obituary
Jasper Rees
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 post-war generation which ducked the same fate, Storey would always see his career as a daily series of grinding shifts mining black stuff from the seam of his own soul.He remained resolutely best-known for This Sporting Life (1960), his debut novel set in the gritty world of rugby league which three years on was made into a groundbreaking film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 with a hammer. But however many Orton plays Storey indirectly lost, he pulped many more of his own.In the first part of this two-part interview the writer, who has died at the age of 83, talked about the forces which shaped him: the fact that he dodged a life down the pit to pursue his ambition to become an artist, a choice paid for by a reluctant Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 Hawthorne, Derek Jacobi. Of them all, Hurt was the outsider. It’s impossible to imagine an alien springing from any midriff but his.There couldn’t be a more iconic signature for a career spent giving birth to weirdos, wackos, outsiders, victims, lunatics and flamboyants. Quentin Crisp, Caligula, Profumo-suicide Stephen Ward, Elephant man John Merrick Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 shakes his head. How about the acid in the bath routine? Another shake of the head. Case him in cement and drop him in the river? No. Sellers’ gangster is bemused. No gun, no acid, no cement: so how’s he going to do it? At this point the Lom lookalike removes his hat and reveals himself as the husband of the sister of the Queen. “Mind your own Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s hardly the lot of an art critic to be loved and admired, still less to speak to an audience that might reasonably be called “the public”. And how many will find their ideas still current 40 years on? All of these things can be said for John Berger, who has died aged 90, a man whose radical approach to looking at art was an absolute inspiration, and whose ideas were a solid presence in my childhood, woven into my early memories as surely as the pages of a photo album.A committed Marxist, Berger set out as a painter, and his writings range from novels, to essays to poetry. He won the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he was in his early 50s and so instantly successful that he was able to give up his career in the Department of the Environment to write full time. Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig, the floppy-eared freedom-fighting heroes of Watership Down, kept him in comfort for the rest of his life.The genesis of Watership Down is now almost as familiar a fable as the novel itself. In the late 1960s a career civil servant began entertaining two Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven. The latter also starred Steve McQueen, with whom Vaughn Read more ...
mark.kidel
Leonard Cohen, who has died at 82, was one of those artists born with a wisdom and maturity that cut deep into the baby-boomer youth culture of his times. He provided the perfect antidote to the innocent optimism of the 1960s, a vision shot through with world-weariness, melancholy and humour. Those who dismissed him as a purveyor of bed-sit self pity missed the point, hooked as they were on hedonism, and blind to the ever-present horrors and recurring tragedy of the world.Cohen wrote for post-Holocaust times, bravely countering Theodore Adorno’s notion that there could be no poetry Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Howard Davies, the theatre director who has died at the too-early age of 71, may not have achieved the renown of many of his colleagues. He didn’t direct blockbuster musicals, rarely ventured into TV and film, and didn’t possess the signature style that gets you noticed – and wins awards – early on.But Davies was what one might call a directors' director: a wide-ranging talent who approached text from the inside out with a clarity, vigour and breadth of vision that are pretty much without peer. I saw my first Davies production in New York in 1981, when his London staging of Pam Gems’s Piaf Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We’re in Gdańsk for the launch of the I, Culture Orchestra (sounds like an Apple product, someone points out). The new outfit has Sir Neville Marriner as guest conductor, at 87, still on sparkling form. The orchestra has brought together young musicians from across Eastern Europe “to encourage better cultural understanding” between Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. New music specialist Pavel Kotla is the artistic director and co-conductor (pictured below, with Sir Neville) – he has championed works by the likes of Charlotte Bray and Ian Vine as part Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who've done that to a certain extent." Edward Albee has died at the age of 88, having participated in his life far more actively than George and Martha, the couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? whose idea of hell is each other.His best-known plays had the civilised exterior of East Coast comfort: there were no Eddie Carbones in his world view, only profs and tennis club habitués and well-heeled products of the WASP factory. But open Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name. It was Nixon who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Nixon who sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I. Those top notes of Marilyn Monroe’s in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Read more ...