Word: coriolanus
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Like any Hollywood animal, Olmos thinks on a grand scale, in broad, confident strokes. It is not inconceivable that he might play Hamlet or Kowalski. Or he might take on heroes like Coriolanus or Willy Loman. But consider this option: suppose he decided to develop a movie, Spielberg-style, about a Hispanic family in the suburbs, coping the American way. Instead of a tragic figure, he would be playing Eddie Average. (Then perhaps Eddie II and III). It would be Close Encounters of a fresh new kind, and the vast audience watching the melodrama might also start to recognize...
...took Burton to Oxford during World War II, and in 1948, after a mandatory stint in the Royal Air Force, to London's West End, where he soon established himself as a logical successor to the reigning monarchs of the stage: Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Coriolanus, he thought, was his greatest role, and others agreed. "Nobody else can ever again play Coriolanus now," said Olivier. Added Critic Kenneth Tynan: "We thought he could be another Edmund Kean, that he was going to be the greatest classical actor living...
Actually, it is not a terrible word but a rather distinguished one, derived from the Latin depopulare and meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "to lay waste, ravage, pillage, spoil." Shakespeare used it in Coriolanus when he had the tribune Sicinius ask, "Where is this viper/ That would depopulate the city?" John Milton's History of England referred to military forces "depopulating all places in their way," and Shelley wrote in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills of "thine isles depopulate...
Hall plans three new productions at the National: Coriolanus, Animal Farm as a musical and, possibly, another play from Peter Shaffer. (Hall staged Amadeus in both London and New York.) Meantime, he is happy to see the three auditoriums in the National complex filled to 80% of capacity. "I've always been a businessman as well as trying to be an artist. And I do love running things." With his $71,000-a-year contract at the National renewed for five years, Sir Peter seems destined to remain a lively British monument. Just like Nelson's Column...
...Olivier. A sense of danger, athletic as well as emotive, has often been at the heart of his Shakespearean performances. His Romeo (1935) clambered up to his fair lady's balcony in record time; his Hamlet (1947) leaped from a 14-ft. balcony to wrestle with Laertes; his Coriolanus (1959) executed a horrendous, death-daring fall. Inside this theatrical peer, the spirit of a Douglas Fairbanks was always bounding...