Ian Holm
Sir Ian Holm Cuthbert, known as Ian Holm, is an English actor known for his stage work and many film roles. He received the 1967 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance as Lenny in The Homecoming and the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of King Lear, he won the 1981 BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his role as athletics trainer Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. His other well-known film roles include Ash in Alien, Sir William Gull in From Hell, Father Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series. Holm was born Ian Holm Cuthbert on 12 September 1931 in Goodmayes, in Essex, to Scottish parents, Jean Wilson and James Harvey Cuthbert, his mother was a nurse, his father was a psychiatrist who worked as the superintendent of the West Ham Corporation Mental Hospital and was one of the pioneers of electric shock therapy.
He had an older brother, who died in 1943. Holm was educated at the independent Chigwell School in Essex, his parents retired to Mortehoe and Worthing where he joined an amateur dramatic society. A visit to the dentist led to an introduction to Henry Baynton, a well-known provincial Shakespearean actor who helped Holm train for admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he secured a place in 1949, his studies there were interrupted a year when he was called up for National Service in the British Army, during which he was posted to Klagenfurt and attained the rank of Lance Corporal. They were interrupted a second time when he volunteered to go on an acting tour of the United States in 1952, he graduated from RADA in 1953. Holm was an established star of the Royal Shakespeare Company before making an impact on television and film. In 1965, he played Richard III in the BBC serialisation of The Wars of The Roses, based on the RSC production of the plays, in 1969 he played the lead in Dennis Potter's Moonlight on the Highway and he made a name for himself with minor roles in films such as Oh!
What a Lovely War and Alexandra, Queen of Scots and Young Winston. In 1967, he won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play as Lenny in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. In 1977, Holm appeared in the TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth as the Sadducee Zerah, a villainous Moroccan in March or Die; the following year he played J. M. Barrie in the award-winning BBC TV series The Lost Boys, in which his son Barnaby played the young George Llewelyn Davies. In 1981, he played Frodo Baggins in BBC radio adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Holm's first film role to have a major impact was that of the treacherous android, Ash, in Ridley Scott's Alien, his portrayal of Sam Mussabini in Chariots of Fire, earned him a special award at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Back home in England, he won a BAFTA award, for Best Supporting Actor, for Chariots. In the 1980s, he had memorable roles in Time Bandits, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
He played Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland in the Dennis Potter-scripted fantasy Dreamchild. In 1989, Holm was nominated for a BAFTA award for the TV series Game and Match. Based on the novels by Len Deighton, this tells the story of an intelligence officer who discovers that his own wife is an enemy spy, he continued to perform Shakespeare, appeared with Kenneth Branagh in Henry V and as Polonius to Mel Gibson's Hamlet. Holm was reunited with Kenneth Branagh in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, playing the father of Branagh's Victor Frankenstein. Holm raised his profile in 1997 with two prominent roles, as the stressed but gentle priest Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element and lawyer Mitchell Stephens in The Sweet Hereafter. In 2001 he starred in From Hell as the physician Sir William Withey Gull; the same year he appeared as Bilbo Baggins in the blockbuster film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, having played Bilbo's nephew Frodo Baggins in a 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
He reappeared in the trilogy in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, for which he shared a SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. He reprised his role as the elder Bilbo Baggins in the movie The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Martin Freeman portrayed the young Bilbo Baggins in those films. Holm has been nominated for an Emmy Award twice, for a PBS broadcast of a National Theatre production of King Lear, in 1999. Holm has provided voice-overs for many British TV commercials. Holm has appeared in two David Cronenberg films: Naked Lunch and eXistenZ, he was Harold Pinter's favourite actor, the playwright once stating: "He puts on my shoe, it fits!" Holm played Lenny in the first performance of Pinter's masterpiece The Homecoming. He has played Napoleon Bonaparte three times: first, in the 1972 television series Napoleon and Love. Holm has been married four times
An Unofficial Rose
An Unofficial Rose is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1962, it was her sixth novel; the novel begins with the funeral of the wife of Hugh Peronett. Hugh is a retired civil servant. Randall and his wife Ann have Miranda. Randall is having an affair in London with Lindsay Rimmer, a young woman, the secretary and companion of Emma Sands, a detective novelist with whom Hugh had had an affair twenty five years earlier. Randall is determined to leave Ann for Lindsay, asks his father for financial help. Hugh complies by giving the proceeds to Randall. Randall takes Lindsay off to Italy, asks his wife for a divorce. For emotional and religious reasons she is reluctant to grant his request. Felix Meecham, an army officer and family friend, has been in love with Ann for years. After Randall leaves and asks Ann for a divorce, Felix declares his love and urges her to give up hoping for Randall's return. Ann falls in love with Felix, but her daughter Miranda, devoted to her father and is herself secretly in love with Felix, convinces her that she should not marry him.
Discouraged by Ann's rejection, Felix decides to take a position in India. Years before, Hugh had broken off his affair with Emma and returned to his wife, but Fanny's death opens up the possibility of his renewing the relationship, he visits Emma in her London flat. After Lindsay's departure Hugh declares his love to Emma, but she refuses him, saying she has hired another secretary and companion. At the end of the novel, Hugh is on his way to India for a holiday, accompanying Felix and Felix's older sister Mildred, in love with Hugh; the novel's title and epigraph are taken from Rupert Brooke's poem Grantchester. In the poem, written in Berlin in 1912, Brooke contrasts his beloved English countryside with the German city around him; the disciplined German tulips, "bloom in rows", unlike the "unkempt" wild roses in England. Along with its obvious relevance to the rose nursery setting of the book, the title refers to the formlessness of Ann Peronett's character; the lack of self-assertiveness that Randall criticizes as making her "as messy and flabby and open as a bloody dogrose", is part of what makes her a virtuous but, to some readers, a dull character.
Romantic love is a dominant theme of An Unofficial Rose, in which each of the main characters is in love with at least one of the others. In this novel most of the emotional attachments, whether or not they are reciprocated or acknowledged, have existed in some form for some time; this contrasts with some of Murdoch's other novels, in which "people implausibly fall and disastrously in love", lends an air of naturalism to the plot. Freedom is another important theme. Randall is determined to free himself from his marriage to Ann, succeeds in doing so, unlike his father Hugh, who gave up Emma and stayed with Fanny. However, the question of individual freedom is complicated by the fact that the characters, while attempting to achieve their own ends, are influencing the course of other people's lives. Thus, for example, Randall finds out that his flight with Lindsay was to some extent facilitated by Emma. In some cases, several people share responsibility for an action, without realizing it. For example, Hugh thinks the act of freeing Randall by selling his Tintoretto and giving him the money is his alone, while Mildred, who counselled Hugh to do so, thinks she is responsible.
Ann and Randall Peronett's relationship represents the tension between a virtuous or religious person and an artist, two ways of being that Murdoch explores in her novels. In this case Ann's formlessness and passivity contrast with Randall's quest for form and his desire for decisive action. In a televised discussion with Frank Kermode in 1965, Iris Murdoch said that Ann's having a'lack of ego" was "one way of being good". Contemporary reviewers saw An Unofficial Rose as a comic novel, describing it variously as a "tragi-comedy about the follies and ambiguities of love" or a "comedy of manners"; the book's reception was favourable, the New York Times included it on its list of recommended books for summer reading. The Times, on the other hand, found the characters lifeless and the style "flat-footed and undistinguished". Literary scholars have tended to treat An Unofficial Rose within the context of Murdoch's work as a whole. Hilda Spear describes it as belonging to Murdoch's "romantic phase", in which her books were concerned with "the responsibilities and ties of marriage".
It has been analyzed in the context of Murdoch's four novels dealing with male adultery. A more philosophical approach compared Murdoch's views of freedom with those of the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre; the author found that An Unofficial Rose was the "most interesting of her novels for examining this facet of Anglo-French literary relations". An Unofficial Rose was adapted as a four-part television miniseries by Simon Raven, it appeared on BBC Two beginning on 28 December 1974. Among the cast were Maurice Denham as Hugh Peronett, John Woodvine as Randall, Ann Bell as Ann. Fulltext of Rupert Brooke's poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester Iris Murdoch and Frank Kermode discussing An Unofficial Rose
Hardcover
A hardcover or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper, they are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible damaged paper covers. Hardcover books are marginally more costly to manufacture. Hardcovers are protected by artistic dust jackets, but a "jacketless" alternative is becoming popular: these "paper-over-board" or "jacketless hardcover" bindings forgo the dust jacket in favor of printing the cover design directly onto the board binding. If brisk sales are anticipated, a hardcover edition of a book is released first, followed by a "trade" paperback edition the next year; some publishers publish paperback originals. For popular books these sales cycles may be extended, followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on shallower, less hardy paper.
This is intended to, in part, prolong the life of the immediate buying boom that occurs for some best sellers: After the attention to the book has subsided, a lower-cost version in the paperback, is released to sell further copies. In the past the release of a paperback edition was one year after the hardback, but by the early twenty-first century paperbacks were released six months after the hardback by some publishers, it is unusual for a book, first published in paperback to be followed by a hardback. An example is the novel The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal, which had its revised edition of 1961 first published in paperback, in hardcover. Hardcover books are sold at higher prices than comparable paperbacks. Books for the general public are printed in hardback only for authors who are expected to be successful, or as a precursor to the paperback to predict sale levels. Hardcovers consist of a page block, two boards, a cloth or heavy paper covering; the pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, it too is covered by the cloth.
A paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. Dust jackets serve to protect the underlying cover from wear. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is a blurb, or a summary of the book; the back flap is. Reviews are placed on the back of the jacket. Many modern bestselling hardcover books use a partial cloth cover, with cloth covered board on the spine only, only boards covering the rest of the book. Bookbinding Paperback
Chatto & Windus
Chatto & Windus was an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era. Since 1987, it has been an imprint of publishers; the firm developed out of the publishing business of John Camden Hotten, founded in 1855. After his death in 1873, it was sold to Hotten's junior partner Andrew Chatto who took on the minor poet W. E. Windus as partner. Chatto & Windus published Mark Twain, W. S. Gilbert, Wilkie Collins, H. G. Wells, Richard Aldington, Frederick Rolfe, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett, the famous'unfinished' novel Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson, the first translation into English of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu, amongst others. In 1946, the company took over the running of the Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Active as an independent publishing house until 1969, when it merged with Jonathan Cape, it published broadly in the field of literature, including novels and poetry, it is not connected, with Pickering & Chatto Publishers.
Norah Smallwood was appointed to the board of Chatto & Windus when it became a limited company in 1953, succeeded Ian Parsons as chairman and managing director in 1975, serving until her retirement in 1982. The New Phoenix Library The Phoenix Library The Phoenix Living Poets Warner, Chatto & Windus: A Brief Account of the Firm's Origin and Development Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Simon & Schuster, New York, John, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0-8047-1842-3, p. 118. Official website Chatto & Windus catalogs
A Severed Head (film)
A Severed Head is a 1970 British drama film directed by Dick Clement, starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, Ian Holm. It is based on the novel of the same name by Iris Murdoch. Antonia is the pampered wife of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, she tells her husband that she is in love with psychiatrist Palmer Anderson. Palmer and Antonia wish to deal with the situation in a civilized manner by remaining friends with Martin. Meanwhile, Martin tries to keep Georgie Hands, a secret. However, Palmer's sister, Honor Klein, who once taught Georgie at Oxford University, tells Palmer and Antonia about their affair. Honor introduces Georgie to Martin's womanizing brother, Alexander; this is just the start of the various liaisons. Lee Remick - Antonia Lynch-Gibbon Richard Attenborough - Palmer Anderson Ian Holm - Martin Lynch-Gibbon Claire Bloom - Honor Klein Jennie Linden - Georgie Hands Clive Revill - Alexander Lynch-Gibbon Ann Firbank - Rosemary Lynch-Gibbon Rosamund Greenwood - Miss Seelhaft Constance Lorne - Miss Hernshaw A Severed Head on IMDb
Criterion Theatre
The Criterion Theatre is a West End theatre at Piccadilly Circus in the City of Westminster, is a Grade II* listed building. It has a seating capacity of 588. In 1870, the caterers Spiers and Pond began development of the site of the White Bear, a seventeenth-century posting inn; the inn was located on sloping ground stretching between Jermyn Street and Piccadilly Circus, known as Regent Circus. A competition was held for the design of a concert hall complex, with Thomas Verity winning out of 15 entries, he was commissioned to design a large restaurant, dining rooms and galleried concert hall in the basement. The frontage, the façade of the restaurant, showed a French Renaissance influence using Portland stone. After the building work began, it was decided to change the concert hall into a theatre; the composers' names, which line the tiled staircases, can still be seen. The redesign placed the large Criterion Restaurant and dining rooms above the theatre, with a ballroom on the top floor; when Spiers and Pond applied for a licence to operate, the authorities were unhappy because the theatre was underground and lit by gas, creating the risk of toxic fumes.
The Metropolitan Board of Works had to vote twice before the necessary licence was issued, fresh air had to be pumped into the auditorium to prevent the audience from being asphyxiated. It was not until October 1881, at the Savoy; the building was completed in 1873 with the interior decoration carried out by Son. The first production opened on 21 March 1874 under the management of Henry J. EP Hingston; the programme consisted of An American Lady written and performed by Byron and a piece by W. S. Gilbert, with music by Alfred Cellier, entitled Topsyturveydom; the event did not make much of an impression on Gilbert. In a 1903 letter to Thomas Edgar Pemberton, author of the book on The Criterion, Gilbert wrote: "I am sorry to say that in my mind is an absolute blank to the opening of The Criterion. I never saw Topseyturveydom. If you happen to have a copy of it and could lend it to me for a few hours it might suggest some reminiscences: as it is I don't know what the piece was about!" Gilbert had, been back at the theatre in 1877 with his farce, On Bail.
Haste to the Wedding was a flop, but it introduced the 18-year-old George Grossmith, Jr. the composer's son, to the London stage. The younger Grossmith would go on to become a major star in Edwardian musical comedies. Charles Wyndham became the manager and lessee in 1875, under his management the Criterion became one of the leading light comedy houses in London; the first production under the manager was The Great Divorce Case, opening on 15 April 1876. When Wyndham left in 1899 to open his own theatre, The Wyndham's Theatre he remained the lessee bringing in various managements and their companies. In March 1883 the theatre closed; the pumping of fresh air into the ten-year-old auditorium, some thirty feet below street level, was deemed unsatisfactory. Thomas Verity supervised the alterations; the new direct access ventilation shaft meant cutting off a considerable portion of the adjoining Criterion Restaurant. New corridors were built, with several new exits; the auditorium was the stage re-equipped.
The old dressing rooms were demolished and new ones built. Most electricity was installed. Dramatic Notes states "The Criterion Theatre, transformed from a stuffy band-box to a convenient and well ventilated house, reopened on April 16". Further alterations and redecorations took place in 1902–03, when the theatre was closed for seven months. Between the world wars productions included Musical Chairs with John Gielgud and in 1936, French Without Tears which ran for 1,039 performances and launched the writing career of Terence Rattigan. During World War II, the Criterion was requisitioned by the BBC – as an underground theatre it made an ideal studio safe from the London blitz – and light entertainment programmes were both recorded and broadcast live. After the war, the Criterion repertoire included avant-garde works such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot; the early part of 1956 saw the arrival of Anouilh's popular comedy, The Waltz of the Toreadors, with impressive performances by Hugh Griffith and Beatrix Lehmann.
In the 1970s the Criterion site was proposed for redevelopment, which caused protest, as people feared the theatre would be lost. In February 1975 the GLC Planning Committee approved the development on the condition that the theatre continued in "full and uninterrupted use" while the redevelopments took place. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s the argument increased, the Equity Save London's Theatre Committee organised high-profile demonstrations as they feared that the theatre would still be lost. In the 1980s, the theatre building was purchased by Robert Bourne, a property tycoon and patron of the arts, his wife, theatre impresario Sally Greene; the couple set up the Criterion Theatre Trust, a registered charity created to protect the Criterion's future. From 1989 to 1992 the theatre was renovated both in the front of the house. During that time, the block that exists today was built aro
Under the Net
Under the Net is a 1954 novel by Iris Murdoch. Set in London, it is the story of Jake Donaghue. Murdoch's first novel, its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular novels, it is dedicated to Raymond Queneau. When Jake leaves Madge's flat in Chapter 1, two of the books he mentions taking are Murphy by Samuel Beckett, Pierrot mon ami by Queneau, both of which are echoed in this story; the epigraph, from John Dryden's Secular Masque, refers to the way in which the main character is driven from place to place by his misunderstandings. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present; the editors of Modern Library named the work as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century. The "net" in question is the net of abstraction and theory. In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular.
Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net." In this comic novel about work, love and fame the main character of Jake Donaghue, a long-winded freeloader, seeks to improve his circumstances and make up for past mistakes by reconnecting with his old acquaintance Hugo Bellfounder, a mild mannered and soft spoken philosopher. Jake, a shameless mooch and hack-writer - now homeless and out of options - tracks down his ex-girlfriend, Anna Quentin, her elegant sister, an actress named Sadie, he reacquaints himself with Hugo, whose philosophy Jake had long ago presumptuously tried to decipher and interpret to his own liking. The plot develops through a series of adventures involving his offbeat minion, Finn. From the kidnapping of a movie-star canine to the staging of a political riot on a film set, Jake attempts to discover and incorporate Hugo’s abstruse philosophies. Berated yet enlightened, Jake's aspirations to become a true writer/philosopher may at last be at hand.
Jake Donaghue has just arrived back in London from a trip to France. Finn, a distant relative, so obliging that he is sometimes mistaken for a servant, tells Jake that they are being thrown out of Madge's house, where they have been living rent-free for eighteen months. A conversation with Madge reveals that they are being moved to make way for her new lover, the rich bookmaker Sammy Starfield, he goes with his suitcase to the cat-filled corner shop of Mrs Tinckham to check he has all his manuscripts and figure out where to live. Only one manuscript is missing: his translation of Le Rossignol de Bois, a novel by Jean-Pierre Breteuil, it is a mediocre work. He thinks of an old friend, a philosopher named Dave Gellman, goes to his flat. A political meeting is being held there, Dave is dismissive, but allows him to leave his suitcase. Finn suggests that he ask a singer he once fell in love with. Jake has not seen Anna for several years, he tracks her down to the Riverside Miming Theatre, on Hammersmith Mall, finds her in a prop room "like a vast toy shop".
She is happy to see him, but somewhat uncomfortable when he asks about her new project, involving mime. She suggests that he ask her film-star sister, for help. After she leaves he spends the night sleeping in the prop room; the next morning Jake goes to Welbeck Street to look for Sadie, learns that she is at her Mayfair hairdresser. He spruces himself up, goes to talk to her, she is happy to see him there, asks him to look after her flat while she hides from an admirer named Hugo Belfounder, a fireworks manufacturer who now owns a film studio. It so happens, they had met long ago as fellow participants in a cold-cure experiment, had had long philosophical discussions which Jake, without Hugo's knowledge, had turned into a book called The Silencer. Because Hugo believed that language was corrupt, Jake felt that creation of the book was a kind of betrayal, had unilaterally broken off the friendship after its publication, not wishing to face Hugo's anger. Jake goes back to Madge's to fetch his radio, finds Sammy there.
Jake is prepared to fight, but the bookmaker is friendly and offers him money to leave. This leads to a bet being placed by phone. Jake goes to Sadie's flat to begin housesitting, is surprised to see a copy of The Silencer on a bookshelf—did Hugo give it to her? His pleasure in the flat's luxury is soon destroyed: firstly by a call from Hugo, asking for Miss Quentin, secondly by the discovery that he has been deliberately locked in, he calls from the window to his friends and Finn, who pick the lock and rescue him. Jake resolves to find Hugo, who must love Anna, have given her the idea for the mime theatre; the three men take a taxi to Holborn Viaduct. They find Hugo's door open, a note left saying "Gone to the pub"; this begins a pub crawl. At the Skinners' Arms, they are joined by a political activist. After Lefty subjects Jake to a kind of Socialist catechism, they go for a walk, all but Dave have a swim in the Thames; the next morning, Dave belatedly hands Jake a letter from Anna. He rushes to the Riverside Theatre, but everything has been packed up, she is gone.
Devastated, he takes a ride in the lorry carrying away the contents of the prop room. Jake goes back to Sadie's flat to purloin her copy of The Silencer, but on approaching her door he overhears a conversation between her and Sammy a
