Word: filumena
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Dench, 64, may be one of Britain's hardest-working actors. She is currently filming her third Bond movie and starring in London's West End in the Peter Hall-directed Filumena, and she often stars in British sitcoms. But amazingly, Dench confesses that she still suffers from stage fright. "It's anxiety and fear that create adrenaline, which for me is petrol," she explains. Worst of all, she says, is actually watching herself onscreen. She has never seen some of her movies, and only watched Shakespeare in Love to prepare for a U.S. press junket. "I'm very squeamish...
DIED. Eduardo De Filippo, 84, Italian actor, director, playwright and maestro of the still active dialect theater of Naples, whose boisterous, sentimental tragicomedies, including Millionaire Naples (1945), Filumena Marturano (1946) and Inner Voices (1948), celebrated the earthy Neapolitan zest for life; of kidney failure; in Rome. Two of his screenplays, a segment of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), and Marriage-Italian Style (1964), adapted from Filumena, both starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and directed by Vittorio De Sica, were among Italy's funniest film comedies of the 1960s...
...character once ornamented a Naples brothel, but for the past 25 years she has been the housekeeper of one of her former customers, Domenico Soriano. Finally, after years of his indifference, she pretends that she is dying, tricking him into a deathbed wedding. A miraculous recovery naturally follows, and Filumena tells Domenico why she deceived him. She has three grown sons, whom she has kept secret all these years, and she wants them to bear his name. Her moment of triumph is fleeting, however. She discovers that a marriage induced by fraud has no legal standing; she has outwitted only...
There is a narrow line between sentimentality and mawkishness, and not many writers can walk it without falling into the swamp of syrupy sugar waiting below. Eduardo de Filippo, the Italian playwright, is a rare exception. Filumena, which ran for two years in London, may be the easiest, most companionable show on Broadway. It is warm, undemanding and, in its own modest way, always enjoyable...
...would be unfair to describe the resolution of this ancient script except to say that it is happy. The chief joy of this production is not the plot, in any case, but the amusing game of thrust and parry carried on by Joan Plowright and Frank Finlay as Filumena and her quarry. They are an even-which is to say delightful-match, and they have been elegantly directed by Plowright's husband, Laurence Olivier. -Gerald Clarke