Word: bancroft
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FOREMAN MAKES the semblance of letting some Churchill family skeletons dance obscenely in a series of TV-style interviews. On several occasions we suddenly find Young Winston his father Lord Randolph (Robert Shaw), and the American mother (Anne Bancroft) alone in a study badgered by the bitchy Rex Reed-style questions of an off-screen journalist. "What precisely was the nature of your husband's last illness?" the journalist inquires, adding after an evasive answer, "Come, come, Lady Randolph, we live in modern times, Surely the word syphilis need hold no terrors for us." Lord Randolph's death, his wife...
Much of the film is centered around the meteoric career of Churchill's father, Lord Randolph. Robert Shaw, with his twinkling arrogant eyes, angulating cigarettes, and expressions which flash between aristocratic disdain and hard calculation is a pleasure to watch. Anne Bancroft is serviceable as his wife, being required only to produce a variety of worried expressions to accompany such lines as, "Must you be...so hard on Winston, Randolph?" Almost every minor role--Pat Heywood as Winston's nanny Ian Holm as George Buckle, the Editor of the London Times, Anthony Hopkins as Lioyd George--is perfectly cast, although...
...dispatches, memoirs and histories is antiseptic and servile, as empty of conflict as a biographical entry in the Britannica. The movie even employs an offscreen journalist, whose task it is to badger Young Winston (Simon Ward), his father Lord Randolph (Robert Shaw) and American mother (Anne Bancroft) with indelicate inquiries. "What precisely was the nature of your husband's last illness?" the journalist sneers from behind the camera, adding after an evasive answer, "Come, come, Lady Randolph, we live in modern times. Surely the word syphilis need hold no terrors for us." Lord Randolph's death, like...
...actor himself. Ward is credible in the thorny role of Winston as a young man, Shaw superb as his father. The secondary characters are all cast and played faultlessly, with Ian Holm as editor of the Times and Anthony Hopkins as Lloyd George especially engaging. Anne Bancroft, who ought to have been perfect as Lady Randolph, is thwarted largely by a part that asks her only to be coquettish or long-suffering. Young Winston suffocates her restless dynamism, just as it does the true power and substance of Churchill's early life...
Born. To Anne Bancroft, 40, and Mel Brooks, 45, who have three Oscars between them (she for her performance in The Miracle Worker, he for his role in writing The Critic and The Producers); their first child, a son; in Manhattan. Name: Maximilian Michael...