Post by Lauryn on Jul 10, 2006 23:29:00 GMT -5
Can you tell I was playing around with the library's online subscription services today? I might have put this in the former Grey Owl thread, as parts of it are pertinent, but for now, OT.
Eerie parallels: Richard Attenborough's next film mirrors family tragedy
Jay Stone Windsor Star
TORONTO - On a Toronto sound stage recently, 82-year-old Lord Richard Attenborough was directing a scene from his new film Closing the Ring. It is the 12th movie he has directed in a cinematic career that includes acting and producing and stretches back 64 years. He won a best director Oscar for Gandhi in 1982.
"The very word 'retire' makes me sick in the stomach," Attenborough said during a break in the filming. "I just couldn't do that. What I would like to do, I would like to keep going until I got to the end of a particular scene or a day's work, and say, 'Cut,' and drop dead."
Closing the Ring is a love story that begins in the Second World War. In the scene being filmed, a beautiful bride named Ethel Ann -- played by The O.C.'s Mischa Barton -- discovers that her young husband, Teddy, has died in the crash of his B-17 bomber. Ethel Ann reacts by literally walling up her memories of Teddy and refusing to think about him, although years later, the older Ethel Ann, now played by Shirley MacLaine, has that long-ago love reawakened.
After the scene was shot, Attenborough and his wife, British actress Sheila Sim, who flew from England to join her husband, sat down to watch it on video on a small TV screen behind the set.
"It's interesting that (screenwriter Peter Woodward) has written this scene with her not acknowledging that he is dead," Lady Attenborough said later. "Because that's what I've done. That's exactly what I've done."
She was referring to a family tragedy that was part of the worldwide disaster of Boxing Day 2004. Jane, one of the three Attenborough children, was vacationing in Phuket, Thailand, with her husband Michael Holland, and their children Sam, Lucy, and Alice, along with Holland's mother, also named Jane. It was the day the violent tsunami hit Southeast Asia. The Attenboroughs lost their daughter, her mother-in-law, and their 14-year-old granddaughter Lucy. Alice, then 17, was seriously injured, although she has since recovered.
The Attenboroughs are still trying to make sense of what happened, and although Lord Richard says the themes of love and loss in Closing the Ring -- themes that mirror his own life -- were not the reason he took on the film, the parallels are there and the sense of tragedy is still very much near the surface.
"Sheila looks very much like Jane, or Jane looked very much like her mom," he said. "And the granddaughter looked very much like Jane. And so I and the rest of the children, the other grandchildren, now find Jane's loss personified in Sheila, in half measures. And the relationship now between the grandchildren and Sheila, which was wonderful anyway, is now that much more. So we have found that there are grounds for recalling Jane without total, total horror."
Lord Attenborough, who was dressed casually in jeans and a checked shirt, has been married to Sheila since 1945 -- "a disgusting number of years," he put it. They met as students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and acted together in the original cast of Agatha Christie's famously long-running play The Mousetrap when it opened in 1952. His pet name for her is Poppy.
He continued, "What we can't do, and Poppy said it the other day, 'Darling, where is Jane?' And it's no good saying, 'Oh, she's in heaven.' What is the logic? Where is she?"
He turned to his wife and said, "Beloved, we were just talking about your saying relatively recently, 'Where is Jane? Where is she?' And the answer has to be, 'She's still here.' The things that she did, the children, relationships. So of course she has gone. But she has not disappeared."
There was a catch in his voice, and he seemed to be on the verge of tears.
"We have bad times -- I'm talking about it now -- we have bad times, and they are very difficult, aren't they darling?, but in the main, we've found ways of dealing with it. We've a very united family. We had seven grandchildren. We now have six. We had three children. We have two. But their presence and impact is exactly the same for the other members of the family as it ever was. She's just gone away."
I asked him if he was ever so disheartened he considered stopping working. Attenborough, who fought through his emotions to talk about his daughter -- "we've never talked about this before," he explained -- seemed more shocked by that notion than by anything.
"Stop working?" he asked. "On the contrary. I wanted to work."
He's been at it for a long time, since his film debut in 1942, at age 19, in the wartime drama In Which We Serve, playing a deserting soldier. It was the kind of role for which he became known in Britain. For years, the five-foot-seven actor was defined by his performance as the villain Pinkie in the 1947 film Brighton Rock, based on the Graham Greene book.
Asked to look back on his acting career, he mentioned Seance On A Wet Afternoon, the 1964 drama in which he played the subservient husband of Kim Stanley, and 10 Rillington Place, the 1971 thriller that saw him as the real-life murderer John Christie. To American audiences, he is best remembered as the leader of the British troops in The Great Escape, a paleontologist in Jurassic Park, and Kriss Kringle in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street.
Closing the Ring, which is due to be released next year, is his first directing project since the critical and commercial failure of the 1999 film Grey Owl, which he admits was a bitter disappointment. He said the movie -- based on the true story of an Englishman who posed as a native Indian in Canada -- was better than most critics gave it credit for. Part of the reason for its failure, he feels, was the casting of Pierce Brosnan, "who was superb in the film" but was handicapped by his image as James Bond.
"That's the pain of cinema," he said, and turned to his wife for help in remembering the name of another example of unfair typecasting, that of Sandra Bullock, who co-starred in his Ernest Hemingway biopic In Love and War.
"Sandra Bullock is a remarkably clever and fascinating actress but she has a characterization, a credo, particularly in America in the eyes of the public that she's a next-door girl and jokes and fooling around and so on, and I cast her as an adult extraordinary woman who had this experience with Hemingway during the First World War, and the public wouldn't accept it.
"So both with Pierce and Sandra, an adventurous decision in casting resulted in a lack of credibility in the subject matter, which distressed me very much."
Eerie parallels: Richard Attenborough's next film mirrors family tragedy
Jay Stone Windsor Star
TORONTO - On a Toronto sound stage recently, 82-year-old Lord Richard Attenborough was directing a scene from his new film Closing the Ring. It is the 12th movie he has directed in a cinematic career that includes acting and producing and stretches back 64 years. He won a best director Oscar for Gandhi in 1982.
"The very word 'retire' makes me sick in the stomach," Attenborough said during a break in the filming. "I just couldn't do that. What I would like to do, I would like to keep going until I got to the end of a particular scene or a day's work, and say, 'Cut,' and drop dead."
Closing the Ring is a love story that begins in the Second World War. In the scene being filmed, a beautiful bride named Ethel Ann -- played by The O.C.'s Mischa Barton -- discovers that her young husband, Teddy, has died in the crash of his B-17 bomber. Ethel Ann reacts by literally walling up her memories of Teddy and refusing to think about him, although years later, the older Ethel Ann, now played by Shirley MacLaine, has that long-ago love reawakened.
After the scene was shot, Attenborough and his wife, British actress Sheila Sim, who flew from England to join her husband, sat down to watch it on video on a small TV screen behind the set.
"It's interesting that (screenwriter Peter Woodward) has written this scene with her not acknowledging that he is dead," Lady Attenborough said later. "Because that's what I've done. That's exactly what I've done."
She was referring to a family tragedy that was part of the worldwide disaster of Boxing Day 2004. Jane, one of the three Attenborough children, was vacationing in Phuket, Thailand, with her husband Michael Holland, and their children Sam, Lucy, and Alice, along with Holland's mother, also named Jane. It was the day the violent tsunami hit Southeast Asia. The Attenboroughs lost their daughter, her mother-in-law, and their 14-year-old granddaughter Lucy. Alice, then 17, was seriously injured, although she has since recovered.
The Attenboroughs are still trying to make sense of what happened, and although Lord Richard says the themes of love and loss in Closing the Ring -- themes that mirror his own life -- were not the reason he took on the film, the parallels are there and the sense of tragedy is still very much near the surface.
"Sheila looks very much like Jane, or Jane looked very much like her mom," he said. "And the granddaughter looked very much like Jane. And so I and the rest of the children, the other grandchildren, now find Jane's loss personified in Sheila, in half measures. And the relationship now between the grandchildren and Sheila, which was wonderful anyway, is now that much more. So we have found that there are grounds for recalling Jane without total, total horror."
Lord Attenborough, who was dressed casually in jeans and a checked shirt, has been married to Sheila since 1945 -- "a disgusting number of years," he put it. They met as students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and acted together in the original cast of Agatha Christie's famously long-running play The Mousetrap when it opened in 1952. His pet name for her is Poppy.
He continued, "What we can't do, and Poppy said it the other day, 'Darling, where is Jane?' And it's no good saying, 'Oh, she's in heaven.' What is the logic? Where is she?"
He turned to his wife and said, "Beloved, we were just talking about your saying relatively recently, 'Where is Jane? Where is she?' And the answer has to be, 'She's still here.' The things that she did, the children, relationships. So of course she has gone. But she has not disappeared."
There was a catch in his voice, and he seemed to be on the verge of tears.
"We have bad times -- I'm talking about it now -- we have bad times, and they are very difficult, aren't they darling?, but in the main, we've found ways of dealing with it. We've a very united family. We had seven grandchildren. We now have six. We had three children. We have two. But their presence and impact is exactly the same for the other members of the family as it ever was. She's just gone away."
I asked him if he was ever so disheartened he considered stopping working. Attenborough, who fought through his emotions to talk about his daughter -- "we've never talked about this before," he explained -- seemed more shocked by that notion than by anything.
"Stop working?" he asked. "On the contrary. I wanted to work."
He's been at it for a long time, since his film debut in 1942, at age 19, in the wartime drama In Which We Serve, playing a deserting soldier. It was the kind of role for which he became known in Britain. For years, the five-foot-seven actor was defined by his performance as the villain Pinkie in the 1947 film Brighton Rock, based on the Graham Greene book.
Asked to look back on his acting career, he mentioned Seance On A Wet Afternoon, the 1964 drama in which he played the subservient husband of Kim Stanley, and 10 Rillington Place, the 1971 thriller that saw him as the real-life murderer John Christie. To American audiences, he is best remembered as the leader of the British troops in The Great Escape, a paleontologist in Jurassic Park, and Kriss Kringle in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street.
Closing the Ring, which is due to be released next year, is his first directing project since the critical and commercial failure of the 1999 film Grey Owl, which he admits was a bitter disappointment. He said the movie -- based on the true story of an Englishman who posed as a native Indian in Canada -- was better than most critics gave it credit for. Part of the reason for its failure, he feels, was the casting of Pierce Brosnan, "who was superb in the film" but was handicapped by his image as James Bond.
"That's the pain of cinema," he said, and turned to his wife for help in remembering the name of another example of unfair typecasting, that of Sandra Bullock, who co-starred in his Ernest Hemingway biopic In Love and War.
"Sandra Bullock is a remarkably clever and fascinating actress but she has a characterization, a credo, particularly in America in the eyes of the public that she's a next-door girl and jokes and fooling around and so on, and I cast her as an adult extraordinary woman who had this experience with Hemingway during the First World War, and the public wouldn't accept it.
"So both with Pierce and Sandra, an adventurous decision in casting resulted in a lack of credibility in the subject matter, which distressed me very much."
