Louise Lasser, star of cult sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Woody Allen comedies, dies aged 87

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The 1970s soap parody made a household name of Lasser, who was also known for her collaborations with ex-husband Allen and later films including Requiem for a Dream Louise Lasser, star of cult 70s sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and early films by Woody Allen (to whom she was married for four years), has died aged 87. The New York Times reported she died “at home in Manhattan” . Lasser’s role as a satirically conceived housewife in suburban Ohio in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, designed as a parody of daytime soap operas, made her a national star, landing her on the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone. The series lasted a year and a half, between January 1976 and July 1977, but due to its five-days-a-week schedule squeezed more than 300 episodes out of its two season run. Lasser’s Hartman, with her signature pigtails, was preoccupied with domestic minutiae but found herself in unsettling and disturbing situations, including bizarre deaths. The show was intended to explore the ch...
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Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent emperor in thrilling biopic

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Ridley Scott dispenses with the symbolic weight attached to previous biopics in favour of a spectacle with a great star at its centre

Many directors have tried following Napoleon where the paths of glory lead, and maybe it is only defiant defeat that is really glorious. But Ridley Scott – the Wellington of cinema – has created an outrageously enjoyable cavalry charge of a movie, a full-tilt biopic of two and a half hours in which Scott doesn’t allow his troops to get bogged down mid-gallop in the muddy terrain of either fact or metaphysical significance, the tactical issues that have defeated other film-makers.

Scott cheekily imagines Napoleon firing on the pyramids in the Egyptian campaign as well as witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette (but not the humiliation of Louis XVI by the Tuileries mob, which he might actually have seen). Out of deference moreover, Scott and his screenwriter David Scarpa suppress all mention of Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery into the French colonies. But above all, there’s a deliciously insinuating portrayal of the doomed emperor from Joaquin Phoenix, whose derisive face suits the framing of a bicorne hat and jaunty tricolour cockade. Phoenix plays Napoleon as a military genius and lounge lizard peacock who is incidentally no slouch on horseback. Others might show Napoleon as a dreamy loner, but for Scott he is one half of a rackety power couple: passionately, despairingly in love with Vanessa Kirby’s pragmatically sensual Josephine. Scott makes this warring pair the Burton and Taylor of imperial France.

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