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Private Notes
Zoë Wanamaker remembers the 1982 BBC adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play, Baal, in which she appeared with David Bowie.
In 1964, a young Steven Berkoff was cast in one of his earliest screen roles, as a junior player in Hamlet in Elsinore, a BBC co-production with Danish television. Shot in Denmark by director Philip Saville, it starred Christopher Plummer as Hamlet and Michael Caine, in his only Shakespeare role, as Horatio. Here, Berkoff shares his memories of the production and how he got involved, gives his verdict on how the film stands up today, and describes - as only he can - the excitement and inspiration he felt from watching Plummer and Caine at work.
Award-winning director and screenwriter Sir Richard Eyre looks back on his 2018 production of King Lear, which garnered huge critical acclaim upon its release and drew together a stellar cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Emily Watson, Jim Broadbent and the then up-and-coming talent of Florence Pugh.
Eyre looks back on the challenges he faced when directing such a multitude of star names and the pressures that a screenwriter takes on when choosing to adapt one of the greatest stage plays of all time to the big screen.
Dame Sian Phillips looks back on Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and her own experiences with the various adaptions that have brought perhaps the world’s most celebrated ‘play for voices’ to cinema and television audiences.
She recalls the BBC’s 2014 version that brought together a huge range of Welsh talent, including Tom Jones, Matthew Rhys, Charlotte Church, Michael Sheen and Katherine Jenkins. She also looks further back, sharing the story of her encounters with Dylan Thomas and her part in the 1972 film, which saw her working alongside the great Richard Burton, his wife Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband Peter O’Toole.
Claire Bloom introduces a rare screening of the BBC’s 1961 adaptation of Anna Karenina, in which she delivers one of her own personal favourite performances, playing Tolstoy’s tragic heroine.
Claire recalls the challenges involved in bringing 'the world’s greatest novel' to the small screen, assesses how successfully the drama captured Anna’s tale and shares her memories of acting opposite a relatively unknown co-star called Sean Connery, who was cast as Anna’s charismatic lover, Vronsky, not long before James Bond turned him into an international superstar.
National treasure Miriam Margolyes looks back on her role in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of one of the much-loved jewels of 20th-century British literature, Stella Gibbons’s 1930s comic classic, Cold Comfort Farm.
Directed by John Schlesinger, who won an Oscar for Midnight Cowboy, the drama brought together an impressive ensemble cast that included Ian McKellen, Eileen Atkins, Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry and two up-and-coming stars, Kate Beckinsale and Rufus Sewell.
Having only watched the drama for the first time recently, Miriam delivers a typically forthright assessment on how she thinks it turned out, critiques the performances of her fellow cast members and shares some fond memories of the overall filming experience.
First transmitted in 1971, Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, talks to writer Wilfred De'Ath about her life from her Cornish clifftop home. In her first television interview, the cameras follow du Maurier as she walks through her house and its grounds, recalling key events from her life and revealing memorabilia from her famous theatrical family. She also reflects on the inspirations and influences that shaped her writing and shares archived manuscripts of some of her famous works.
