Word: williamsons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life to think, listen, grow, love, hate, suffer and endure. So rigorous is this demand that in these more than 31 centuries there have been no more than a dozen great Hamlets. Everyone who is alive today has the rare and illuminating privilege of seeing one of them-Nicol Williamson...
Dramatic Vise. This is a filmed version of the play (TIME, Feb. 28, 1969), and Williamson is a man of the theater in the same way that a tiger is a creature of the jungle. This means that he transcends the celluloid and holds the audience in a dramatic vise. His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier...
Apart from Williamson, the cast is uneven, with Anthony Hopkins' Claudius and Judy Parfitt's Gertrude lacking sufficient force, maturity and sensuality. But Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia is remarkably affecting. She is ethereal, vulnerable, and in some strange way purer than the infancy of truth. Yet the granitic power and sweep of the film rest with Williamson. Here are antic wit, sly, sarcastic irony, erotic longings, a sentient intelligence that lights up thought like the sun at dawn...
Daily Plank. Williamson has something more that sets him apart from almost every other actor. He is a Scot, and every inch the child of John Knox out of Calvin. What he puts into Hamlet and all the other parts that he has played is the passionate intensity of a religious zealot. This makes him a metaphysical actor who asks people to look into the abyss of being. Most people prefer to walk the safe 9-to-5 plank of their daily lives and never look over the edge at fate...
Hemingway once said of the great bullfighter Joselito that, having given greatly of himself in the bull ring, he found the crowd asking for more. And so, said Hemingway, he gave his life, because that was all he had. That is what Nicol Williamson ineluctably gives...