obituary
John Mahoney: 'I wanted to be like everybody else'Tuesday, 06 February 2018
In 11 seasons of Frasier, John Mahoney played Marty Crane, a cussed blue-collar ex-cop who couldn’t quite understand how his loins came to produce two prissily cultured psychiatrists. His ally in straight-talking was his physiotherapist Daphne,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Mark E SmithWednesday, 24 January 2018
Since releasing their first record, Bingo Masters Breakout, Mark E Smith (b 1957) has led The Fall through some of rock music’s most extreme and enthralling terrain, cutting a lyrical and musical swathe that few other artists can match. An outsider... Read more... |
Remembering Dmitri Hvorostovsky (1962-2017)Friday, 24 November 2017
A certain online scandalmonger and coffin-chaser likes to preface news of deaths in the musical world with "sadness" or "tragedy", usually when neither he nor we have heard of the person in question. But the end of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's two-and-a-... Read more... |
Peter Hall: A ReminiscenceTuesday, 12 September 2017
Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and... Read more... |
Sue Steward 1946-2017: She came, she saw, she salsa'dMonday, 28 August 2017
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site... Read more... |
When Sam Shepard was a LondonerMonday, 31 July 2017
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in... Read more... |
Sergei Vikharev, master ballet-reconstructor, 1962-2017Tuesday, 06 June 2017
Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's... Read more... |
Tim Pigott-Smith: from The Jewel in the Crown to King Charles IIISaturday, 08 April 2017
It is the fate of a certain type of well-spoken classically trained actor to wear the livery of the English Establishment. Tim Pigott-Smith, double-barrelled and tall with a high forehead, was one such. But the full arc of his career encompassed... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 1Monday, 27 March 2017
David Storey, who has died at the age of 83, was the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner. His father spent his life down a Yorkshire pit, and out of guilt that he belonged to an educated... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 2Monday, 27 March 2017
In Radcliffe, an early novel by David Storey, one character murders another with a telling blow from a hammer. The author was later advised that Kenneth Halliwell was reading Radcliffe on the night in 1967 before he killed his lover Joe Orton, also... Read more... |
John Hurt: 'If I’ve been anything I’ve been adventurous'Saturday, 28 January 2017
John Hurt, who has died at the age of 77, belonged to that great generation of British thespians who started in the 1960s and eventually, one by one, ended up knighted: Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Nigel... Read more... |
When Snowdon starred in Peter Sellers' home movieFriday, 13 January 2017
On screen, two hoodlums in macs and homburgs debate the best way to waste a victim. One of them, played by Peter Sellers, proffers a revolver. The other, who from under his hat has something of Herbert Lom about his profile, pulls on a cigarette and... Read more... |
