Word: gielguds
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MOVIES . . . HAMLET: "If Kenneth Branagh doesn?t win an Oscar for his four-hour, uncut ?Hamlet,? " says TIME's Richard Corliss, "he should at least cop a Chutzpah Award." Here's the most eclectic cast in movie history -- Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gerard Depardieu, John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, Charlton Heston, Derek Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, John Mills, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet and the Duke of Marlborough, to name but a dozen -- in the second longest film released by a major studio (after ?Cleopatra?). To his credit, the actor-director-adapter approached this job not as a solemn duty or an egotistical...
...style also allows the actors to speak the dialogue (all from the play) without worrying about whether they sound like John Gielgud. "We tried to bring the language to the actors," he says, "and not have the actors try to satisfy some spurious notion of the correct Shakespearean pronunciation...
...played Iago to Laurence Fishburne's Othello and made a film, A Midwinter's Tale, about doing Hamlet in the provinces. This year he directs and stars in Hamlet--every word of Shakespeare's longest play--and has cast it with nearly every tony Brit actor (Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Kate Winslet, Rosemary Harris) but Emma Thompson. There are also some ringers: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Billy Crystal. How do you say shtick in Elizabethan English...
...Britain, film art lagged. Stage actors were ashamed of their film work. The trick, as John Gielgud says with a smile, was to "Shut your eyes...and think of England." Britain's most gifted director, Alfred Hitchcock, didn't think of England; he learned his trade from the Americans and the Germans. On the set, instead of "Action!" he'd cry "Achtung!" Cinema Europe reveals him as an impishly sadistic fellow--he is seen lifting an actress' skirt while she tries to rehearse. But Hitch could make movies; Hollywood saw that. He went to the U.S., as had Lubitsch, Lang...
...Gielgud was still around this past Christmas Eve when Osborne, 65, died of diabetes and other complaints. And Osborne was not such a radical that he couldn't find use for the great old British lions; in The Entertainer he gave Laurence Olivier his meatiest modern role as a decayed vaudevillian. But with Look Back in Anger, the 26-year-old actor-author, who never went to university and who, only a year before, was playing callow Freddy Eynsford Hill in a road-company Pygmalion, forever changed the face of theater...