Word: courtenay
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...enjoy The Dresser simply as a backstage fable, rich in the full-tilt emotional exaggeration of plays and pictures that try to catch showfolk off guard, offstage. Or as a fairly acute study of the master-servant relationship. Or simply as an excuse to give two splendid actors (Tom Courtenay as the title figure, Albert Finney as Sir) a chance to strut their stuff...
...Courtenay, of course, originated the role of Norman in the theater, and offers a perfectly polished version of it to such posterity as the film vaults grant. On its face his is a comic turn, an impersonation of a homosexual impersonating a nanny to a grownup child. But his mincing rage for order has deeper roots; this small and isolated backstage world has offered him, until Sir started disrupting it, an asylum from the larger world he could never manage. Subtle observation and marvelously controlled invention mark Courtenay's work...
...advised to stop short of his last-act fling at tragedy and rest on his strength, which is for comically melodramatic commentary on the vagaries and excesses of the theatrical life. Still, he has wisely turned his original vehicle from a unicycle into a bicycle built for two, and Courtenay and Finney give it a thrilling ride. -By Richard Schickel
...Dreamgirls. A pearl in the strand of notable U.S. musicals. There is dazzling elegance in Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes, and a young belter named Jennifer Holliday can start, stop and steal a show. (See above.) The Dresser. Paul Rogers plays a decrepit provincial Shakespearean actor-manager; Tom Courtenay, his valet. In double image, they are Lear and his Fool-and both are magnificent...
...leading actors is incalculable. Rogers' Sir is a white-maned lion who roars formidably against his self-sought fate. He is a ham to his hocks, but he serves Shakespeare with feudal valor ("We've done it, Will, we've done it"). As for Courtenay's Norman, as his voice echoes sepulchers and his hands etch the air with images of touching vulnerability, he opens the book of acting to a previously uncut page. -By T.E. Kalem