Podcasts about most promising newcomer

Olivier nominee Jack Wolfe is currently starring as Gabe in the UK premiere of Next To Normal. Following an acclaimed, sold-out run at the Donmar Warehouse, Michael Longhurst's production has transferred to the West End for a limited run at the Wyndham's Theatre. Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey's musical premiered on Broadway in 2010, winning three Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. For his performance as Gabe, Jack won Best Supporting Performer at the WhatsOnStage Awards and Most Promising Newcomer at The Critics Circle Theatre Awards. He was also nominated for Best Emerging Talent at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the Olivier Awards. Jack's theatre credits include Peter in The Magician's Elephant (RSC), The Snow Queen (Rose Theatre Kingston), The Musician (The Belfast Ensemble), Sweeney Todd (Lyric Theatre Belfast) and Pinocchio (National Theatre). His work on screen includes Shadow and Bone, Inside No.9, The Witcher and The Magic Flute produced by Roland Emmerich. Next To Normal runs at the Wyndham's Theatre until 21st September 2024. Visit www.nexttonormal.com for info and tickets. Hosted by Andrew Tomlins  @AndrewTomlins32  Thanks for listening! Email: andrew@westendframe.co.uk Visit westendframe.co.uk for more info about our podcasts.  STOPTIME: Live in the Moment.Ranked in the top 5% of podcasts globally and winner of the 2022 Communicator Award...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Today on the show we have Oscar® nominated filmmaker and screenwriter Joe Wright.Joe has established himself as one of Hollywood's top directors with his rare ability to captivate global audiences through his extraordinary cinematic craft.Most recently, Wright directed the psychological thriller THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, starring Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, and Gary Oldman. The film follows an agoraphobic psychologist whose life is turns upside down when a befriended neighbor suspiciously disappears. The film was released by Netflix in May 2021.Previously, Wright directed the war drama the Academy Award winning film DARKEST HOUR. Written by Anthony McCarten and starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, the film follows Churchill's early days as the British Prime Minister during World War II. At the 90th Academy Awards, the film earned four nominations, including ‘Best Picture' and won for ‘Best Actor' and ‘Best Makeup and Hairstyling'. The film was also additionally nominated for nine BAFTA Awards including ‘Best Film' and ‘Best British Film', four Critics Choice awards, and a Golden Globe award.Wright made his directorial debut in 2005 with the critically acclaimed film PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen and Donald Sutherland, the film was adapted from the Jane Austen novel of the same name and garnered commercial and critical success.Wright received the BAFTA Award for ‘Most Promising Newcomer' and also won the ‘Best Director of the Year' award from the London Film Critics Circle. The film also received an additional five BAFTA nominations including ‘Best Screenplay-Adapted', four Academy Award nominations including ‘Best Actress' for Knightley and ‘Best Original Score' and two Golden Globe nominations including ‘Best Film'.His sophomore directorial feature was an adaptation of Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT, which was released in 2007 by Universal Pictures. Reuniting with Keira Knightly and also starring James McAvoy and Saoirse Ronan, the film opened the 64th Venice International Film Festival, making Wright the youngest director to ever open the event.The film went on to receive thirteen BAFTA Award nominations in major categories including ‘Best Director' for Wright and ultimately won for ‘Best Film'. At the 80th Academy Awards the film also picked up seven nominations including ‘Best Picture' and won for ‘Best Original Score' and earned seven nominations at the Golden Globes, winning ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama' and ‘Best Original Score'.In 2012, Wright released his film adaption of Leo Tolstoy's historical romantic drama ANNA KARENINA, which first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Marking his third collaboration with Keira Knightley, the film depicts the tragedy of Russian aristocrat and socialite ‘Anna Karenina', whose affair with ‘Officer Count Vronsky' leads to her ultimate demise.His adaptation earned four nominations at the 85th Academy Awards, six nominations at the BAFTA Awards including ‘Best British Film', a Golden Globe nomination, and two Critics Choice Awards.Additional filmmaking credits include the 2015 prequel PAN starring Hugh Jackman; the 2011 action thriller HANNA with Saoirse Ronan; and the 2009 drama THE SOLOIST starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.His new film is the magical Cyrano starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, and Kelvin Harrison Jr.Too self-conscious to woo Roxanne himself, wordsmith Cyrano de Bergerac helps young Christian nab her heart through love letters.  This musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand's classic play tells the story of Cyrano de Bergerac as he pines for the affections of the beautiful Roxanne, who has fallen in love with another man named Christian de Neuvillette. Though Cyrano understands that his social status and physical appearance will forever keep him apart from his lady love, he offers his skills as a gifted poet to Christian in an effort to bring the two lovers together once and for all.Enjoy my enlightening conversation with Joe Wright.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bulletproof-screenwriting-podcast--2881148/support.

Last year, Jack Wolfe won huge critical acclaim for his role as Gabe in the Donmar Warehouse's production of Next to Normal earning a WhatsOnStage Award, the Critic's Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Newcomer as well as an Olivier nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical. He is about to reprise his award winning role in the West End transfer of the Pulitzer-Prize winning show at the Wyndham's Theatre, starring alongside the  same Donmar Warehouse cast who all return this Summer. Earlier this year, Jack also starred alongside the original London cast of Spring Awakening for a special 15th anniversary concert.  Here, he also tells us how much both shows meant to him  growing up and shares his excitement around getting to take part in these projects.In this brand new interview, Jack Wolfe looks back over the last few years and reflects on the success he's found with projects like Next to Normal as well as Shadow and Bone and The Magic Flute.  He also opens up about his roots, growing up in Yorkshire as well as Wales, providing a glimpse into his warm, down-to-earth personality. Our interview also looks at some of his earlier work - playing Tobias in Sweeney Todd at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and working on the premiere of The Magician's Nephew at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. Our interview also shows Jack's vulnerable side as he also takes time to talk about his mental health and struggles with anxiety. Still, he remains very grateful for the friends he's made during this journey and shares his hope for more opportunities to work on exciting projects going forward. His enthusiasm is quite infectious too telling us about his favourite musicals growing up and his love for his peers in the industry. It's a fascinating and heartwarming conversation which we hope you enjoy listening to.Next to Normal runs at Wyndham's Theatre from 18th June - 21st September.

Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth Interview with Founding Member of The Four Preps, Bruce Belland About Harvey's guests: Today's guest, Bruce Belland, is a founding member of one of America's most popular and beloved vocal groups, commonly referred to as America's First Boy Band, The Four Preps.   As young teenage students at Hollywood High in 1954, our guest, along with singing partners Glen Larson, Ed Cobb and Marv Ingram, entered a high school talent show, and they kept on performing at high schools until that fateful day in 1956, when they were signed to a recording contract at Capitol Records, making them the youngest vocal group in history to ever sign with a major record label.   They recorded dozens of classic songs and produced 8 gold singles and 3 gold albums featuring their signature tunes, “Dreamy Eyes”, "26 Miles (Santa Catalina)," "Big Man," "Lazy Summer Night," “Down By the Station”, “More Money for You and Me”, and many more.   In 1957, Cashbox Magazine named The Four Preps the Most Promising Newcomer of the Year.  They made numerous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, American Bandstand and many other TV variety shows, in addition to singing backup for Ricky Nelson for 4 years on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”.  And of course, they appeared with Sandra Dee in the 1959 movie, “Gidget”.  And they sang the theme song from the 1957 Clark Gable movie, “Band of Angels”.   The Four Preps headlined at nightclubs, concert halls and college campuses across the country, and toured with everyone from Tennessee Ernie Ford, George Burns and Carol Channing to Henry Mancini, Johnny Mathis, Buddy Rich and Glen Campbell.  They received an official commendation from the Air Force for their extraordinary contribution to National Guard Recruitment.  And in 2007, they were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame.    And now, our guest has released a fascinating and highly entertaining memoir entitled, “Icons, Idols and Idiots of Hollywood:  My Adventures in America's First Boy Band.”   This delightful book details our guest's remarkable show business journey, full of great anecdotes, many colourful adventures, and poignant memories of pop culture history.  And let me tell you, the chapter about his hilarious experience filming a TV commercial with Annette Funicello at Disneyland is easily worth ten times the price of the book.    For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ To see more about Bruce Belland, go to:https://www.brucebelland.com/ https://the4preps.wixsite.com/thefourprepshttps://www.facebook.com/BruceBelland https://www.facebook.com/the4prepshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9J0TACPReX2IRCFPgDStZwhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/the-four-preps/19280148https://open.spotify.com/artist/5MsnoFODDc5nxWrjm99Zew https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+four+preps #BruceBelland   #TheFourPreps  #harveybrownstoneinterviews

Venice-winning director Audrey Diwan joins me to talk about her brilliant, breathless abortion thriller Happening, starring French film's Most Promising Newcomer, Anamaria Vartolomei; billionaire property developer and film producer Charles Cohen reveals his love of classic pictures, his adoration of classic cinemas and why he's restoring more sacred film spaces. I review The Lost City, Playground and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.Music by Lee Rosevere. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today on the show we have Oscar® nominated filmmaker and screenwriter Joe Wright.Joe has established himself as one of Hollywood's top directors with his rare ability to captivate global audiences through his extraordinary cinematic craft.Most recently, Wright directed the psychological thriller THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, starring Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, and Gary Oldman. The film follows an agoraphobic psychologist whose life is turns upside down when a befriended neighbor suspiciously disappears. The film was released by Netflix in May 2021.Previously, Wright directed the war drama the Academy Award winning film DARKEST HOUR. Written by Anthony McCarten and starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, the film follows Churchill's early days as the British Prime Minister during World War II. At the 90th Academy Awards, the film earned four nominations, including ‘Best Picture' and won for ‘Best Actor' and ‘Best Makeup and Hairstyling'. The film was also additionally nominated for nine BAFTA Awards including ‘Best Film' and ‘Best British Film', four Critics Choice awards, and a Golden Globe award.Wright made his directorial debut in 2005 with the critically acclaimed film PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen and Donald Sutherland, the film was adapted from the Jane Austen novel of the same name and garnered commercial and critical success.Wright received the BAFTA Award for ‘Most Promising Newcomer' and also won the ‘Best Director of the Year' award from the London Film Critics Circle. The film also received an additional five BAFTA nominations including ‘Best Screenplay-Adapted', four Academy Award nominations including ‘Best Actress' for Knightley and ‘Best Original Score' and two Golden Globe nominations including ‘Best Film'.His sophomore directorial feature was an adaptation of Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT, which was released in 2007 by Universal Pictures. Reuniting with Keira Knightly and also starring James McAvoy and Saoirse Ronan, the film opened the 64th Venice International Film Festival, making Wright the youngest director to ever open the event.The film went on to receive thirteen BAFTA Award nominations in major categories including ‘Best Director' for Wright and ultimately won for ‘Best Film'. At the 80th Academy Awards the film also picked up seven nominations including ‘Best Picture' and won for ‘Best Original Score' and earned seven nominations at the Golden Globes, winning ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama' and ‘Best Original Score'.In 2012, Wright released his film adaption of Leo Tolstoy's historical romantic drama ANNA KARENINA, which first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Marking his third collaboration with Keira Knightley, the film depicts the tragedy of Russian aristocrat and socialite ‘Anna Karenina', whose affair with ‘Officer Count Vronsky' leads to her ultimate demise.His adaptation earned four nominations at the 85th Academy Awards, six nominations at the BAFTA Awards including ‘Best British Film', a Golden Globe nomination, and two Critics Choice Awards.Additional filmmaking credits include the 2015 prequel PAN starring Hugh Jackman; the 2011 action thriller HANNA with Saoirse Ronan; and the 2009 drama THE SOLOIST starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.His new film is the magical Cyrano starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, and Kelvin Harrison Jr.Too self-conscious to woo Roxanne himself, wordsmith Cyrano de Bergerac helps young Christian nab her heart through love letters.  This musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand's classic play tells the story of Cyrano de Bergerac as he pines for the affections of the beautiful Roxanne, who has fallen in love with another man named Christian de Neuvillette. Though Cyrano understands that his social status and physical appearance will forever keep him apart from his lady love, he offers his skills as a gifted poet to Christian in an effort to bring the two lovers together once and for all.Enjoy my enlightening conversation with Joe Wright.

Today on the show we have Oscar® nominated filmmaker Joe Wright.Joe has established himself as one of Hollywood's top directors with his rare ability to captivate global audiences through his extraordinary cinematic craft.Most recently, Wright directed the psychological thriller THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, starring Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, and Gary Oldman. The film follows an agoraphobic psychologist whose life is turns upside down when a befriended neighbor suspiciously disappears. The film was released by Netflix in May 2021.Previously, Wright directed the war drama the Academy Award winning film DARKEST HOUR. Written by Anthony McCarten and starring Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, the film follows Churchill's early days as the British Prime Minister during World War II. At the 90th Academy Awards, the film earned four nominations, including ‘Best Picture' and won for ‘Best Actor' and ‘Best Makeup and Hairstyling'. The film was also additionally nominated for nine BAFTA Awards including ‘Best Film' and ‘Best British Film', four Critics Choice awards, and a Golden Globe award.Wright made his directorial debut in 2005 with the critically acclaimed film PRIDE & PREJUDICE. Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen and Donald Sutherland, the film was adapted from the Jane Austen novel of the same name and garnered commercial and critical success.Wright received the BAFTA Award for ‘Most Promising Newcomer' and also won the ‘Best Director of the Year' award from the London Film Critics Circle. The film also received an additional five BAFTA nominations including ‘Best Screenplay-Adapted', four Academy Award nominations including ‘Best Actress' for Knightley and ‘Best Original Score' and two Golden Globe nominations including ‘Best Film'.His sophomore directorial feature was an adaptation of Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT, which was released in 2007 by Universal Pictures. Reuniting with Keira Knightly and also starring James McAvoy and Saoirse Ronan, the film opened the 64th Venice International Film Festival, making Wright the youngest director to ever open the event.The film went on to receive thirteen BAFTA Award nominations in major categories including ‘Best Director' for Wright and ultimately won for ‘Best Film'. At the 80th Academy Awards the film also picked up seven nominations including ‘Best Picture' and won for ‘Best Original Score' and earned seven nominations at the Golden Globes, winning ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama' and ‘Best Original Score'.In 2012, Wright released his film adaption of Leo Tolstoy's historical romantic drama ANNA KARENINA, which first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Marking his third collaboration with Keira Knightley, the film depicts the tragedy of Russian aristocrat and socialite ‘Anna Karenina', whose affair with ‘Officer Count Vronsky' leads to her ultimate demise.His adaptation earned four nominations at the 85th Academy Awards, six nominations at the BAFTA Awards including ‘Best British Film', a Golden Globe nomination, and two Critics Choice Awards.Additional filmmaking credits include the 2015 prequel PAN starring Hugh Jackman; the 2011 action thriller HANNA with Saoirse Ronan; and the 2009 drama THE SOLOIST starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.His new film is the magical Cyrano starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, and Kelvin Harrison Jr.Too self-conscious to woo Roxanne himself, wordsmith Cyrano de Bergerac helps young Christian nab her heart through love letters. This musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand's classic play tells the story of Cyrano de Bergerac as he pines for the affections of the beautiful Roxanne, who has fallen in love with another man named Christian de Neuvillette. Though Cyrano understands that his social status and physical appearance will forever keep him apart from his lady love, he offers his skills as a gifted poet to Christian in an effort to bring the two lovers together once and for all.Enjoy my enlightening conversation with Joe Wright.

This week's WorkLife Book of The Week is: How To Recover From Rejection And Build Strong Resilience This week's WorkLife Stories of The Week: A Collection of Short Stories from The World of Performing Arts To Demonstrate How Actors Used The 3 P's: Persistence, Passion and Purpose To Survive Rejection and Build Resilience To Recover And To Push Through Their WorkLife Obstacles. Denise Gough's Story: It Took 10 Years to Receive the Critics' Award for Most Promising Newcomer and Vince Vaughan's Story Rejected for His Height.Weekly WorkLife Book Of The Week Stories from the School Of WorkLife Series from WorkLife Incorporated.Here's the link to the School Of WorkLife Series, where you can see a preview of what's inside each book, along with the main ideas behind these:  https://worklifeincorporated.com/school-of-worklife/Here's a link to my Instagram page, where I publish the daily short stories, that will come together here in this new weekly podcast format. You may like to follow me there:  https://www.instagram.com/carmel.oreilly3/ Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/worklifeincorporated)

In this episode I'm joined by designer Bélocine Musolo, who moved to Scotland from Paris, France three years ago and she shares her story of turning a passionate hobby into a successful start up, all while holding down a full time job in a new country. Bélocine tells us all about how her desire to share her culture with the world inspired her to start a business that encourages women of all ages, shapes and sizes to be bold and colourful in how they present themselves to the world. Her one of a kind business has accomplished some major achievements in a short period of time, from seeing her designs showcased on a catwalk to winning an award for Most Promising Newcomer and we chat all things start up, from networking to sourcing materials to the importance of customer service with lots of real life tips, advice and perspective. Episode Links:Guest: Bélocine MusoloWebsite: https://www.nephtali-couture.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nephtali.couture/Host: Rhiannon Louden Website: https://www.smallfishglasgow.co.ukInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallfishphotoco/ &https://www.instagram.com/rhiannoneale/Intro/Outro music credit: https://www.purple-planet.com

This is a special extra episode of the podcast, not one of the "proper" five hundred. A book I've written, on the TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade, has just become available for pre-order from Obverse Books, so to publicise that I've done an extra episode, on the pop music career of its star, Anthony Newley. The next normal episode will be up in a day or two. Transcript below the cut.  Erratum: In a previous version of this episode, I mentioned, in passing, my understanding that Newley was an alcoholic. This has been strongly questioned by some fans, who took offence at the suggestion, and as it was utterly irrelevant to the point I was making I have deleted those three words rather than cause further offence.   ----more---- Welcome to a special bonus episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. This is not this week's normal episode, which will be up in a couple of days, and nor is it the Patreon bonus episode, which will also be up as normal. This is an extra, full-length episode, on a song which didn't make the list of songs I'm covering. But this week, a book I've written has gone on pre-order, and it'll be out on the first of September. That book is on The Strange World of Gurney Slade, a TV show from the very early 1960s. And the star of that show, Anthony Newley, also had a very successful music career in the late fifties and early sixties -- and a career which had a real influence on many people who will be seen in future episodes. So, in order to promote my book, I'm going to talk today about some of Newley's music. If you're not interested in anything that isn't part of my "official" five hundred songs, then you can skip this episode, but I promise that other than a brief mention at the end, this is not going to be an advert for my book, but just another episode, about the music career of one of Britain's most interesting stars of the pre-Beatles era. So let's look at "Strawberry Fair" by Anthony Newley: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "Strawberry Fair"] Anthony Newley was someone whose career only came about by what would seem at first to be bad luck. Newley was a child in London during the Blitz, the son of an unmarried mother, which had a great deal of stigma to it in those days. When the Blitz hit, he was evacuated, and felt abandoned by his mother. That sense of abandonment increased when his mother married her new boyfriend and moved to Scotland. And then Newley was moved into a second foster home, this one in Morecambe, Lancashire. His foster father during the war was one George Pescud, a music hall performer about whom I can discover nothing else, except that he instilled in Newley a great love of the theatre and of the arts, and that as a result of this Newley started writing music, painting, writing, and, especially, acting. When the war ended, Newley was fourteen, and didn't go back to live with his mother and her new husband, choosing instead to move to London and start living an artistic life. He saw an advert in the paper for the Italia Conti stage school, and tried to become a student there. When he found out that he couldn't afford the fees, he found another way in -- he got a job there as an office boy, and his tuition was included in his wages. While there, he became friends with another student, Petula Clark, who would herself go on to stardom with records like “Downtown”. [Excerpt: Petula Clark, "Downtown"] Clark also encouraged him to start singing -- something that would definitely pay off for him later. Apparently, Clark had a crush on Newley, but he wasn't interested in her. While at the school, Newley got cast in a couple of roles in low-budget films, which brought him to the attention of David Lean, who was directing his film adaptation of Oliver Twist, and cast Newley in the role of the Artful Dodger. The film, which featured Alec Guinness, became one of the classics of British cinema, and also starred Diana Dors, with whom Newley started an affair, and who managed to get him a job as a bit player for the Rank Organisation. For the next few years, Newley had small roles in films, started a double act with the comedy writer Dick Vosburgh, had a brief spell in the army (very brief -- he was discharged because of his mental health problems), spent a couple of years in rep, shared a flat with Christopher Lee and appeared in a Hammer Horror film -- the usual things that low-level actors do as they slowly work their way up to stardom. His most notable appearance was in the West End revue Cranks, which opened in late 1955. A revue, for those who don't know, is a theatrical show that usually mixes comedy sketches and songs (though the term was, confusingly for our purposes, sometimes also used for a bill with several different musical acts). These were very popular in the fifties and sixties, and Cranks was one of the most popular. After its West End run it transferred to Broadway, and Newley was one of the cast members who appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote it, though the Broadway run of the show was not a success like the British one was. It was in Cranks that Newley's singing first came to public attention: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "Cold Comfort"] Newley was starting to get substantial film roles, and it was with the film Idol on Parade that Newley became a star, and became drawn into the world of pop music. In that film, the first film written by the prominent British screenwriter John Antrobus, he played a pop star who was drafted into the British army, as all young men were in Britain in the fifties. The film is usually said to have been inspired by Elvis Presley having been called up, though it was likely that it was also influenced by Terry Dene, a British rock and roll star who had recently been drafted, before having a breakdown and being discharged due to ill health, and who had recorded songs like “Candy Floss”: [Excerpt: Terry Dene, "Candy Floss"] Dene's story must have struck a chord with Newley, who'd had a very similar Army experience, though you couldn't tell that from the film, which was a typical low-budget British comedy. As Newley was playing a pop singer, obviously he had to sing some songs in the film, and so he recorded five songs, one of which, “I've Waited So Long”, was released as a single and went to number three in the charts: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "I've Waited So Long"] Somehow, despite Newley being an actor -- and someone who despised a lot of rock and roll music -- he had become a pop star. He won the Variety Club of Great Britain Award for Most Promising Newcomer of 1959, even though he'd been making films since 1946. "I've Waited So Long" was co-written by Jerry Lordan, who wrote "Apache", and Len Praverman, but two of the other songs in the film were written by Newley and Joe 'Mr. Piano' Henderson, and this would soon set Newley on the way to a career as a songwriter -- indeed, as the most important singer-songwriter in pre-Beatles British pop music. He had seven UK top ten hits, two of them number ones, in the years from 1959 through 61, and he had a few more minor hits after that. Most of those hits were either cover versions of American hits like Lloyd Price's "Personality", or were written for him by people like Lionel Bart. One odd example shows where he would go as a music-maker, though. "Strawberry Fair" is a traditional folk song, which was collected, and presumably bowdlerised, by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould -- the lyrics, about a young woman offering a young man the chance to pluck the cherries from her basket, read as innuendo, and Baring-Gould, who wrote "Onward Christian Soldiers", was well known for toning down the lyrics of the folk songs he collected. Newley rewrote the lyrics under the pseudonym "Nollie Clapton": [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, "Strawberry Fair"] But Newley was someone who wanted to do *everything*, and did so very well. While he was a pop star, he starred in his own series of TV specials, and then in his own sitcom, The Strange World of Gurney Slade. He starred in the classic British noir film The Small World of Sammy Lee. And he recorded a satirical album with his second wife, Joan Collins, and Peter Sellers, mocking the Government over the Profumo sex scandal: [Excerpt: Fool Britannia, "Twelve Randy Men"] That album went top ten, and was co-written by Newley and Leslie Bricusse. Bricusse would go on to collaborate with Newley in writing a series of songs, mostly for musicals, that everyone knows, though many don't realise that Newley was involved in them. Newley mostly wrote the music, while Bricusse mostly wrote lyrics, though both did both. Their first major collaboration was on the play Stop The World, I Want To Get Off!, a semi-autobiographical starring vehicle for Newley, which displayed the life of a selfish womaniser called Littlechap, who would regularly stop the action of the play to monologue at the audience in much the same way as Newley's TV character Gurney Slade. Much of Newley's work seems to be trying to be three different things at the same time -- he seems to want to write self-flagellating autobiography about his own selfish and sometimes misogynistic behaviour -- this is a man who would later write a song called "Oh What a Son of a Bitch I Am", and mean it -- while also wanting to create work that is formally extraordinary and involves a lot of metafictional and postmodern elements -- *and* at the same time wanting to make all-round family entertainment. For a while, at least, he managed to juggle all three aspects very successfully, and Stop The World, I Want to Get Off! became a massive hit on stage, and was adapted for the cinema once and TV twice. Stop The World introduced two songs that would become standards. "What Kind of Fool Am I?" became a big hit for Sammy Davis Jr, and won the Grammy for "Song of the Year" at the 1963 Grammy Awards: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr., "What Kind of Fool Am I?"] Davis also recorded another song from that show, "Gonna Build a Mountain", as the B-side, and that too became a standard, recorded by everyone from Matt Monroe to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Gonna Build a Mountain"] Newley and Bricusse followed that up with another musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, which again introduced a whole host of famous songs. "Who Can I Turn To?" was the big hit at the time, for Tony Bennett, and has since been performed by everyone from Miles Davis to Barbra Streisand, Dusty Springfield to the Temptations: [Excerpt: Temptations, "Who Can I Turn To?"] But the song from that musical that is now best known is almost certainly "Feeling Good", which you've almost certainly heard in Nina Simone's staggering version: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "Feeling Good"] They also wrote the theme to "Goldfinger", with John Barry: [Excerpt: Shirley Bassey, "Goldfinger"] That song was one that Bricusse would use in interviews to demonstrate the almost telepathic rapport that he and Newley had – when Barry played them the beginning of the melody, they both instantly sang, without looking at each other, “wider than a mile”. Barry was unimpressed, and luckily for all concerned the rest of the melody wasn't that similar to “Moon River”, and the song became arguably the definitive Bond theme. But at the same time that Newley was having this kind of popular success, he was also doing oddities like "Moogies Bloogies", a song in which Newley sings about voyeuristically watching women, while Delia Derbyshire backs him with experimental electronic music: [Excerpt: Delia Derbyshire and Anthony Newley, "Moogies Bloogies"] That was recorded in 1966, though it wasn't released until much later. Newley's career was a bizarre one by almost every measure. Possibly the highlight, at least in some senses, was his 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? [Excerpt: "Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?" trailer] On one level, that film is a terrible sex comedy of the kind that the British film industry produced far too much of in the late sixties and seventies, featuring people like Bruce Forsyth and with characters named Hieronymus Merkin, Filligree Fondle, and Polyester Poontang. On the other hand, it's a work of postmodern self-commenting autobiography, with Newley co-writing the script, starring as multiple characters, directing, producing, and writing the music. Roger Ebert said it was the first English-language film to attempt the same things that Fellini and Godard had been attempting, which is not something you'd normally expect of a musical featuring Milton Berle and Joan Collins. The film has at least four different layers of reality to it, including a film within a film within the film, and it features Newley regularly stepping out of character to talk about the problems with the film. It's a film of his midlife crisis, basically, but where Ebert compares it to Fellini and Godard, I'd say it's closer to Head, 200 Motels, or other similarly indulgent rock films of the era, and it deals with a lot of the same concerns -- God and the Devil, sexual freedom, and the nature of film as a narrative medium. All of Newley's career was like that -- a mixture of lowbrow light entertainment and attempts at postmodernist art, both treated by Newley as of equal value, but each being offputting to an audience that might have enjoyed the other. If you want songs and pretty women and dirty jokes, you probably don't want metafictional conversations between the main character of the film and the director, both of whom are the same person. If you want a film that Roger Ebert will compare to Fellini, you probably don't want it to be a musical including a song that starts out as a fairy-tale about a lonely princess named Trampolena Whambang, and ends up with the princess having sex with a donkey: [Excerpt: Heironymus Merkin soundtrack, "Princess Trampolena"] The film also was one of the things that led to Newley's breakup with Collins -- she decided that she didn't like the aspects of his character, and his attitudes towards women, the film revealed -- though Newley claimed until his dying day that while the film was inspired by his own life, it wasn't directly autobiographical. Given that the film's main character, in one sequence, talks about his attraction to underage girls, that's probably for the best. (And Newley did have a deplorable attitude to women generally -- I'm not going into it in detail here, because this podcast is about the work, not the person, but Newley was a thoroughly unpleasant person in many respects.) Hieronymus Merkin was a massive flop, though the critical response to it was far kinder than its reputation suggests. Unfortunately, Joan Collins so detests the film that it's never been available on DVD in the UK, and only sporadically elsewhere -- DVD copies on Amazon currently go for around three hundred pounds. That was, largely, the end of Anthony Newley's career as an auteur. It wasn't, though, the end of his career in songwriting. With Leslie Bricusse he wrote the songs that made up the soundtrack of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory -- songs like "Pure Imagination": [Excerpt: Gene Wilder, "Pure Imagination"] That film also featured "The Candy Man", which became a number one hit in a cover version by Sammy Davis Jr: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr, "The Candy Man"] After that, though, Newley didn't have much more success as a songwriter, but by this point his biggest influence on rock and roll music was already very apparent. David Bowie once said "I never thought I could sing very well, and I used to try on people's voices if they appealed to me. When I was a kid, about fifteen, sixteen, I got into Anthony Newley like crazy, because a couple of things about him -- one, before he came to the States and did the whole Las Vegas thing, he really did bizarre things over here. Now, a television series he did, called the Strange World of Gurney Slade, which was so odd, and off the wall, and I thought, 'I like what this guy's doing, where he's going is really interesting'. And so I started singing songs like him... and so I was writing these really weird Tony Newley type songs, but the lyrics were about, like, lesbians in the army, and cannibals, and paedophiles" If you listen to Bowie's earliest work, it's very, very apparent how much he took from Newley's vocal style in particular: [Excerpt: David Bowie, "Rubber Band"] There is a whole vein of British music that usually gets called "music hall" when bad critics talk about it, even though it owes nothing to the music that was actually performed in actual music halls. But what it does owe a great deal to is the work of Anthony Newley. One can draw a direct line from him through Davy Jones of the Monkees, Bowie, Syd Barrett, Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Blur... even a performer like John Lydon, someone who would seem worlds away from Newley's showbiz sheen, has far more of his influence in his vocal inflections than most would acknowledge. Every time you hear a singer referred to as "quintessentially British", you're probably hearing someone who is either imitating Newley, or imitating someone who was imitating Newley. Newley is one of the most frustrating figures in the history of popular culture. He was someone who had so much natural talent as an actor, singer, songwriter, and playwright, and so many different ideas, that he didn't work hard enough at any of those things to become as great as he could have been -- there are odd moments of genius scattered throughout his work, but very little one can point to and say "that is a work worthy of his talents". His mental and emotional problems caused damage to him and to the people around him, and he spent much of the last half of his career making a living from appearing in Las Vegas and as a regular on Hollywood Squares, and appearing in roles in things like The Garbage Pail Kids Movie -- his last starring role in the cinema. He attempted a comeback in the nineties, appearing with his ex-wife Joan Collins in two Noel Coward adaptations on TV, taking the lead role in the hit musical Scrooge, written by his old partner Bricusse, and getting a regular role in East Enders (one of the two most popular soap operas on British TV), but unfortunately he had to quit the East Enders role as he was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him in 1999, aged sixty-seven. Anyway, if this episode has piqued your interest in Newley, you might want to check out my book on The Strange World of Gurney Slade, which is a TV show that has almost all the best aspects of Newley's work, and which deserves to be regarded as one of the great masterpieces of TV, a series that is equal parts Hancock's Half Hour, The Prisoner, and Waiting for Godot. You can order the book from Obverse Books, at obversebooks.co.uk, and I'll provide a link in the show notes. While you're there, check out some of the other books Obverse have put out -- they've published two more of my books and a couple of my short stories, and many of their writers are both friends of mine and some of the best writers around. I'll be back in a couple of days with the next proper episode.

This is a special extra episode of the podcast, not one of the “proper” five hundred. A book I’ve written, on the TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade, has just become available for pre-order from Obverse Books, so to publicise that I’ve done an extra episode, on the pop music career of its star, Anthony Newley. The next normal episode will be up in a day or two. Transcript below the cut.  Erratum: In a previous version of this episode, I mentioned, in passing, my understanding that Newley was an alcoholic. This has been strongly questioned by some fans, who took offence at the suggestion, and as it was utterly irrelevant to the point I was making I have deleted those three words rather than cause further offence.   —-more—- Welcome to a special bonus episode of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. This is not this week’s normal episode, which will be up in a couple of days, and nor is it the Patreon bonus episode, which will also be up as normal. This is an extra, full-length episode, on a song which didn’t make the list of songs I’m covering. But this week, a book I’ve written has gone on pre-order, and it’ll be out on the first of September. That book is on The Strange World of Gurney Slade, a TV show from the very early 1960s. And the star of that show, Anthony Newley, also had a very successful music career in the late fifties and early sixties — and a career which had a real influence on many people who will be seen in future episodes. So, in order to promote my book, I’m going to talk today about some of Newley’s music. If you’re not interested in anything that isn’t part of my “official” five hundred songs, then you can skip this episode, but I promise that other than a brief mention at the end, this is not going to be an advert for my book, but just another episode, about the music career of one of Britain’s most interesting stars of the pre-Beatles era. So let’s look at “Strawberry Fair” by Anthony Newley: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “Strawberry Fair”] Anthony Newley was someone whose career only came about by what would seem at first to be bad luck. Newley was a child in London during the Blitz, the son of an unmarried mother, which had a great deal of stigma to it in those days. When the Blitz hit, he was evacuated, and felt abandoned by his mother. That sense of abandonment increased when his mother married her new boyfriend and moved to Scotland. And then Newley was moved into a second foster home, this one in Morecambe, Lancashire. His foster father during the war was one George Pescud, a music hall performer about whom I can discover nothing else, except that he instilled in Newley a great love of the theatre and of the arts, and that as a result of this Newley started writing music, painting, writing, and, especially, acting. When the war ended, Newley was fourteen, and didn’t go back to live with his mother and her new husband, choosing instead to move to London and start living an artistic life. He saw an advert in the paper for the Italia Conti stage school, and tried to become a student there. When he found out that he couldn’t afford the fees, he found another way in — he got a job there as an office boy, and his tuition was included in his wages. While there, he became friends with another student, Petula Clark, who would herself go on to stardom with records like “Downtown”. [Excerpt: Petula Clark, “Downtown”] Clark also encouraged him to start singing — something that would definitely pay off for him later. Apparently, Clark had a crush on Newley, but he wasn’t interested in her. While at the school, Newley got cast in a couple of roles in low-budget films, which brought him to the attention of David Lean, who was directing his film adaptation of Oliver Twist, and cast Newley in the role of the Artful Dodger. The film, which featured Alec Guinness, became one of the classics of British cinema, and also starred Diana Dors, with whom Newley started an affair, and who managed to get him a job as a bit player for the Rank Organisation. For the next few years, Newley had small roles in films, started a double act with the comedy writer Dick Vosburgh, had a brief spell in the army (very brief — he was discharged because of his mental health problems), spent a couple of years in rep, shared a flat with Christopher Lee and appeared in a Hammer Horror film — the usual things that low-level actors do as they slowly work their way up to stardom. His most notable appearance was in the West End revue Cranks, which opened in late 1955. A revue, for those who don’t know, is a theatrical show that usually mixes comedy sketches and songs (though the term was, confusingly for our purposes, sometimes also used for a bill with several different musical acts). These were very popular in the fifties and sixties, and Cranks was one of the most popular. After its West End run it transferred to Broadway, and Newley was one of the cast members who appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote it, though the Broadway run of the show was not a success like the British one was. It was in Cranks that Newley’s singing first came to public attention: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “Cold Comfort”] Newley was starting to get substantial film roles, and it was with the film Idol on Parade that Newley became a star, and became drawn into the world of pop music. In that film, the first film written by the prominent British screenwriter John Antrobus, he played a pop star who was drafted into the British army, as all young men were in Britain in the fifties. The film is usually said to have been inspired by Elvis Presley having been called up, though it was likely that it was also influenced by Terry Dene, a British rock and roll star who had recently been drafted, before having a breakdown and being discharged due to ill health, and who had recorded songs like “Candy Floss”: [Excerpt: Terry Dene, “Candy Floss”] Dene’s story must have struck a chord with Newley, who’d had a very similar Army experience, though you couldn’t tell that from the film, which was a typical low-budget British comedy. As Newley was playing a pop singer, obviously he had to sing some songs in the film, and so he recorded five songs, one of which, “I’ve Waited So Long”, was released as a single and went to number three in the charts: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “I’ve Waited So Long”] Somehow, despite Newley being an actor — and someone who despised a lot of rock and roll music — he had become a pop star. He won the Variety Club of Great Britain Award for Most Promising Newcomer of 1959, even though he’d been making films since 1946. “I’ve Waited So Long” was co-written by Jerry Lordan, who wrote “Apache”, and Len Praverman, but two of the other songs in the film were written by Newley and Joe ‘Mr. Piano’ Henderson, and this would soon set Newley on the way to a career as a songwriter — indeed, as the most important singer-songwriter in pre-Beatles British pop music. He had seven UK top ten hits, two of them number ones, in the years from 1959 through 61, and he had a few more minor hits after that. Most of those hits were either cover versions of American hits like Lloyd Price’s “Personality”, or were written for him by people like Lionel Bart. One odd example shows where he would go as a music-maker, though. “Strawberry Fair” is a traditional folk song, which was collected, and presumably bowdlerised, by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould — the lyrics, about a young woman offering a young man the chance to pluck the cherries from her basket, read as innuendo, and Baring-Gould, who wrote “Onward Christian Soldiers”, was well known for toning down the lyrics of the folk songs he collected. Newley rewrote the lyrics under the pseudonym “Nollie Clapton”: [Excerpt: Anthony Newley, “Strawberry Fair”] But Newley was someone who wanted to do *everything*, and did so very well. While he was a pop star, he starred in his own series of TV specials, and then in his own sitcom, The Strange World of Gurney Slade. He starred in the classic British noir film The Small World of Sammy Lee. And he recorded a satirical album with his second wife, Joan Collins, and Peter Sellers, mocking the Government over the Profumo sex scandal: [Excerpt: Fool Britannia, “Twelve Randy Men”] That album went top ten, and was co-written by Newley and Leslie Bricusse. Bricusse would go on to collaborate with Newley in writing a series of songs, mostly for musicals, that everyone knows, though many don’t realise that Newley was involved in them. Newley mostly wrote the music, while Bricusse mostly wrote lyrics, though both did both. Their first major collaboration was on the play Stop The World, I Want To Get Off!, a semi-autobiographical starring vehicle for Newley, which displayed the life of a selfish womaniser called Littlechap, who would regularly stop the action of the play to monologue at the audience in much the same way as Newley’s TV character Gurney Slade. Much of Newley’s work seems to be trying to be three different things at the same time — he seems to want to write self-flagellating autobiography about his own selfish and sometimes misogynistic behaviour — this is a man who would later write a song called “Oh What a Son of a Bitch I Am”, and mean it — while also wanting to create work that is formally extraordinary and involves a lot of metafictional and postmodern elements — *and* at the same time wanting to make all-round family entertainment. For a while, at least, he managed to juggle all three aspects very successfully, and Stop The World, I Want to Get Off! became a massive hit on stage, and was adapted for the cinema once and TV twice. Stop The World introduced two songs that would become standards. “What Kind of Fool Am I?” became a big hit for Sammy Davis Jr, and won the Grammy for “Song of the Year” at the 1963 Grammy Awards: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr., “What Kind of Fool Am I?”] Davis also recorded another song from that show, “Gonna Build a Mountain”, as the B-side, and that too became a standard, recorded by everyone from Matt Monroe to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, “Gonna Build a Mountain”] Newley and Bricusse followed that up with another musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, which again introduced a whole host of famous songs. “Who Can I Turn To?” was the big hit at the time, for Tony Bennett, and has since been performed by everyone from Miles Davis to Barbra Streisand, Dusty Springfield to the Temptations: [Excerpt: Temptations, “Who Can I Turn To?”] But the song from that musical that is now best known is almost certainly “Feeling Good”, which you’ve almost certainly heard in Nina Simone’s staggering version: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Feeling Good”] They also wrote the theme to “Goldfinger”, with John Barry: [Excerpt: Shirley Bassey, “Goldfinger”] That song was one that Bricusse would use in interviews to demonstrate the almost telepathic rapport that he and Newley had – when Barry played them the beginning of the melody, they both instantly sang, without looking at each other, “wider than a mile”. Barry was unimpressed, and luckily for all concerned the rest of the melody wasn’t that similar to “Moon River”, and the song became arguably the definitive Bond theme. But at the same time that Newley was having this kind of popular success, he was also doing oddities like “Moogies Bloogies”, a song in which Newley sings about voyeuristically watching women, while Delia Derbyshire backs him with experimental electronic music: [Excerpt: Delia Derbyshire and Anthony Newley, “Moogies Bloogies”] That was recorded in 1966, though it wasn’t released until much later. Newley’s career was a bizarre one by almost every measure. Possibly the highlight, at least in some senses, was his 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? [Excerpt: “Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” trailer] On one level, that film is a terrible sex comedy of the kind that the British film industry produced far too much of in the late sixties and seventies, featuring people like Bruce Forsyth and with characters named Hieronymus Merkin, Filligree Fondle, and Polyester Poontang. On the other hand, it’s a work of postmodern self-commenting autobiography, with Newley co-writing the script, starring as multiple characters, directing, producing, and writing the music. Roger Ebert said it was the first English-language film to attempt the same things that Fellini and Godard had been attempting, which is not something you’d normally expect of a musical featuring Milton Berle and Joan Collins. The film has at least four different layers of reality to it, including a film within a film within the film, and it features Newley regularly stepping out of character to talk about the problems with the film. It’s a film of his midlife crisis, basically, but where Ebert compares it to Fellini and Godard, I’d say it’s closer to Head, 200 Motels, or other similarly indulgent rock films of the era, and it deals with a lot of the same concerns — God and the Devil, sexual freedom, and the nature of film as a narrative medium. All of Newley’s career was like that — a mixture of lowbrow light entertainment and attempts at postmodernist art, both treated by Newley as of equal value, but each being offputting to an audience that might have enjoyed the other. If you want songs and pretty women and dirty jokes, you probably don’t want metafictional conversations between the main character of the film and the director, both of whom are the same person. If you want a film that Roger Ebert will compare to Fellini, you probably don’t want it to be a musical including a song that starts out as a fairy-tale about a lonely princess named Trampolena Whambang, and ends up with the princess having sex with a donkey: [Excerpt: Heironymus Merkin soundtrack, “Princess Trampolena”] The film also was one of the things that led to Newley’s breakup with Collins — she decided that she didn’t like the aspects of his character, and his attitudes towards women, the film revealed — though Newley claimed until his dying day that while the film was inspired by his own life, it wasn’t directly autobiographical. Given that the film’s main character, in one sequence, talks about his attraction to underage girls, that’s probably for the best. (And Newley did have a deplorable attitude to women generally — I’m not going into it in detail here, because this podcast is about the work, not the person, but Newley was a thoroughly unpleasant person in many respects.) Hieronymus Merkin was a massive flop, though the critical response to it was far kinder than its reputation suggests. Unfortunately, Joan Collins so detests the film that it’s never been available on DVD in the UK, and only sporadically elsewhere — DVD copies on Amazon currently go for around three hundred pounds. That was, largely, the end of Anthony Newley’s career as an auteur. It wasn’t, though, the end of his career in songwriting. With Leslie Bricusse he wrote the songs that made up the soundtrack of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — songs like “Pure Imagination”: [Excerpt: Gene Wilder, “Pure Imagination”] That film also featured “The Candy Man”, which became a number one hit in a cover version by Sammy Davis Jr: [Excerpt: Sammy Davis Jr, “The Candy Man”] After that, though, Newley didn’t have much more success as a songwriter, but by this point his biggest influence on rock and roll music was already very apparent. David Bowie once said “I never thought I could sing very well, and I used to try on people’s voices if they appealed to me. When I was a kid, about fifteen, sixteen, I got into Anthony Newley like crazy, because a couple of things about him — one, before he came to the States and did the whole Las Vegas thing, he really did bizarre things over here. Now, a television series he did, called the Strange World of Gurney Slade, which was so odd, and off the wall, and I thought, ‘I like what this guy’s doing, where he’s going is really interesting’. And so I started singing songs like him… and so I was writing these really weird Tony Newley type songs, but the lyrics were about, like, lesbians in the army, and cannibals, and paedophiles” If you listen to Bowie’s earliest work, it’s very, very apparent how much he took from Newley’s vocal style in particular: [Excerpt: David Bowie, “Rubber Band”] There is a whole vein of British music that usually gets called “music hall” when bad critics talk about it, even though it owes nothing to the music that was actually performed in actual music halls. But what it does owe a great deal to is the work of Anthony Newley. One can draw a direct line from him through Davy Jones of the Monkees, Bowie, Syd Barrett, Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Blur… even a performer like John Lydon, someone who would seem worlds away from Newley’s showbiz sheen, has far more of his influence in his vocal inflections than most would acknowledge. Every time you hear a singer referred to as “quintessentially British”, you’re probably hearing someone who is either imitating Newley, or imitating someone who was imitating Newley. Newley is one of the most frustrating figures in the history of popular culture. He was someone who had so much natural talent as an actor, singer, songwriter, and playwright, and so many different ideas, that he didn’t work hard enough at any of those things to become as great as he could have been — there are odd moments of genius scattered throughout his work, but very little one can point to and say “that is a work worthy of his talents”. His mental and emotional problems caused damage to him and to the people around him, and he spent much of the last half of his career making a living from appearing in Las Vegas and as a regular on Hollywood Squares, and appearing in roles in things like The Garbage Pail Kids Movie — his last starring role in the cinema. He attempted a comeback in the nineties, appearing with his ex-wife Joan Collins in two Noel Coward adaptations on TV, taking the lead role in the hit musical Scrooge, written by his old partner Bricusse, and getting a regular role in East Enders (one of the two most popular soap operas on British TV), but unfortunately he had to quit the East Enders role as he was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him in 1999, aged sixty-seven. Anyway, if this episode has piqued your interest in Newley, you might want to check out my book on The Strange World of Gurney Slade, which is a TV show that has almost all the best aspects of Newley’s work, and which deserves to be regarded as one of the great masterpieces of TV, a series that is equal parts Hancock’s Half Hour, The Prisoner, and Waiting for Godot. You can order the book from Obverse Books, at obversebooks.co.uk, and I’ll provide a link in the show notes. While you’re there, check out some of the other books Obverse have put out — they’ve published two more of my books and a couple of my short stories, and many of their writers are both friends of mine and some of the best writers around. I’ll be back in a couple of days with the next proper episode.

In today’s episode Elaine chats to Scottish actress and photographer Jessica Hardwick. Jess should have been at Pitlochry Theatre then on to The Lyceum Theatre in Barefoot in The Park playing Corie. However, due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and no gatherings of more than 2 people this production has had to be cancelled for the moment. Here is hoping they can remount soon. Jessica graduated from the BA Acting course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Since graduating she went on to win the Billy McColl Award for Most Promising Newcomer in Scottish Stage Acting 2014 and won Best Female performance at the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland 2018. Theatre work includes: Numerous productions with The Citizens Theatre, Tron Theatre, Traverse Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, Perth Theatre and Edinburgh International Festival. She has worked extensively with National Theatre of Scotland, most recently playing Roxane, In Cyrano De Bergerac and Prudencia Hart in The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, which toured all across the US and transferred to New York. Helen in Meet me at Dawn at the Arcola. Radio work includes: A Christmas Compass: East, When the Pips Stop, The Vital Spark: Intelligence, Reachers Point, Brothers, McLevy and The Pillow Book (all for BBC Radio 4). She also played one of the leads in the BBC Radio 4 six-part series The Fair Intellectual Club by comedian Lucy Porter. She recently recorded the audio book version of Canongate Books Salt on Your Tongue by Charlotte Runcie, which is now available on Audible. https://www.jesshardwickphotography.com/ For those of you struggling financially just now remember we have started a Go Fund Me Wan Mair Tune Fund to help Scottish creatives. Head to persistentandnasty@gmail.com and ask for a bread and butter form. Or if you can help by donating please follow the link below. Big Love, Elaine, Louise and Misha https://www.gofundme.com/f/wan-mair-tune-fund-coronavirus-scottish-artists?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link-tip&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&fbclid=IwAR3hXCySZF-eCLe2Kx1_T59CLkD56CIa-5y6xOdG7WDJWDUaaJ1gLA0MDlc You can support Persistent & Nasty and receive exclusive members only content by subscribing to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/persistentandnasty To check in with our Nasty Action Plan and see what we're doing to keep busy & positive check in on social media: Twitter: @PersistentNasty Instagram: @PersistentandNasty Persistent and Nasty is produced in association with Edinburgh based live-arts production house Civil Disobedience. Civil Disobedience is committed to creating and supporting queer work and theatre and art that addresses issues of inequality and injustice. You can find out more about the Persistent and Nasty project and all the work that Civil Disobedience do by visiting wearecivildisobedience.com. You can also find us on all the usual social media platforms. On Twitter @weareohsocivil On Instagram @wearecivildisobedience And on Facebook at Facebook.com/wearecivildisobedience

Singer/Actor/Dancer, Kaylee Harwood is joining the conversation on this weeks episode of Cue To Cue! I am so glad I was able to grab Kaylee for an interview while she was in Toronto this month for a short stop on the North American a tour of Beautiful : Beautiful: The Carole King Musical! Kaylee brings a wonderful combination of playfulness, wisdom, and spontaneity to our conversation about the creative lifestyle, art, and love! We also share an admiration for the movie Waiting For Guffman so it was pretty much game on from there!   In this episode! the skillset one needs to hone in order to be a successful swing in a touring production why it is important in having a mentor to seek what they sought and not what they have learning patience can be the biggest gift you can give to your artist self how she finally found freedom in auditioning while living in New York If she could change on element about the entertainment industry what that would be   Born in London, Ontario and raised near Vancouver, Kaylee Harwood has worked in Theatre across North America from Broadway and Radio City Music Hall to the Stratford and Shaw Festivals. Kaylee’s skills and interests lie in new play and musical development, coaching, choreography, classical voice and dance, yoga, gardening and solo travel. Her appearance as Cosette in Les Misérables at the Arts Club won her the 2010 Sam Payne Award for Most Promising Newcomer at the Jessie Awards in Vancouver, and she revived the role in 2015 opposite her partner Sayer Roberts. She made her way east to the Festivals by way of Chemainus Theatre Festival, Western Canada Theatre, Citadel Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse and Rainbow Stage. Toronto appearances include world premieres at the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, Musical Stage Company and Theatre20, the latter of which featured her in the Dora-nominated Bloodless. Television credits include Reign (CW), Good Witch (Hallmark) and Workin’ Moms (CBC) and she is currently on tour as a swing with Beautiful: The Carole King Musical across the US and Canada. Kaylee has trained with Action Theatre Berlin, various voice/movement/Alexander instructors at the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, world-renowned voice teachers at Canada’s National Voice Intensive in Vancouver and Fitzmaurice Voice Technique, in addition to her degree in Theatre from Trinity Western University and her personal yoga practice. Her favourite book in the world is Franny & Zooey and even though she gives her copies away all the time, she always buys a new (used) copy to have close. She is currently obsessed with singer/songwriter Maggie Rogers and would love nothing more than to be/be best friends with Kate Winslet.  Share Kaylee's episode! www.thisischelseajohnson.com/133 Follow Kaylee! I: @kaylee.harwood T: @kayleeharwood Donate to Kaylee's causes! https://www.dandelioninitiative.ca/donate-index-impact https://broadwaycares.org/donation-options-page/ https://afchelps.thankyou4caring.org/donate

ISABELLE HUPPERT is a multi-award winning screen and stage actress. Throughout her career Isabelle Huppert has worked with many French and international directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Maurice Pialat, Patrice Chéreau, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, the Taviani brothers, David O’Russell, Marco Ferreri, Michael Cimino, Harl Hartley, Neil Jordan, Hong Sang Soo and more. Awards won include: a BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Feature Films for her work in The Lacemaker, two Venice Film Festival Best Actress Awards for Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women and The Ceremony, Venice Film Festival’s Special Jury Lion d’Or for her performance in Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle and for her entire body of work; two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Awards for Claude Chabrol’s Violette and for Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher; in France she received the César (Best Actress Award) for Claude Chabrol’s The Ceremony and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle – a film for which she also received a Gotham Award, a Golden Globe and a Spirit Award in addition to being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She received a Molière Award for her career (honoring achievements in French theater; equivalent to the Tony Awards); and the prestigious “XVI Prix Europe pour le Théâtre” in Rome. Isabelle Huppert has also pursued her theatrical career in France and internationally, including BAM (4:48 Psychosis, Quartet, and Phaedra). She has acted under the direction of Bob Wilson (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Heiner Müller’s Quartet), Peter Zadek (Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), Claude Régy (Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis), and Howard Davies (Friedrich von Schiller’s Mary Stuart). TRIP CULLMAN (Director). Broadway: Choir Boy, Lobby Hero, Six Degrees of Separation, Significant Other. Select off Broadway: I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard (Atlantic); Days of Rage, The Layover, Lonely I’m Not, The Substance of Fire, Some Men, Bachelorette, Swimming in the Shallows (Second Stage); Punk Rock (Obie Award), Yen, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Gynecologic Oncology Unit At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Of New York City (MCC); Significant Other (Roundabout); Choir Boy, Murder Ballad (MTC); A Small Fire (Drama Desk nom.), Assistance, The Drunken City (Playwrights Horizons); The Hallway Trilogy: Nursing, The Last Sunday in June (Rattlestick); Dog Sees God (Century Center); Roulette (EST); US Drag(stageFARM); and several productions with The Play Company. London: The Colby Sisters of Pittsburgh, PA (Tricycle). Select regional: Geffen, Alliance, Old Globe, South Coast Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, Bay Street, Williamstown Theater Festival.

Michael Berkeley talks to the actress Frances Barber about the music and friendships that have inspired her throughout her career. From Cleopatra at the Globe Theatre to the evil Madame Kovarian in Dr Who, from Peter Greenaway to Inspector Morse, and from Chekhov at the Royal Shakespeare Company to playing a seductive barrister in TV's Silk, Frances Barber is one of our most versatile actors. From the moment she won the Olivier Award for the Most Promising Newcomer, her hugely diverse career has spanned theatre, television and film - and every genre from comedy, sci-fi, kitchen sink drama, to theatrical classics and Hollywood. Frances tells Michael how she discovered classical music by working her way through the records in her local library when she was setting out on her acting career; she chooses Chopin to remind her of that time. In a funny and revealing interview, Frances talks about the music that's been part of her work, including Michael Nyman's soundtrack to A Zed and Two Noughts and songs by Brecht and the Pet Shop Boys. And she chooses music that reminds her of people she's loved, including Schubert for her close friend Alan Rickman. Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.

The Total Tutor Neil Haley will interview Freddie Highmore Star of The Bates Motel on A&E. "Bates Motel"  season finale  ..Monday May 16th at 9/8CT on A&E Freddie Highmore stars as Norman Bates in A&E's Bates Motel series.   He also starred in 2005 as Charlie in the movie Charlie in the Chocolate Factory He doesn't care if he plays an innocent little chocoholic kid OR a psycho kliler  as long as he's the star of the project  …bio below Freddie Highmore stars as Norman Bates in "Bates Motel" on A&E, produced by Universal Television. While still a young child, Freddie Highmore established himself as a leading talent in the film world. Previously Empire Award's Most Promising Newcomer, Highmore is a double SAG nominee and was winner of the Film Critics Award for the world's Best Young Actor two years running. Having shot “Two Brothers,” directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, “Women Talking Dirty” with Helena Bonham Carter and “Five Children and It” with Kenneth Branagh, Highmore came to prominence as Peter in the Oscar-nominated “Finding Neverland.” His co-star Kate Winslet described him as simply the best young actor she had ever seen. Johnny Depp was so impressed that he pushed for Highmore to star opposite him again in Tim Burton's “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” After appearing alongside Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott's “A Good Year,” Highmore went on to play the title role in Luc Besson's “Arthur and the Invisibles” trilogy, where he became fluent in French.  

Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth Interview with Renowned Actor & Director, Robby BensonAbout Harvey's guest:Today's guest, Robby Benson, is a popular and beloved show business veteran who has literally done it all from the time he was a child star. He's an actor, director, writer, composer, lyricist, educator, filmmaker and best selling author. On Broadway, he appeared in “Zelda”, “The Rothschilds” and “The Pirates of Penzance”.  In the movies, you've seen him in “Jeremy”, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. He also starred in “Lucky Lady”, “Ode to Billy Joe”, “One on One”, which he also wrote, “Ice Castles”, “Tribute”, “The Chosen”, “Running Brave”, “Modern Love”, which he also wrote and directed, and many more. And of course, he's been immortalized as the voice of “Beast” in the Disney blockbuster Oscar-winning movie, “Beauty and the Beast”.   On television, he's appeared in dozens of shows, movies and miniseries including “Death Be Not Proud”, “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln”, “The Death of Richie”, “Our Town”, “Two of a Kind”, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, “Homewrecker”, “Precious Victims”, “American Dreams”, “Brave New World”, “A Feeling of Home”, and most recently, he can be seen in Season 2 of the popular Apple TV hit series, “Severance”. Our guest has also directed over a hundred episodes of top 10 TV shows including “Ellen”, “Friends”, “Dharma & Greg”, “The Naked Truth”, “Sabrina The Teenage Witch”, “Evening Shade” and “Dream On”, for which he was nominated for a Cable Ace Award for Best Director of a Comedy Series. As a composer, he's written many movie scores, and together with his wife, the brilliant music superstar Karla DeVito, he co-wrote the hit song “We are Not Alone” from the movie, “The Breakfast Club”, AND the wonderful song “Nobody Makes Me Crazy” recorded by Diana Ross on her “Swept Away” album. Our guest also wrote the libretto and composed the music for the critically acclaimed musical, “Open Heart”.  Our guest is also an award-winning professor of filmmaking, having taught at The University of Utah, the University of South Carolina and NYU. And if all of that weren't enough, he's written TWO best selling books – a novel entitled, “Who Stole The Funny?”, and a highly compelling and very poignant memoir entitled, “I'm Not Dead Yet”, which chronicles not only his amazing career, but his miraculous journey as a survivor of FOUR open heart surgeries. For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/To learn more about Robby Benson, go to:http://www.robbybenson.com/https://www.facebook.com/robinbenson.eeeooo/https://www.instagram.com/realrobbybensonhttps://twitter.com/Robby_Bensonhttps://www.youtube.com/c/RobbyBensoneohttps://open.spotify.com/artist/3QcGV278a6mmLRTOK29WBPhttps://music.apple.com/us/artist/robby-benson@harveybrownstone,#harveybrownstone,@harveybrownstoneinterviews,#harveybrownstoneinterviews,#robbybenson,@robbybenson,#robinbenson.eeeooo,@robinbenson.eeeooo,@realrobbybenson,#Jeremy,#LuckyLady,#OdetoBillyJoe,#OneonOne,#IceCastles,#Tribute,#TheChosen,#RunningBrave,#BeautyandtheBeast,#DeathBeNotProud,#TheLastofMrsLincoln,#TheDeathofRichie,#OurTown,#TwoofaKind,#AmericanDreams,#BraveNewWorld,#AFeelingofHome,#Ellen,#Friends,#I'mNotDeadYet,#heartdisease,#heartsurgery,#TheGodfather2,#JackLemmon,#GeorgeBurns,#BurtReynolds,#EllenDeGeneris,#JohnRitterAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy