Stockard Channing: ‘I cried at the election of Joe Biden, thinking we were out of the woods. Wrong!’

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The actor on being told she was no Ingrid Bergman, forgetting her lines on stage, and not caring about getting older Born in New York City, Stockard Channing, 82, played Rizzo in the 1978 film Grease. In 1985, she received a Tony for her performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and in 1994 was Oscar-nominated for her role in the film Six Degrees of Separation. She has three Emmys for her TV work, which includes The West Wing. She makes her directorial debut at the Edinburgh festival with Krapp’s Last Tape, in aid of the Wembley to Soweto Foundation, Upstairs at the Roxy until 31 August. Her latest film is Practical Magic 2. She lives in London. What is your greatest fear? Climate change. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/tU3oZP1 via IFTTT
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‘It’s like Game of Thrones!’ The return of India’s ancient superhero fantasy epic

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In the 1980s, Peter Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata enchanted audiences on stage and screen. As Brook’s son presents a restored print at the Venice film festival, he and his team discuss the work’s extraordinary journey

When Antonin Stahly was nine years old, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see a production of the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, which translates loosely as “the great story of mankind”. More than 20 actors from 16 countries performed on a stage steeped in red earth and scarred by a water-filled trench; fire also played a leading role. Directed by Peter Brook, whom the RSC founder Peter Hall called “the greatest innovator of his generation”, and adapted by Luis Buñuel’s former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, this spectacular Mahabharata weighed in at nine hours, plus intervals. Even at that length, it represented a massive compression of its source text, which runs to 1.8m words. Brook and Carrière’s version has been likened to summarising the Bible in 40 minutes.

Audiences could devour The Mahabharata in three parts over successive evenings or as an all-day weekend marathon; in some outdoor venues, such as the limestone quarry in Avignon where the production premiered in 1985, it began at dusk and climaxed just as the dawn sun lit up the sky. Stahly saw it in a single noon-to-midnight sitting. “It was like a superhero fantasy,” he says, still sounding awestruck. “It had Bhima, the strongest man on Earth, and Bhishma, who has the power to live for ever. Arjuna was the best warrior. And then there were all the gods. It was amazing for me, because I’m half Indian, but I wasn’t brought up in an Indian context.”

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