by Helenistic | You Tube / Wikipedia | November 6, 1996
The Fragile Heart is a BAFTA award-winning British medical drama television series created by Paula Milne and first aired on Channel 4 from 6 to 20 November 1996. The series was nominated for the Royal Television Society award for Best Drama Serial.
by Matt Wolf | February 11, 1996 | Variety
Marcel Carne’s great 1945 film “Les Enfants du Paradis” is a hymn to actors, to the luxuriant power of art, and to France itself, whose spirit — the film was made during the German Occupation — remains as unvanquished as that of the simultaneously pervasive and elusive Garance, the courtesan who best embodies it. Simon Callow’s stage adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company is about a revolve, and a creaky one at that. Ten minutes in, and your heart sinks. Four hours later, you revolve out of the theater, dizzy and happy to get some air.
Robin Don’s calamitous turntable design is perhaps the most obvious failing of an enterprise that seems noble and foolish in equal measure. Callow is by no means the first to see in Jacques Prevert’s script the possibility of a stage epic, and what better troupe to attempt such a task than the RSC, which proved undaunted by heftier sources; Dickens and Hugo? In our time of abased emotion, why not restore to the theater the heightened sentiment that “Les Enfants” celebrates, folded into a narrative often compared to “Gone With the Wind”?
Continue reading Les Enfants Du Paradis at the Barbican – Review
PRINCIPAL CAST: Tom Chadbon (Duncan); Ewen Cummins (Banquo); Lennie James (Macbeth); John Keegan (Macduff); Helen McCrory (Lady Macbeth).
This production ran from 20 October – 18 November 1995.
“Nicholas Kent’s production of a play that could hardly be better suited to the Tricycle’s intimate auditorium is pacy and racy but patchily acted….Christine Marfleet’s set of curved, beaten metal panels that gleam in the firelight suggest both the distant path but also some future state, and a canny use of percussion adds to the atmosphere….But too many of the actors are ill at ease with the verse. Not so Helen McCrory’s Lady Macbeth, whose performance is in a different league to the rest – passionate, focused and artfully spoken. A great classical career beckons.” ~ Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 1 November 1995
by Karl Francis | Vimeo | September 15, 1995
Bob Flynn, writing for the Irish Times about the 49th Edinburgh Film Festival in 1995, thought Streetlife was the discovery of the festival fortnight, and marked “the triumphant renaissance” of Francis as a “devastating writer and director.” The film received a special runner-up from the Michael Powell Jury.
It also won the Silver Nymph Award at the 1995 Monte Carlo TV Festival, and two BAFTA Cymru Awards in 1997. One for best director and the other for Helen McCrory for Best Actress.
by Derek Elley | September 4, 1995 | Variety
Tough, funny, moving and totally truthful, “Streetlife” is a sock slice-of-life low-budgeter from the Ken Loach school of working-class drama. Motored by superbly nuanced playing from National Theatre actress Helen McCrory, as a gutsy single mom forced to deal with an inconvenient pregnancy, this BBC Wales telepic deserves wide exposure at Brit-friendly festivals in addition to its small-screen airings. It’s among the best work Welsh-born Karl Francis has done.
Setting is the town of Pontypridd, in the no-nonsense Rhondda Valley region of southern Wales, where Jo (McCrory) works in an all-femme sweatshop ironing clothes. Her life is raw but good: She has a perpetually horny married lover, Kevin (Rhys Ifans), and a young daughter; is studying to improve herself; and has managed to move away from her slobby father (John Pierce Jones) into her own place on a state housing estate.