The Blood Countess review – Isabelle Huppert reigns supreme in a surreal vampire fantasia

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Vienna turns into a playground of camp, cruelty and aristocratic disdain in a blackly comic take on the Báthory legend – with Huppert gloriously suited to the title role From the dark heart of central Europe comes a midnight-movie romp through the moonlit urban glades of Euro-goth and camp from German director Ulrike Ottinger. As for the star … well, it’s the part she was born to play. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Elizabeth Báthory, 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, legendary for having the blood of hundreds of young girls on her hands and indeed her body, in an attempt to attain eternal youth. The “blood countess” has been variously played in the past by Ingrid Pitt, Delphine Seyrig, Paloma Picasso, Julie Delpy and many more, but surely none were as qualified as Huppert who importantly does not modify her habitual hauteur one iota for the role. Her natural aristocratic mien and cool hint of elegant contempt were never so well matched with a part. She gives us the ...
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‘I said goodbye to Heath Ledger at this urinal’: a stroll round Terry Gilliam’s pivotal places

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The studio where he crashed the Life of Brian spaceship, the stage where he put on a Faust that caused fights, the pub where he last spoke to Heath Ledger … the ex-Python takes a hilarious and evocative stroll down memory lane

Down an alley in Covent Garden, on a building that was once a banana warehouse, there is a blue plaque. “Monty Python, Film Maker, Lived Here, 1976-1987,” reads the inscription. It’s easy to miss: the plaque is not at eye level as they normally are, but up on the first floor, almost as if the blue plaque committee lost confidence in their uncharacteristic joke. Or perhaps John Cleese put it up.

Terry Gilliam arrives. I like his jacket. It looks like it’s been stitched together from bits of blankets. “Me too,” he says. “I got it 30 years ago in a secondhand store in New York.” We’re going to wander around London, revisiting places that have played significant parts in his career, as he approaches his 85th birthday.

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