s film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1962), before becoming one of the defining actors of swinging 60s Britain. Roles in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967) and John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) earned him critical acclaim, even as his offscreen relationships, with Julie Christie among others, kept him in the media spotlight.
He lived in Italy in the late 60s, working with Federico Fellini on his ‘Toby Dammit’ section of the Edgar Allan Poe portmanteau film Histoires extraordinaires/Spirits of the Dead (1967) and Pier Paolo Pasolini on Theorem (1968), in which the actor plays a mysterious visitor who seduces each and every member of a bourgeois Italian household.
When leading roles dried up after this, Stamp disappeared from the public eye to live in India, returning to mainstream filmmaking when he was offered the part of General Zod, playing opposite Marlon Brando, in Superman (1978).
Adjusting to a career as a character actor rather than a top-billed star, Stamp has continued to seek out creatively interesting projects, starring as a retired gangster living in Spain in Stephen Frears’s The Hit (1984), a transsexual in the Australian road movie The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994), and – most recently – an ageing husband coming to terms with his wife’s illness in Paul Andrew Williams’s Song for Marion (2012).
We spoke to him about the tumult of his early celebrity life, the directors he admires (and the ones he doesn’t), and his knack for a comeback.
British comedian Tim Key plays a millionaire fanboy who commands his favorite band to put on a private show, even though its singers Tom Basdan and Carey Mulligan have split
By Amy Nicholson
At this year’s Sundance, I blushed every time someone asked about my favorite movies of the fest. I knew I’d have to include James Griffiths’ “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” a twee-sounding British comedy about a folk musician named Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) who plays a gig on a remote Welsh island for his No. 1 fan, Charles (Tim Key).
Sundance is all about championing bold new discoveries that will electrify the art form. But this sentimental charmer is literally acoustic: an expansion of the 2007 BAFTA-nominated short film “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island,” which, like the feature, was directed by Griffiths with a script from Basden and Key. And it’s something almost as rare as a revelation: a crowdpleaser I’d recommend to everyone. And I have, from the grocery store clerks in Park City to my aunt to my metalhead pal — and now I’m tipping you off, too.
The core story has deepened over the decade and a half it took to enlarge it to full-length. Eighteen years ago, indie folk was ascendant in the U.K. with the formation of Mumford & Sons, and already on the airwaves in the States thanks to Sufjan Stevens, Fleet Foxes and the Plain White T’s. The short film’s incarnation of Herb McGwyer had more hair, more hope and more cool-kid credibility in pop culture. This older Herb knows his peak has passed. Once, he sold out shows as half of the folk duo McGwyer Mortimer; today, he’s a sell-out. His ex-bandmate and former girlfriend Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) stopped speaking to him ages ago in favor of expatriating to Portland, Ore., to sell chutney at farmers markets.
We don’t hear any of Herb’s post-duo commercial hits, but we’re meant to assume they’re godawful. His mood sure is. Having sullenly agreed to a £500,000 paycheck for one show, Herb gets drenched as soon as his boat wobbles into Wallis Island and spends most of the film with his bangs plastered pathetically to his forehead. He’s even grown himself a hipster mustache of despair.
Herb’s patron, Charles, is a mysterious mega-millionaire who has spent a fortune for a private show. An apple-cheeked, motor-mouthed fanboy, he doesn’t fit the profile of, say, former Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi who managed to command performances from Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. Charles swears up and down his fortune isn’t from anything evil and Key’s smile is enough to convince you. He’s never done anything crueler than return a library book past due.
Charles used a chunk of his money to travel the world and settled down with souvenir magnets cluttering every inch of his fridge. “Katmandu was very much a case of Katman-did,” the lonely widower says, bubbling over with his need to impress his famous guest or really, just to talk to anybody. The composer Adem Ilhan has written a warm score of creaky horns and foot-stomping jangles to pair with Basden’s 16 original songs, but the film’s actual soundtrack is Charles’ constant chatter. (Key acted a minor role as the Pigeon Man in Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17,” but he launched his career as a comic poet.) Quips, puns, allusions — the nonsense tumbles out of him so fast, you barely have time to make sense of one joke before he’s onto the next.
I’d call “Wallis Island” a contender for the most quotable film of the year but there are so many good lines stacked on top of each other, and so much giggling on top of that, it’s impossible to keep up with Key’s wordplay. Presenting Herb with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, he calls it a “Winona.” As in Ryder, as in a tour rider, as in the goodies a musician expects in their dressing room.
Only once does Charles find himself stymied. “Well, I’m speechless,” he says to fill the silence.
“Well, you’re not,” Herb rebuts.
Yet, there’s a cyclone of emotions inside this goofball that he never lets out — never ever. If he did, the film would get maudlin. But there are clues: Watch how furiously Charles plays tetherball when no one is looking
The audience will see the surprise arrival of Mulligan’s Nell coming like a warship on the horizon. His estranged ex’s appearance alongside her new American husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), gobsmacks this snob off his pedestal. Nell knows Herb well enough to be thoroughly unimpressed. When Herb reveals his new back tattoo, exposing that a guy who once prided himself on authenticity is now desperately chasing trends, Mulligan’s Nell barely cocks an eyebrow.
“Cool,” she says. Her neutrality is brutal.
Mulligan has been edging toward comedy without committing to it. She’s great in that sweet spot of playing either narcissistic fools (like “Saltburn’s” Poor Dear Pamela) or here, a woman who shows up with a game plan to be confident and droll. Although Mulligan is the newbie within this filmmaking team, she probably knows the folk-star world more intimately than any of them — she’s been married to the singer of Mumford & Sons since 2012.
The script promptly sends her fictional spouse off on a birding expedition so that Herb and Nell can get slowly and persuasively reacquainted. (Pun-happy Charles would no doubt call the conveniently exiled husband’s trip a McGuffin of puffins.) With just one other character worth mentioning, a daffy shop clerk played by “Fleabag’s” Sian Clifford, there’s only so many moves a story this small can make. The film can’t afford to be shy about contrivances, but it’s only willing to cheat on facts, not feelings.
You can imagine how things will play out and you’d be close but not exact. Griffiths doesn’t fight against the formula, he just takes our expectations for every scene and gingers them up a little, the movie version of a cozy sweater threaded with tinsel. It’s the music that takes things from pleasant to powerful — not just indie folk’s earnest refrains, but the way everyone hides behind the songs’ pretense of candor while keeping their own walls sky-high. All three leads croon along with these pure emotions, each one believing they’ve grown to know each other, either through their own lyrics or Charles’ nonstop blather. Yet whenever one claims to know what another person wants, they’re usually wrong.
Key, in particular, plays all the these layers beautifully. Blunt as his Charles is, he proves to be the most guarded of the trio; there are unsung stanzas of sadness in his eyes. He might open up if his heroes asked. Except he’s the geek, the hanger-on, the money man, so nobody does. Fandom isn’t painless. But “Wallis Island” is worth applause.
Source: ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ review: Carey Mulligan, folk star – Los Angeles Times