Word: hamlets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...went to England, let his peroxided hair grow brown and long. He took speech lessons, and, after a strong performance in a BBC drama, received an offer to play Hamlet with the excellent Birmingham Repertory Theater. Recalls Chamberlain: "I felt pride, amazement, disbelief, terror." He was the first American to dare Hamlet in Britain since John Barrymore, and, premiere night, a full cry of London critics rode to Birmingham for the kill -and for a shock. Wrote the Times critic the next morning: "Anyone who comes to this production prepared to scoff at the sight of a popular American television...
That same gratifying surprise awaits NBC viewers next Tuesday when Hallmark Hall of Fame televises the Chamberlain Hamlet. It is an aristocratic, romantic and (he admits) "not scholarly" conception of the role. His Hamlet is passionate sometimes to the point of hysteria and Chamberlain's accents (well east of mid-Atlantic) are tinged with tremolo. Sir Michael Redgrave, an esteemed former Old Vic Hamlet who plays Polonius in this TV production, says that, overall, "Richard is very good-more than just interesting." To fit the two-hour time slot, however, more massive surgery has been performed on the Folio...
...change in direction was not easy. His Broadway bash, the musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, closed before it opened. His films included one limited success as Julie Christie's sadistic husband in Petulia. The change of image and luck finally came with Hamlet. "I had been told that the English actors would eat me alive," he says, but he took strength from their patience and from the dictum of Margaret Leighton (his TV Gertrude) that rehearsals are the place to make a"bloody fool" of yourself. As he got deeper into the play, he discovered that...
...pity it is too, because the little hamlet of Kirrary, perched on the wild southwestern coast of Ireland, is populated with handsome and talented characters. There is Robert Mitchum, a solid, burly movie craftsman woefully miscast as Charles Shaughnessy, the weak-shanked schoolteacher. There is Trevor Howard, who makes the crustaceous Father Collins genuinely likable and credible against almost insuperable odds. In the role of Ryan's daughter Rosy, Sarah Miles is as tremulously lovely a colleen as ever graced a Kerry hillside. The elliptic, listless script is by Robert Bolt, her real-life husband...
...Shakespearean canon, "Troilus and Cressida" comes after "Hamlet" and the powerful tragedies and at a time of the moody, enigmatic comedies that are unresolved and express a general distaste for life. There was a time when pedants were convinced that Shakespeare had suffered a nervous breakdown. Romanticists are sure that the Dark Lady of the Sonners had betrayed him more wantonly than usual, and that, like Jimmy Durante, he was in a mowing mood...