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Jun 21 12 5:49 PM
THE voices of some of Britain's best-known actors and writers will resound around a ruined castle in Northumberland this summer for a cultural event linked to the London Olympics.
The Peace Camp project at Dunstanburgh Castle will see love poetry suggested by members of the public performed over a specially-commissioned music soundtrack from dusk to dawn on July 19-22.
Actors Anne-Marie Duff, Jane Horrocks, Alun Armstrong and Jonathan Pryce will be among those reading poems, along with poets Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion and novelist Edna O’Brien.
The project has been put together by director Deborah Warner and actress Fiona Shaw, best-known as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films.
They appealed to the public to submit love poems to be read out at eight coastal locations around the British Isles, including Dunstanburgh. Among those submitting poems were people who visited Barter Books in Alnwick to meet Fiona Shaw.
The project is inspired by the little known tradition of the Olympic truce, when the United Nations calls on all warring nations to lay down their arms for the duration of the Olympic Games.
Ms Shaw said: “These islands have a strong tradition of poetry, of capturing human experiences with words.
“In moments of true love or painful parting, all that’s unimportant falls away and language is laid bare. We quote poets in times of need, borrowing their fragments of feelings.”
As well as Dunstanburgh, the project will take place at Cemaes Bay in Anglesey, White Park Bay on the North Antrim Coast, Mussenden Temple and Downhill Beach in Northern Ireland, Cliff Beach on the Isle of Lewis, Fort Fiddes in Aberdeenshire, Cuckmere Haven in Sussex and Godrevy in Cornwall.
Arts company Artichoke, which put on the Lumiere festival in Durham is staging the event. A schools project will run alongside Peace Camp designed to engage young people in the discussions about the poetic language of love.
In Northumberland, artists Bethan Maddocks and Verity Quinn and poet Ira Lightman, are working with pupils at the Duchess’s Community High School in Alnwick to make a poetry-filled tent installation to go on display in London.
For more on Peace Camp see Culture magazine, free in Tuesday's Journal.
Posts: 459
Aug 6 12 5:49 AM
Aug 6 12 8:21 AM
Aug 15 12 2:59 AM
Anne-Marie Duff plays a hairdresser who bravely defies gangsters on a housing estate in Jimmy McGovern’s hard-hitting series. Here, the former Shameless star discusses her episode.
Is this the kind of drama that makes you think, ‘What would I do in this situation?’Well, that’s the point – in a way – of the whole series. You get to see people who you either empathise or identify with, or people that you know very little about, but you are still forced to examine what it is to be in their shoes. That’s why Jimmy is such a clever writer.
He does create fantastic dilemmas, doesn’t he?Oh God, yes, but he’s lucky with Accused, because they’re co-written [he worked with playwright Carol Cullington on Anne-Marie’s episode]. They’ve come up with scenarios he might not have investigated.
Have you worked with Jimmy before?No, I haven’t actually. I was so in awe when I met him at the read-through. He’s just someone who I’ve grown up with. There are not many writers of his ilk about. Well, I’m sure there are, but they’re not regularly commissioned. So as an actor you’re very lucky to work them. Writers and musicians – they’re always the people I get most star-struck around.
Your co-star is Twenty Twelve and Rev. actress Olivia Colman. How did you create your on-screen friendship?Luckily, we bonded quite quickly. We immediately had a good rapport, and we didn’t have to work at it too much. The schedule was very tight, but it just meant that we had to work very quickly together, which forces you to engage.
When you’re dealing with such a sad story, is there quite a sombre atmosphere on set?I’m not so sure. It just depends. Each set is very different, because every director is very different. Some sets are terribly quiet and serious, and some directors have more raucous sets, and that’s also defined by the kind of story you’re telling, weirdly.
David Blair is an amazing director, and he takes every moment very seriously, but we also had good giggle. I think that’s kind of a necessity when you’re telling serious stories, otherwise it can become too ponderous. It’s important that you keep it lively and keep the energy up.
You married your former Shameless co-star James McAvoy in 2006, but he has since become a Hollywood star. What’s it been like witnessing that?Dude, I’m just married to the man I’m married to. And that’s who I have in the house. I don’t have anyone else in the house.
When you’re relaxing at home, do you discuss your work? Or do you tend not talk about it?I think if you had two doctors in the house, they’d talk shop, so it’s inevitable. But ultimately, you choose a job because the writing is amazing or the director is interesting – you know, those kinds of things govern my decisions for work. So I’m lucky.
BBC1, Tuesday It's been changed to air 21 AugDavid Collins
And here she is in a scene from Parade's End with Stephen Graham
More pics: http://www.radiotimes.com...res#.UCFhPk8UjfA.twitter
Aug 22 12 5:53 PM
By Jane Shilling
7:00AM BST 21 Aug 2012
As a shy, bookish teenager growing up in the Eighties in the west London suburb of Hayes, Anne-Marie Duff was a voracious reader, devouring novels, drama and biographies of great actors, including Ellen Terry and Eleanora Duse.
“I was obsessed with a version of acting that hadn’t existed for a very long time,” she says. “I would read stories about how [Terry] could recite the alphabet and bring people to tears, and I thought that was magical. It was so other, and so interesting, and it had nothing to do with the grey breeze-block council estate on which I grew up.”
Duff’s family was close. Her Irish parents encouraged their daughter’s passion for books and theatre. But her childhood memories are also of a community in turmoil: “There were riots in Southall and a lot of racism, homophobia and all kinds of snobbery.”
Her latest television role, in Accused, the second series of Jimmy McGovern’s courtroom dramas for BBC One, finds her back on a troubled council estate where she plays Mo Murray, a single mother whose determination to stand up to the gang culture that is terrorising her community ends in appalling personal tragedy.
Duff plays Mo with an absence of histrionics that is unbearably poignant. The worse her situation, the stiller she becomes. At the very end of the drama, when all hope is gone and her best friend, Sue (Olivia Colman), subjects her to a wrenching emotional harangue, Duff stands mutely absorbing the rage and accusation, scarcely moving, yet managing to convey a mixture of love, misery, regret and anguish that scorches the camera lens.
Duff’s passionate belief in the power of storytelling resonates with particular force in Mo’s tragedy, for which McGovern’s co-writer, Carol Cullington, drew on her own experience as the mother of a young man sentenced to a lengthy jail term.
Duff has often found herself playing women either literally or metaphorically on trial. “It’s not necessarily that I seek individuals in conflict,” she says. “Good characters generally find themselves on trial one way or another, don’t they?
Last year she played Alma Rattenbury, a woman charged with the murder of her husband, in Thea Sharrock’s production of Terence Rattigan’s Cause Célèbre at the Old Vic. In 2007 she gave an award-winning performance in the title role of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the National Theatre.
The list goes on and on – not least because the longest she has been out of work since leaving drama school was for eight months, after playing Elizabeth I in the BBC’s 2005 miniseries The Virgin Queen.
It was this role – together with her appearance as Fiona, the beleaguered eldest Gallagher daughter in Channel 4’s Shameless – which won her the sort of celebrity that is a mixed blessing.
“You have to protect yourself,” she says. “As time goes by, you learn how to keep your blinkers on and focus on the work.”
Duff is 41, but has the kind of mutable beauty that could be any age, depending on the character she is playing. The camera makes the planes of her face seem sharper than they are in life, while the changeling mixture of strength and vulnerability that lends her performances such troubling depth is discernible as a fierce reserve beneath her down-to-earth charm.
She has been married for almost six years to fellow actor James McAvoy, whom she met on the set of Shameless. “Actors are good fun to be around,” she says, laughing, “so why not have one in your house? And a good-looking one at that. It’s very nice.”
Two years ago they had a son: “The experience of having a child does crack you wide open,” she says. “I felt like I suddenly had to rebuild the skin that I’d grown over the years, before having a child. Perhaps that might be quite interesting in terms of acting.”
Duff’s current roles include Edith Duchemin in Tom Stoppard’s BBC Two dramatisation of Ford Madox Ford’s novel Parade's End, where she joined a stellar cast, including Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall (see page 4). “She’s highly strung and a bit like a pedigree racehorse who could go off at any minute,” she says of her character. “Very different from anything I’ve done before.”
Then in October she takes the title role of Berenice at the Donmar Warehouse in a new adaptation of Racine’s play by the Booker Prize-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst.
When she was younger, Duff devoured Dickens and DH Lawrence and dreamt of being a writer: “And I still think that if I could ever have done that, then I’d have achieved something in my life. It’s the greatest of the arts. But it’s awfully lonely.”
Her head, she says, is full of unwritten novels. “But I self-censor, and think everything is terrible. You have to get beyond that.”
In the meantime, although she complains that “it’s daft that there are fewer parts for women as you grow older”, her career shows no sign of losing pace. She talks warily about having been “insanely lucky”.
“I just would like to keep going. If I kept getting the kind of work that I’ve been getting for the last 20 years for the next 20, I’d be a bloody Dame of the British Empire. I’d be so happy.
“It’s a privilege to do what I do for a living – to take people out of their miserable day, or to educate somebody, or make somebody laugh, or fall in love with an idea. How good is that? And I get paid to do it!”
Accused continues on BBC One on Tuesday 21 August at 9.00pm
I think you can watch Accused via iPlayer.
And Parade's End starts airing this Friday the 24th at 9 p.m. on BBC 2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00xnjcl
Aug 23 12 2:55 AM
Aug 28 12 11:35 PM
Posts: 376
Sep 22 12 8:40 PM
Here's another great AM interview:
Anne-Marie Duff By Cathy GalvinShe has made a career playing strong but vulnerable women. Now, Anne-Marie Duff prepares to take on Racine’s BereniceAnne-Marie Duff may fill an auditorium, but don’t expect her to fill a room. Pale to the point of transparency, she’s sitting opposite me, slight, self-deprecating and contriving to hide behind a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps.
Duff – she doesn’t have a damehood yet, but just give it a few years – would chew razor blades rather than tell you she is any more than ordinary. But this is a quantum kind of ordinariness in which a girl can grow up on a council estate in west London one day and play George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the National Theatre the next. Can arrive on our TV screens as the formidable Gallagher daughter, Fiona, in Paul Abbott’s breakthrough comedy-drama Shameless and, in a breath, appear as Elizabeth I in the BBC mini-series, The Virgin Queen.
The crisps have gone now and she’s started on the fizzy drink and a ham sandwich. She’s insisting none of her achievements has changed her: “I get the train and the Tube to work every morning. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m not 25 and been plucked out of obscurity to play the lead in a Hollywood blockbuster. I’ve been working away for years and it’s been an old-fashioned trajectory. It’s not so impressive really.”
That quiet centeredness is rooted in her working-class origins: her Irish parents coming to live in London in the 1960s. There was an emphasis on hard work and education at home. She is also deceptively tough. Just off our screens as the adulterous Edith Duchemin in BBC Two’s Parade’s End, her current challenge is to bring Jean Racine’s heroine Berenice to life at the Donmar Warehouse.
This 17th-century play is a love story in which the heroine waits for her younger lover, the next Roman emperor Titus, to marry her. Rome has other ideas. What follows is an unexpectedly honest exploration of passion, interpreted with powerfully simple lyricism by the novelist Alan Hollinghurst.
Duff is in her element. If there’s a thread running through her film, television and stage work, it’s her ability to express strength within vulnerability: “She [Berenice] is not an ingénue, which makes things very interesting. It’s not a rites of passage play, she’s a woman at the start of the play as she is a woman at the end. The role is not one of a victim but of a woman prepared to see love in the context of what’s right, rather than right for her.”
So love is, in the end, a deal? “Yes, that’s true and therefore it’s a play about choices: what you choose to do with love and responsibility and power.”
Her own choices have ensured both success and respect: “I’d always dreamt of doing a certain kind of work, and pretty much it’s happened. That’s not being disingenuous. I’ve been choosy a couple of times and said no to things that weren’t really my cup of tea, but I’ve been in a very fortunate position where I haven’t been out of work for three years with bills to pay.” That’s surely not accidental? “Well, we all know there’s no such thing as an accident. I’ve always been very grateful for stuff, and that maybe comes from learning that you should be grateful. I don’t look over my shoulder very much at what everybody else has.”
I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m not 25 and been plucked out of obscurity to play the lead in a Hollywood blockbuster
Are her parents proud of her? “Yeah, I’m sure but then they’re proud of me because I’m happy in what I do. As a parent myself, the idea that your offspring would feel fulfilled and happy, that is beyond your wildest dreams, you know?” She has one child, a boy aged two. No moaning from her about juggling work and home – “You just run a lot!” she laughs – and she’s vehement in her attacks on any form of dilettantism. “You have to really love being an actor, not the idea of being an actor. There’s a great thing [the Russian theatre director and actor] Stanislavski says about having to love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art, and that is what I would say. Don’t do it for the rewards or the acclaim because none of that is guaranteed or means anything. You can’t equate that with happiness,” she says.
“It is a very interesting time. There’s this weird dichotomy where we all feel we are entitled to whatever we want. And then at the same time because of the political climate, we also live in a world where we define people by where they come from.”
Has she been aware of a class glass ceiling? “Well, you mustn’t see one, I suppose. I read this great quote that Lennie James said about being a black actor, and it feels kind of the same. ‘You want to talk to me about the glass ceiling, f*** off. That’s not my conversation. Have that conversation with all the people who don’t cast black actors.'Berenice was, historically, 12 years older than her lover. Duff, at 41, is eight years older than her husband, the Scottish actor James McAvoy. Ageing is on her mind. She’s aware that there are fewer roles for female actors in middle-age but determined not to let that hold her back. Nothing else has. “You just have to take each day as it comes and tell your own tale.”
And if she was forced to take a long break? “The house would be full of baked goods. And little manuscripts.” The bookish Duff has written plays and novels, but they remain hidden away. Writing, she feels, “would be the ultimate achievement, but I self-censor too much and I think the thing is to get beyond that”.
Would she have more children? Silence. She’s also silent on the subject of her husband. They fell in love on the set of Shameless when they were both unknown. He has since had dizzying success in Hollywood, recently playing Charles Xavier in X-Men. She has both the thrill of a younger man and the horror of having to watch him snog Angelina Jolie in Wanted and Keira Knightley in Atonement.
Hollywood, she claims, isn’t an issue. Their understanding of the business and their backgrounds bring them together: “It’s like a big, warm shawl that feels like a safe place to be. We have a very Celtic house. We go up to Scotland a lot, and we were in Ireland last summer, which was great.”
Discipline in work and at home resonates with her: “The path of being a parent is to give a shit about your kids, which a lot of people don’t seem to. It’s important to discipline a child. It’s important because actually what you are doing is communicating the care. It’s very frustrating when you see lazy parenting and you think, that’s part of everything that’s going wrong. Where were all the parents of those 14-year-olds who were involved in the riots? I come from a very working-class family and there’s no way they would have allowed that to happen. Come home with something that had been stolen? Never.”
That uncompromising power will be used to full force in Berenice: “She has strength and dignity, huge passion and pride. It’s very muscular. It’s exhausting actually because great love is knackering. In this play there’s no subtext, there are never any masks. It’s the kind of role you fantasise about as an actor but at the same time, you have to summon it up. You have to fill yourself with the sea and then spray the ocean on to the stage – which is quite extraordinary. But if we can pull it off, it will really be worth it.
“The play will be very resonant for the audience. It’s about sacrifice, which we are not used to because we live in a world where we say, ‘well, I deserve to be happy’ as opposed to saying, ‘well, what does happiness mean in a greater sense? What would be the right thing to do?’”
A big lesson for our times? “Sometimes it feels like that.”
She acknowledges the world has become a harder place to find work and fulfilment: “There’s a lack of specifics and perhaps that’s why people can’t define the ladder they want to climb.” Do you still see that ladder? “I see it when I look at Penelope Wilson. I see it when I look at Judi Dench. Yes, of course I do. Because it’s not just about getting somewhere, it’s about finding something too.”
‘Berenice’ is at The Donmar Warehouse from September 27.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f8f6a70a-01f1-11e2-81ba-00144feabdc0.html#axzz27E1E8G33
ETA: And here's how you can order tix to see AM in Berenice: http://www.atgtickets.com...-warehouse/#overview_tab
edited to add missing sentence :-)
Sep 29 12 2:39 AM
'The most important lesson life has taught me? Never trust a man who doesn't like Elvis'
Rosanna Greenstreet
The Guardian, Friday 28 September 2012 17.59 EDT
Anne-Marie Duff, 41, was born in London. She was cast as Fiona in the original series of Channel 4's Shameless in 2004, and has since played Elizabeth 1 and Margot Fonteyn, and appeared in the recent BBC series Parade's End. Her films include The Magdalene Sisters, and Nowhere Boy. In 2007, she played Saint Joan at the National Theatre, a role that won her Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards for best actress. She is currently in Berenice at the Donmar. She is married to the actor James McAvoy, and has a son.
What is your greatest fear? Losing the people I love most. That and swings – it's a pathetic phobia.
What is your earliest memory?The colour yellow, sunshine and a dinner table.
Which living person do you most admire and why?All the Paralympic athletes.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?I can be paralysed by worry.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?Hypocrisy.
What was your most embarrassing moment?Passing out during a sex-ed video at school.
What is your most treasured possession?A good immune system.
What would your super power be?International Peacekeeper Girl, for which, of course, I'd also need to fly.
What makes you unhappy?Abuse and maltreatment of children.
If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?Lyons Corner Houses.
What is your favourite smell?The nook of a neck.
What is your favourite word?"Nowhere" – it's beautifully duplicitous.
Who would play you in the film of your life?An Aardman creation.
What is your most unappealing habit? Gnawing at my fingers.
Is it better to give or to receive?Depends on what, where and with whom.
To whom would you most like to say sorry and why?To my friends – since becoming a mother, I'm bloody awful at keeping in touch.
What or who is the greatest love of your life?My two housemates.
What does love feel like?Like having all your fuses untripped.
Have you ever said 'I love you' and not meant it?Only after someone has shouted "action".
Who would you invite to your dream dinner party? Hemingway, Presley, Sammy Davis Jr – come on, what girl wouldn't?
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?"Now… where were we?"
What is the worst job you've done?Working in a staff canteen in a huge office on the Strand. I had a big spot and they forced me to wear a blue plaster in my face. Oh the dignity.
If you could go back in time, where would you go?Fifties Soho: frothy coffee, jazz, rock'n'roll and boys with quiffs.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?Never trust a man who doesn't like Elvis.
Tell us a jokeQ: Who was the first person to wear a shell suit? A: Humpty Dumpty.
Tell us a secret I'm a big fan of The Archers. Très uncool. My husband thinks it's hilarious.
Posts: 352
Sep 29 12 1:01 PM
Helen M wrote: What or who is the greatest love of your life?My two housemates.
Sep 30 12 6:22 AM
Oct 3 12 6:48 AM
Donmar Warehouse, London
Michael BillingtonTuesday 2 October 2012
Racine in English? It always poses a problem, but we're getting steadily better at it. And director Josie Rourke and translator Alan Hollinghurst come up with a radical solution to this 1670 tragedy: they treat the characters as real people rather than vehicles for oratory. The intimacy of the space adds to the impression that we are eavesdropping on a human drama, rather than a costumed poetry recital.
The play itself is unusual: a story of renunciation that ends in tears rather than blood. The situation is that Titus, on becoming emperor of Rome, is obliged to banish his beloved Berenice because she is both a foreigner and a queen. The key question is whether Titus has the courage to confront his lover with the decision.
But Racine adds a further complication in that Antiochus, Titus's friend, is in love with Berenice himself. What makes the play moving is that, instead of taking the familiar escape-route of death, the characters face up to eternal separation and the hell of a loveless existence.
The great danger is that the play becomes a study in suffocating nobility. But Hollinghurst's translation, swapping Racine's rhyming alexandrine couplets for blank verse, avoids that by rendering the play in clear, simple language. He even, reversing the French word-order, allows Berenice to end her final speech of self-sacrifice on a preposition.
And it's a measure of the humanity of both this version and Rourke's production that we are allowed the occasional laugh. When Antiochus indulges in the delusion that the rejected Berenice will turn to him, his confidant's cry of "What can go wrong?" encourages an ironic chuckle.
Anne-Marie Duff, as you'd expect from her earthy stage Saint Joan or her appearance in TV's Shameless, strips Berenice of fluting grandeur. Sporting a strapless red gown, she presents us with a woman palpably in love. Her instinctive reaction to Titus is to shoot him a warm smile and to wrap him in her arms. When she realises her fate, her love turns to understandable fury as she asks why he hadn't warned her earlier: "Did you not know your laws when I declared myself for the first time?" And even the final scene of separation is prefaced by a sad, weary sigh. Instead of blistering rhetoric, Duff gives us recognisable human emotion.
Stephen Campbell Moore takes the same approach to Titus, he presents us with a man who, however weak and vacillating, knows he is ultimately trapped by the obligations of empire.
Dominic Rowan also plays Antiochus as a good man living in a world of illusion and Nigel Cooke as Titus's sidekick embodies the inflexible Roman virtues. I was, admittedly, a bit puzzled by Lucy Osborne's design, which, with its sand-filled surface and a winding staircase apparently made of chairs, suggested we were in for a mix of Beckett and Ionesco. But one soon learns to adjust to it, and the evening, as a whole, is quietly compelling. It certainly breathes what Racine called "that majestic sadness which is the whole pleasure of tragedy". But the real secret is that it reminds us that even Racine's elevated characters suffer like the rest of us.
Oct 4 12 3:56 PM
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Oct 26 12 4:46 AM
Dominic Monaghan, Lesley Manville and Emily Watson had been announced previously for "Moon" and Raffey Cassidy will star as Molly. Christopher N. Rowley ("Bonneville") directs with Georgia Byng, Lawrence Elman and Ileen Maisel producing.
Pic is an adaptation of Byng's fantasy novel about an orphan who learns the art of hypnosis. The script was penned by Rowley and Byng with a polish by Chris Hurford and Tom Butterworth.
Production began Thursday in London for a seven-week shoot.
"Moon" is financed through equity and U.K. tax credits. Camela Galano's Speranza 13 banner will be selling territories at the American Film Market.
"Harry Potter" producer David Heyman acquired feature rights to the first book a decade ago, but that option lapsed, and New Line considered the property five years later. Former New Line exec Maisel began discussing the film project with Byng a few years ago before acquring the rights.
Oct 26 12 5:00 AM
Dec 17 12 2:37 AM
'Closed Circuit' set for August domestic releaseThriller stars Eric Bana, Rebecca HallBy Dave McNaryFocus Features has dated John Crowley's international thriller "Closed Circuit" for an Aug. 28 domestic release. Story centers on two ex-lovers, played by Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall, finding their loyalties tested and their lives at risk when they are joined together on the defense team in a terrorism trial.Steve Knight ("Eastern Promises") penned the script. Cast includes Riz Ahmed, Jim Broadbent, Kenneth Cranham, Anne-Marie Duff, Ciaran Hinds and Julia Stiles."Circuit" is the only wide release set for Aug. 28.
Story centers on two ex-lovers, played by Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall, finding their loyalties tested and their lives at risk when they are joined together on the defense team in a terrorism trial.
Steve Knight ("Eastern Promises") penned the script. Cast includes Riz Ahmed, Jim Broadbent, Kenneth Cranham, Anne-Marie Duff, Ciaran Hinds and Julia Stiles.
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