Alan Bennett is an English actor, author and screenwriter. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University, where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue, he stayed to research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame, he gave up academia, turned to writing full-time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968. His work includes The Madness of George III and its film adaptation, the series of monologues Talking Heads and subsequent film of The History Boys, popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds; the youngest son of a co-op butcher and his wife Lilian Mary, Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School, Leeds Modern School. He learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his national service before applying for a scholarship at Oxford University.

He was accepted by Exeter College, from which he graduated with a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of successful actors in the Oxford Revue, he remained at the university for several years, where he served as a junior lecturer of Medieval History at Magdalen College, before deciding, in 1960, that he was not suited to being an academic. In August 1960 Bennett, along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook, achieved instant fame by appearing at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. After the festival, the show continued in New York, he appeared in My Father Knew Lloyd George. His television comedy sketch series On the Margin was erased. However, in 2014 it was announced. Around this time Bennett found himself playing vicars and claims that as an adolescent he assumed he would grow up to be a Church of England clergyman, for no better reason than that he looked like one. Bennett's first stage play Forty Years On, directed by Patrick Garland, was produced in 1968.

Many television and radio plays followed, with screenplays, short stories, novellas, a large body of non-fictional prose, broadcasting and many appearances as an actor. Bennett's distinctive, expressive voice and the sharp humour and humanity of his writing have made his readings of his work popular the autobiographical writings. Many of Bennett's characters are downtrodden. Life else passed them by. In many cases they have met with disappointment in the realm of sex and intimate relationships through tentativeness and a failure to connect with others. Despite a long history with both the National Theatre and the BBC, Bennett never writes on commission, saying "I don't work on commission, I just do it on spec. If people don't want it it's too bad."Bennett is both unsparing and compassionate in laying bare his characters' frailties. This can be seen in his television plays for LWT from the early 1970s through to his work for the BBC in the early 1980s, his many works for television include his first play for the medium, A Day Out in 1972, A Little Outing in 1977, Intensive Care in 1982, An Englishman Abroad in 1983, A Question of Attribution in 1991.

But his most famous screen work is the 1987 Talking Heads series of monologues for television which were performed at the Comedy Theatre in London in 1992. This was a sextet of poignantly comic pieces, each depicting several stages in the character's decline from an initial state of denial or ignorance of their predicament, through a slow realisation of the hopelessness of their situation, progressing to a bleak or ambiguous conclusion. A second set of six Talking Heads followed a decade, darker and more disturbing. In his 2005 prose collection Untold Stories, Bennett has written candidly and movingly of the mental illness that his mother and other family members suffered. Much of his work draws on his Leeds background and while he is celebrated for his acute observations of a particular type of northern speech, the range and daring of his work is undervalued, his television play The Old Crowd includes shots of technical crew. He wrote The Lady in the Van based on his experiences with an eccentric woman called Miss Shepherd, who lived on Bennett's driveway in a series of dilapidated vans for more than fifteen years.

It was first published in 1989 as an essay in the London Review of Books. In 1990 he published it in book form. In 1999 he adapted it into a stage play, which starred Maggie Smith and was directed by Nicholas Hytner; the stage play includes two characters named Alan Bennett. On 21 February 2009 it was broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4, with Maggie Smith reprising her role and Alan Bennett playing himself, he adapted the story again for a 2015 film, with Maggie Smith reprising her role again, Nicholas Hytner directing again. In the film Alex Jennings plays the two versions of Bennett, although Alan Bennett appears in a cameo at the end of the film. Bennett adapted his 1991 play The Madness of George III for the cinema. Entitled The Madness of King George, the film received four Academy Award nominations: for Bennett's writing and the performances of Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren, it won the award f

La maison où j'ai grandi is a studio album of French pop singer Françoise Hardy. It was released in France on LP, Disques Vogue/Vogue international industries. Published without title, except for the word Françoise on the cover, but has become known by the title of the most successful song on the album, "La maison où j'ai grandi". Words and music were written except where noted, she is accompanied by the Johnny Harris orchestra. "Je changerais d’avis" – 2:53Original title: "Se telefonando"Lyrics: Ghigo De Chiara, Maurizio CostanzoMusic written by: Ennio MorriconeFirst sung by: Mina, 1966French adaptation by: Jacques Lanzmann and Françoise Hardy "Si c’est ça" – 2:09 "Rendez-vous d’automne" – 2:40Lyrics: Jean-Max RivièreMusic written by: Gérard BourgeoisAccompanists: Charles Blackwell orchestra. "Je serai là pour toi" – 2:24 "Peut-être que je t’aime" – 2:12 "Il est des choses" – 2:31Original title: "Ci sono cose più grandi"Lyrics: Eliana de SabataMusic written by: Edoardo VianelloFirst sung by: Tony Renis, 1966French adaptation by: Françoise HardyAccompanists: Charles Blackwell orchestra.

"Comme" – 1:54 "Mes jours s’en vont" – 2:26 "Qu’ils sont heureux" – 2:21Lyrics: Eddy MarnayMusic written by: André Popp "Surtout ne vous retournez pas" – 2:20 "Tu es un peu à moi" – 2:14 "La maison où j'ai grandi" – 3:39Original title: "Il ragazzo della via Gluck"Lyrics: Luciano Beretta and Michele "Miki" Del PreteMusic written by: Adriano CelentanoFirst sung by: Adriano Celentano, 1966French adaptation: Eddy MarnayAccompanists: Charles Blackwell orchestra. South Africa, 1966: LP, Vogue. United Kingdom, 1966: LP, Vogue/Vogue international industries. Australia, 1968: Vogue. Canada, 1968: La maison où j'ai grandi, Vogue/Vogue international industries. New Zealand, 1968: Vogue. France, 1996: Disques Vogue/Sony BMG. United States, October 16, 2015: CD, La maison où j'ai grandi, Light in the Attic Records/Future Days Recordings. United States, January 2016: La maison où j'ai grandi, Light in the Attic Records/Future Days Recordings

Blankenrath is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Cochem-Zell district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Zell; the municipality lies in the Hunsrück, near Bundesstraße 421. Its lowest elevation is its highest 450 m above sea level. Yearly precipitation in Blankenrath amounts to 856 mm, rather high, falling into the highest third of the precipitation chart for all Germany. At 73% of the German Weather Service's weather stations, lower figures are recorded; the driest month is February. The most rainfall comes in June. In that month, precipitation is. Precipitation is quite evenly spread over the year. Only 4% of German weather stations report lower seasonal variations; the name "Blankenrath" means white clearing. It is called, after a former daily reality in the municipality, “The clearing at the white stone”. Blankenrath's history reaches back to the 9th and 10th centuries, to a time when sickness and wars gave rise to a need for people to seek homes away from the crowded river valleys, such as the nearby Moselle valley.

According to local lore, the village arose out of three estates, named the Metzenhof, the Geiershof and the Rumershof. Witnessed in history, however, is Gerlach von Braunshorn's enfeoffment with the Blankenrath court in 1347 by Count Johann von Kleve. In 1362, upon Gerlach's death, it passed by marriage into the Winneburg Counts’ ownership; the landlordship was shared by the Electorate of Trier, the Counts of Sponheim and the Counts of Beilstein. This arrangement began when two of Gerlach's grandsons, namely Gerlach and Cuno von Winneburg, acquired their grandfather's old rights, they could not keep them, nor meet their obligations owing to a crushing debt load. Thus, they pledged their holdings to the Electorate of Trier in 1375 for 17,000 Gulden, their descendants did not pay off their pledge debt to the Electorate of Trier –, 17,400 Gulden with the interest added – until 164 years after the original transaction, by which time there was no hope of their family's regaining its former standing in the community.

The Electorate's and the Sponheim comital family's influence had grown so great, that it had become impossible for the now debt-free Winneburg-Beilstein family to wield any power. In 1690, the whole village was destroyed in the ravages of war. Only three farms on the village's outskirts were spared this calamity. Meanwhile, disputes over who had the lordly rights in Blankenrath continued. All together, the disagreement lasted more than two and a half centuries reaching the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar, which failed to resolve the matter; the dispute was made moot when the Holy Roman Empire and all its governing institutions, including all the lordly families and the Imperial Chamber Court, were swept away in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the wake of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic intervention. Beginning in 1794, Blankenrath lay under French rule; the neighbouring village of Reidenhausen, which hitherto had formed together with Blankenrath a single municipality, was separated.

In 1814 Blankenrath was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia at the Congress of Vienna, the Amt of Blankenrath was founded. Since 1946, Blankenrath has been part of the newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Under the Verwaltungsvereinfachungsgesetz of 18 July 1970, with effect from 7 November 1970, the municipality was grouped into the Verbandsgemeinde of Zell, losing its Amt status in the process once the municipality of Mastershausen had been transferred to the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis, precluding any grounds for Blankenrath to have its own Verbandsgemeinde; the council is made up of 16 council members, who were elected by proportional representation at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, the honorary mayor as chairman. The municipal election held on 7 June 2009 yielded the following results: Blankenrath's mayor is Jochen Hansen, his deputies are Thomas Geisen and Jürgen Hastenpflug; the municipality's arms might be described thus: Per fess enhanced, party per pale argent a cross sable and argent a cross gules, gules a bugle-horn sinister of the first.

The black cross stands for the Cologne Cathedral Foundation, the red one for the Prince-Bishopric of Trier. The bugle-horn is the charge borne by the Braunshorn noble family in Beilstein; the arms have been borne since 5 January 1981. The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments: Catholic Church of the Assumption of Mary, Walhausener Straße – Romanesque tower, Baroque aisleless church, 1761, Romanesque Revival portico. Hesweiler Straße 1 – villa, Expressionist plastered building, 1933. Hesweiler Straße 12 – timber-frame Quereinhaus from 1876. Hunsrückstraße 17 – timber-frame Quereinhaus, hipped mansard roof, 1785, characterizes village’s appearance. Hunsrückstraße 22 – timber-frame estate complex along the street, 18th/19th century. Schulstraße 3 – former school, Swiss chalet style building with mansard roof from 1914. There is a Catholic parish in the municipality, called Maria Himmelfahrt; the Zell-Bad Bertrich-Blankenrath Evangelical parish, part of the Church Distr