Category: Kristine Hughes

Nanny McPhee's Triumphant Return

This past weekend, I went to see Nanny McPhee and I can tell all you NMc fans that her Return was as good as the original. And, this time out, Nanny has even more screen time. The new cast of characters are a hoot, especially Eros Vlahos as cousin Cyril. Vlahos plays him as a sort of miniature, self important prig who delivers sarcastic verbal barbs with Oscar Wilde-like precision.  This kid deserves an Oscar nod.

Of course, Maggie Smith is wonderful as the dotty Mrs. Docherty, and the piglets steal the show.

This time out, Nanny’s got a window putty eating crow, Mr. Edelweiss.

One of the funniest scenes in the first film was when Nanny tells Colin Firth that she’s a “government nanny” who has been sent to his aid. He seems to accept this, then sits down to read his paper and after a few beats looks up and says, “A government nanny?!” This time out, Nanny McPhee passes herself off as an “army nanny.” That’s all I’m going to say, as I don’t want to spoil the film for all of you who will be flocking to see it. Suffice it to say that my husband, who was a decidedly reluctant companion going in to the theater, found himself shedding a tear or two at its conclusion.

“When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay.
When you want me, but no longer need me, I must go.”

I'm a Big, Fat London Pig

My withdrawal from London was quite acute back in late July, when I found myself browsing the internet for flight deals back to the Old Smoke. Bear in mind that this was just a scant month since my whirlwind London/Waterloo tour with Victoria. However, the symptoms were all there – daydreams of walking down Piccadilly, a nostalgic longing for a pint and a proper serving of bangers and mash, the almost constant urge to throw up my arm and hail a black cab. At odd moments I’d hear a voice in my head urging me to “Mind the gap. Please mind the gap.” Aaarrrggghhh!

And then I found it – Continental Airlines, Newark to London Heathrow . . . . . $345. What!? Okay, that was each way, but still, seven hundred round trip was a bargain. It was at that moment that a small, cheeky devil appeared at my left shoulder. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill devil dressed in a red suit, with a pointed tail and holding a pitch fork. Oh, no. This devil was dressed in Regency garb and holding a snuff box. He looked uncannily like Beau Brummell.
“Press that button, my dear. The one that says “Buy Now.”

“Don’t be silly. I can’t. I just went to London. My planning another trip to England would be nothing short of greed in piggy proportions.”
“I’ve never found anything wrong with greed, myself.”
“Ha! And look where it got you.”
The devil sniffed. “Be that as it may, I still maintain that you should push that button. Go on,” he cajoled, “push it now.”

“Stop it!”
“You know,” he began, his voice a blend of honey and warm oil, “you could take your husband with you this time. After all, you’ve already been to London twice since you’ve known him. Really, is that fair? I believe he deserves to see the City. . . . you’d be doing it for him.”
This was a novel way of looking at the situation. A very Lucy Ricardo way of looking at it, I might add. He had my attention.

“And,” the devil continued, “you could schedule the trip around Christmas. It could be your Yuletide present to him. In fact, your wedding anniversary is in September, is it not? You could make it a joint anniversary and Christmas gift. Only consider how much more thrifty that would make the expenditure.”
Thrifty? Hhmmm. My husband would like thrifty.
“Push the button.”
“Look, pushing that button is a big deal. I’d be committing myself, and my poor unwitting husband, to a trip to London.”

“Oh, poor dear! London. Such a sacrifice.” The imp removed a miniscule amount of snuff from his tiny snuff box and inhaled it. Once he’d stopped sneezing – into my left ear – he continued. “Push the button. Do it for your mother.”
“My mother? What’s she got to do with it?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, you’re hopeless at greed justification, aren’t you? It’s a good thing for you I deigned to show up and help you with this. Look, if you go to London, you’ll have to fly out of one of the major New York airports. Yes? Or perhaps a nearby major airport. Say . . . Newark?”

“Right,” I allowed.
“And who lives but a scant few miles from Newark airport, hmmmm?”
“My mother.”

“Got it in one! So . . . you back out your departure date and instead fly into Newark a few days before Christmas. You spend the holidays with your mother and daughter, thus making their holidays joyous whilst removing the onus of their having to travel down to you for the festivities, as they usually do. You, my dear, kill three birds with one English stone. You make your mother, daughter and your husband all happy beyond their wildest dreams. In effect, you wouldn’t be going to London for your own greedy delight in the least. Instead, you’d be going in order to make them happy. And, you and your husband would be in London for New Year’s Eve. Whilst still being thrifty, of course.”
My mouth hung open. Why hadn’t I thought of this? It was nothing short of brilliant.

“Do you really think so?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I do. Truly. Push the button.”
Reader, I pushed the button. And just like Lucy Ricardo, I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut until my anniversary. I’ve already told my husband who, thank the Lord, is thrilled to bits, which means that the only fireworks we’ll be encountering will be those over the River Thames on New Year’s Eve.
Oink, oink.

Do You Know About Doc Martin – Series Four?

In a prior “Do You Know About? post, we introduced you to a television series called Doc Martin – surly, tactless, self-centered, Doc Martin’s reception room is never-the-less crowded since he’s the only doctor in Portwenn, Cornwall. We wanted to let you know that Series 4 of Doc Martin is now available in a two disk set. Hurray!

The action picks up a few months after the wedding day disaster, when Doc Martin and the pretty school teacher Louisa realized, literally at the last moment, that neither could go through with the ceremony. Dr. Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes, Men Behaving Badly) is even grumpier and ruder than before. His former fiancée, Louisa (Caroline Catz, Murder in Suburbia), has left the village to avoid embarrassment. The doctor himself plans to return to London as a surgeon – if he can conquer his fear of blood. Even a pin prick’s worth of the red stuff makes him gag.

Matters quickly become complicated when Louisa moves back with startling news.

Meanwhile, Martin’s old flame, Edith Montgomery (Lia Williams), takes a job at the local hospital and sets her sights on the doc. Sparks and rumors fly as patients crowd his office: a shouting oil rigger, the inept local constable, a woman who sees her dead husband’s ghost, and a man who eats his own hair.

Through it all, Doc Martin is gruff, impatient and abrupt. Hard to believe that Doc Martin could be so attractive to two women, no less, as well as to the stray dogs who continually try to get into his surgery.

Actor Martin Clunes had this to say about his return to the set:
“As I drove back to the location there was a sense of anticipation of being back there. We have been able to rent the same house just along the coast from Port Isaac where we have always stayed. The views from the house along the coast are stunning. It took a little while to get back into the character and into the rhythm of single camera acting. Suddenly you realise it is sort of a second skin and it just lovely being back. The doc’s sharp suits and severe haircut help me to get back into character. But it is his trademark curmudgeonly approach to his patients which is the key to playing the role again.”

Stephanie Cole returns as Aunt Joan . . .

Ian McNeice is back as restauranteur Bert Large . . . .

and Katherine Parkinson reprises her role as the often lethargic and slightly looney receptionist, Pauline.

Having just watched this Series, I can tell you that the show is just as funny, the characters just as endearing and the plotlines just as engaging as the first three seasons.

Watch a clip from Espisode 1 of Series 4 here.

Don’t tell anyone, but a 5th Series has been commissioned, but won’t begin filming until 2011.

War Horse

Acquired by Dream Works Pictures, Michael Morpurgo’s novel of the same name takes place during World War I and charts the extraordinary friendship between a boy and a horse who are separated but whose fates continue to intertwine over the course of WWI. The touching novel was made into a play by the same name, which has won the Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle awards and has been a huge hit on the London stage over the past three years, and is set to transfer to Broadway next year. Currently playing at the New London Theatre until October 2011, it is notable for its innovative use of giant puppets to depict the horses.

When DreamWorks Pictures first optioned the book, Spielberg immediately came on to produce and eventually decided to direct the picture. The cast will include Oscar-nominated actress Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Benedict Cumberbatch and theatre actor Jeremy Irvine in the lead role. The film will also feature German actor David Kross, who co-starred in The Reader.

Spielberg said he knew from the minute he read the book that he wanted DreamWorks to make the film. “Its heart and its message provide a story that can be felt in every country,” he said. He will direct off a script by  Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) and Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”). DreamWorks will release War Horse to theaters on August 10, 2011.

In addition, Spielberg is producing the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” also for Paramount, and his own studio’s “Cowboys and Aliens,” which began shooting this summer.

Margaret Rutherford – A Truly Dramatic Life

Victoria’s post on Sir Alec Guiness prompted me to recall how much I’d always enjoyed the great character actress Margaret Rutherford and to do a bit of research. What I discovered was downright hair raising. Margaret was the only child of William Rutherford Benn and his wife, the former Florence Nicholson.

Wikipedia tells us that Rutherford’s father suffered from mental illness and had a nervous breakdown on his honeymoon, afterward being confined to an asylum. He was eventually released on holiday and on 4 March 1883 he murdered his father, Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamberpot. Shortly afterward, William tried to kill himself as well, by slashing his throat with a pocketknife. William Benn was confined to the Broadmoor Aslyum for the Criminally Insane and was released several years later, reportedly cured. He changed his surname to Rutherford (no wonder!) and returned to his wife. The parents then moved to India with the infant Margaret, but the drama continued unabated – her mother committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree, three year old Margaret was sent back to Britain to live with an aunt, professional governess Bessie Nicholson, in Wimbledon and her father’s continued mental illness resulted in his being confined once more to Broadmoor in 1904; he died in 1921.

The intervening years must have been relatively peaceful, as Margaret eventually managed to secure a place at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, although she didn’t make her stage debut at the Old Vic until 1925 at the age of thirty-three.

She married the openly homosexual actor Stringer Davis in 1945 and they appeared in many productions together (right). They were happily together until Rutherford’s death in 1972. Davis absolutely adored Margaret, one friend noting: ‘For him she was not only a great talent but, above all, a beauty.’ Dubbed by bitchy colleagues as ‘String-along’, he rarely left her side. He was private secretary and general dogsbody, lugging bags, teapots, hot water bottles, teddy bears and nursing Margaret through her ‘bad spells’. These manic depressive episodes – often involving mental hospitals and electrotherapy – were hushed up.

As if their lives didn’t contain enough drama, in the 1950s, Rutherford and Davis adopted the writer Gordon Langley Hall, then in his twenties. Hall later had gender reassignment surgery and became Dawn Langley Simmons, under which name she wrote a biography of Rutherford in 1983. Hall was born at Sissinghurst, the estate of the writer Vita Sackville-West, in Heathfield, Sussex, England, and was the illegitimate child of Jack Copper, Sackville-West’s chauffeur (a grandfather was Rudyard Kipling’s gardener) and Marjorie Hall Ticehurst, who came, Hall always said, from a high social class. Hall said she was born with an adrenal abnormality that causes the female genitalia to resemble a man’s and was thus raised as a boy. She always maintained that she was — unequivocally — female. In 1950 she emigrated to the U.S. and in 1968, she underwent the sex change operation and the next year married her 22-year-old black butler, John-Paul Simmons. The publisher of ”Dawn: A Charleston Legend” was quoted as calling it the first documented interracial marriage in Charleston’s history. A bomb threat forced the couple to move the wedding from a Baptist church to the bride’s home, and the gifts were destroyed by a firebomb.

In England, Miss Rutherford was reported to have said, ”I am delighted that Gordon has become a woman, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of another race, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of a lower station, but I understand the man is a Baptist!”

Ironically, Dawn did a bit of acting herself – she became an extra in the ABC/Warner Bros miniseries North and South while visiting Charleston in 1985.

Margaret Rutherford and her daughter, Dawn

But back to Margaret herself – Rutherford made her first appearance in London’s West End theatres in 1933 but her talent was not recognised by the critics until her performance as Miss Prism in the play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1939). In summer 1941, Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” opened on the London stage, with Coward himself directing. Rutherford played Madame Arcati, the fake psychic in a role in which Coward had earlier envisaged for her and which he then especially shaped. It would be Rutherford’s turn as Madame Arcati in David Lean’s ‘Blithe Spirit’ (1945) that would actually establish her screen success. This would become one of her most memorable performances, with her bicycling about the Kentish countryside, cape fluttering behind her. Interestingly it would also establish the model for portraying that pseudo-soothsayer forever thereafter and there have been about six remakes of the film.

Some of Margaret’s finest screen work was done when she was in her fifties. She was superb as Nurse Carey in Miranda (1948) and completely believable in the role of Professor Hatton Jones in Passport to Pimlico (1949). More success followed as she starred along Alistir Sim in ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’ (1950). Then came along the role that she was so destined for, that of Miss Letitia Prism in Anthony Asquiths ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1952). Incredibly, despite a whole string of very capable and distinguished performances – she had still not won a single film honour. More comic characters followed including Prudence Croquet in ‘An Alligator Named Daisy’ (1955).

Rutherford then played Mrs. Fazackalee in Basil Deardens ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’ (1957) with such notables as Virginia McKenna, Peter Sellers and Leslie Phillips. For much of the 60’s she become synonymous with Miss Jane Marple, making four Marple based films with a comedy bent that must have won Christie’s approval, as in 1962 Agatha Christie dedicated her novel The Mirror Crack’d: “To Margaret Rutherford in admiration.” Margaret was awarded an OBE for services to stage and screen in 1961 and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe for The VIPs (1963), as the absent-minded Duchess of Brighton, opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. She also played Mistress Quickly in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight in 1966 and was raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1967.

Margaret suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at the end of her life. Sir John Gielgud wrote: “Her last appearance at the Haymarket Theatre with Sir Ralph Richardson in The Rivals, an engagement which she was finally obliged to give up after a few weeks, was a most poignant struggle against her obviously failing powers.” She died in 1972. Britain’s top actors flocked to the funeral, where 90-year old Dame Sybil Thorndike praised her friend’s enormous talent and recalled that she “never said anything horrid about anyone.”

You can watch a video tribute to Margaret Rutherford here.