Still blazing after all these years: Mel Brooks at 100

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The director of The Producers hits his century as a uniquely beloved entertainer who embodies his conviction that ‘comedy is the opposite of death’ Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart : “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.” In his youth, Brooks’ preferred method of making a noise was playing the drums and he was actually taught the instrument by Buddy Rich. Neither could possibly have known at the time t...
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What a sad loss – Tom Wilkinson was quietly and consistently wonderful

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From The Full Monty to In the Bedroom, Michael Clayton to Eternal Sunshine, the actor – who has died aged 75 – was an intelligent and unshowy delight

For British movie audiences of a certain generation, there is one image of Tom Wilkinson that will always sum up his hold on our hearts: a paunchy, respectable bloke in a dole queue, wearing an anorak over his collar and tie, with a bunch of other depressed but much younger and scruffier males, shyly, almost unconsciously, practising some swaying erotic dance moves to the accompaniment of Donna Summer’s Hot Stuff.

He played the upright, uptight Gerald in the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty, an ex-supervisor at a Sheffield steel mill who got laid off like the blue-collar workers under him but, unlike them, he initially tries concealing his humiliating unemployment from his wife. But Gerald swallows his pride and joins the bizarre male striptease troupe of blokes whose manhood was once deeply bound up with their role as breadwinners, and who are now symbolically reduced to earning a few pounds revealing this same reduced manhood at the climax of a horribly unsexy dance routine. It was a gloriously tender, funny, sweet-natured and lovable performance from Wilkinson: he was the authority figure, the teacher/boss/dad character who had to get off his high horse and admit that he was as lonely and unhappy and need of help as everyone else. It was a part that Wilkinson instinctively knew how to play by showing the vulnerability within the grumpiness.

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