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Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Salutes the Best of American Fashion at Intimate New York Public Library Event

Swarovski Sole Sponsor of Awards

NEW YORK, June 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Monday night the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) announced the winners and special honorees for the 2002 CFDA Fashion Awards, which was sponsored by Swarovski. Narciso Rodriguez was named Womenswear Designer of the Year, Marc Jacobs for Marc Jacobs was named Menswear Designer of the Year, and Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche was named Accessory Designer of the Year. California-based Rick Owens was declared winner of the Perry Ellis Award for emerging talent, Vogue creative director Grace Coddington and Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld were each honored with Lifetime Achievement awards, style maven C.Z. Guest was honored as a Fashion Icon, Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme received the International Award, New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn received the Eugenia Sheppard Award for Fashion Journalism, Harper's Bazaar creative director Stephan Gan received the Creative Visionary Award, and Bloomingdale's fashion director Kal Ruttenstein was honored with the Eleanor Lambert Award for his unique contribution to the world of fashion.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020605/NYW026-a
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020605/NYW026-b
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020605/NYW026-c
http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020605/NYW026-d )

I just got a call from Ticketmaster to say that all performances of PL are cancelled after Sept.1, So I quickly went to Ticketmaster.com and was able to find seats for 8/25 since I cannot attend 9/1. Sorry, I wish this was a joke :0(
lLinda
NJ USA - Thursday, June 27, 2002 at 14:32:17

	June 26, 2002

Here in Toronto we have a little festival of British movies each summer. I have just received the schedule. 'The Search for John Gissing' is to be shown on Sat. July 20th at 7 p.m. gail.rayment@sympatico.ca
Gail <In the body of the message to foil spammers.foo>
Toronto, Canada - Wednesday, June 26, 2002 at 05:46:40 (PDT)

This transcript has not been checked against videotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to accuracy of speakers and spelling of names. (DSM, TW)

CHARLIE ROSE Transcript #3221

June 7, 2002

CR: Alan Rickman is here.

He began career on stage in London. He came to Hollywood to star opposite Bruce Willis in Die Hard. With that film and most recently Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, he has redefined the bad guy, the villain. The New Republic once said, "His villains have exposed a comic side on the edge of menace."

He is currently playing Elyot Chase in Private Lives on Broadway. The production just won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. It is Rickman's first leading role in a comedy.

Here is a look at that performance.

[excerpt from "Private Lives"]

I am pleased to have him at this table for the first time.

Welcome.

ALAN RICKMAN, Actor: Nice to be here. Thank you.

CR: Tell me where you think Private Lives is in the great spectrum of romantic comedies. I mean, is it near the top?

AR: Well, there was a point in rehearsals when we were trying to, you know, build some sort of shape or some structure that would help us to get through the evening because it is an incredibly demanding piece to do. And I said, "Well, the--It's like three plays in one. The first act is like playing a restoration comedy. The second act is like moving swiftly to Chekhov. And then the third act is Phaedo."

And the fact that Noel Coward pulls all three of those rhythms and identities all--puts it pretty high--[crosstalk]

CR: Pretty high.

Yeah. And he wrote it, like, in three or four days.

AR: I think it was fast, yeah, which is staggering.

CR: That's pretty fast, wouldn't you say?

And it's staggering if it has all the elements you say, you know, from there to Chekhov to--

AR: It's a masterpiece, really.

I mean, I wasn't sure--we all came to it very innocently. I'd only ever seen it once before. Lindsay--I don't know had ever seen it. And Howard Davies actually, when he was asked to direct it, turned it down and just said, "Oh, I don't want to direct Noel Coward."

And I wasn't sure that I'd ever wanted to be in a Noel Coward. And the smart producers actually said to him, "Have you--have you ever read it?"

And he said, "Well, no, I haven't read it."

"We suggest you read it."

CR: Yes. [crosstalk]

AR: He read it. And he then he basically discovered a new play that he fell in love with. And, in a way, that's where we've all--

You know, that's the point at which we came to it.

CR: When you he "discovered a new play"--

AR: To himself.

CR: To himself.

Yeah. A new--in other words, was, in fact, a new play because he had never read it before? Or a new play in context of everything else that had ever been done with Private Lives?

AR: That, too.

Because I think inasmuch as I know what people have written about this production they've called it "revelatory" because we take the play very much at face value. There is no kind-of holding up of too many cocktail glasses and brittle speech-rhythms.

CR: Yeah, yeah.

AR: It's taken at its face value.

And then you discover that this is a writer of great wisdom and compassion and melancholy.

CR: And wit.

AR: Unbelievable wit, but interestingly enough--and this is why Howard's such a good director--the more that--the more serious Lindsay and I were in rehearsals, the more he laughed.

And so that became the identity of the production.

CR: Yeah.

Help me understand why it's so different from other productions--or what's--you know, what is revealing about this interpretation.

AR: Well, I hope that in this production you care about Amanda, really.

One of the problems you have with a play is that these people do absolutely nothing for a living, so it's hard to sympathize with their dilemmas.

CR: Exactly. They are--

AR: I hope that what we found are their vulnerable spots. And so you actually care about them a bit more this time.

CR: And what's his vulnerable spot?

AR: Well, as she says, that she always knows what he's thinking. And so she's always three steps ahead of him. And that's incredibly frustrating.

And it's a joy as a grown man to play another grown man who's actually about 11 years old.

CR: Yeah?

AR: So, you're playing a little boy.

CR: Why is that a joy?

AR: It's fairly releasing.

CR: Oh, yeah.

So, you can find the child in yourself in order to play the child in him.

AR: Yeah. And to discover that the child in yourself has never really gone away and is only sitting there waiting to be relocated.

CR: Maybe one of the worst things about maturation is that will kill the child within us so much.

Do you? I mean, in terms of hope. In terms of--in terms of everything. In terms of optimism. In terms of--I mean, life wears too many people down.

AR: I think that's true. And people--You know, there's a lot of pressure to have some kind of public image--

CR: Yeah.

AR: --in whatever your job is. And I think that is one of the great things about being an actor is that it's at your peril do you lose touch with the child in you.

CR: You almost have to almost have to be in touch with everything that's part of you to be a great actor, don't you? I mean, that's part of the genius of the best is that they are in touch with all of their feelings, emotions, experiences--

AR: [crosstalk] available to you, yeah. Hopefully, physically [unintelligible] every emotion and things that you don't even know about.

And very much your innocence.

CR: Now, is that learned thing? Or is that somehow intuitive and there?

AR: I think it's both. It's like--It's learned in the sense that I'm a great believer in training for actors. And so, when you go to drama school--if you're fortunate enough to have great teachers, and I was--there's a painful process where they take you apart before putting you back together.

And I was very nervous about training 'cause I thought, "Oh, it's just a sausage factory."

CR: Yeah.

AR: "And they'll turn me out like everybody else.

But that's not it. They actually--the acquisition of something called "technique" is really something that there to serve your imagination and to get rid of your bad habits which get in the way of making your own, unique, imaginative response to a text and connect to an audience.

CR: I find this fascinating. And I know that some will to say that to talk about process is boring and understanding is boring, too. Not for me.

Two things about it. Number one, is that I always thought it'd be great for most of us who love theater, film, performance to have some understanding, more understanding than we do, of the actors' craft, you know, in terms of what it means and how difficult--

Then you can appreciate it more. Like most things, the more you appreciate them, the more you enjoy them, I think. On the other hand, I don't know whether you want to place yourself there.

Do you have any thoughts on that? Whether you want to place yourself, you know, within the actor's skin, in terms of technique and you're just simply better off letting it wash over you?

AR: It's very difficult for me as an actor go to the theater and let go--

CR: Yeah.

AR: --as a member of an audience because I know what's happening--or often, not, actually.

CR: For the lesser of them.

AR: Yeah.

So, in many ways, what I'm interested in is the innocence of the response and the handing-over. You know, I think actors are--and should be--the servants of the writer.

Do you know? We're a channel, and our job is to be the most efficient channel between a piece of writing and an audience so that there is this thing called a "shared experience." And there's the actors. There's the audience and the players in the middle and all of the story.

And it's about telling a story. And what's the joy of this production of Private Lives is feeling the audience starting out at the beginning of the evening as "yeah, here we are on Broadway" and the laughter is sort of sophisticated in its tone and appreciative of Noel Coward.

As the evening goes on becomes more animal. You can feel the laughter coming from--

CR: More about instinct.

AR: Yeah, and about men and women. And you can feel the laughter being connected to elbows being dug into the ribs of the person next to them.

CR: As a reflection of whatever their experience is--

AR: Exactly.

CR: Personal experience. Yeah.

Take a look at this. This is--am I saying that right? Elyot?

AR: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

CR: And Amanda, played by Lindsay Duncan. It's where they reunite.

Here it is.

[excerpt from "Private Lives"]

Lindsay makes a difference, you just said that she's good. You said, "She's wonderful."

I said, "Does she make a difference for you?" I mean, if you're there and there's someone who's--

AR: Well, this play about two duets.

CR: Right.

AR: And there are four major characters. There's no Elyot without an Amanda. There's no Amanda without an Elyot. It's like two halves of one coin.

CR: Yeah, but I would assume that--back to what you said about technique, that timing is everything.

AR: Everything.

But also living inside. You know, it's--these are very, very complicated sentences. You have breathe them properly, but you've also gotta believe what you're saying. And you have to pick up on the rhythms of your fellow actor.

And these are two people who can't live together, but they can't live without each other. So, you've got to feel this umbilical cord all the time.

CR: You said something about the notion of the first responsibility of the actor is to give--you know, is to take the actor's--the writer's words and do something with them--ennoble them, make them--

AR: Trust them.

CR: Trust them.

See writers--

AR: If it's played right--

CR: Writers must love you, when you say that--

AR: --it takes trust.

CR: --"Trust them."

AR: Yeah, but the great writing tells you what to do. And also great writing frequently doesn't know what it's possibilities are.

When I--Lindsay and I did one play together before--12 years ago--which was Les Liaisons Dangereuses. We did here in New York as well. And one of the run-throughs--obviously in London, after we'd been playing it in Stratford we had--It was a break, and then we put it on again.

And so we had a run-through. And Christopher Hampton, the author, was there. And at the end of it Howard Davies, who also directed that gave some notes. And then he said to Christopher, "Would you like to say anything, Christopher?"

And Christopher said, "Well, I'd just like to say how moved I am because I have no idea I'd written half of that."

CR: Wow.

AR: "No," we said, "well, we're only saying what we see on the page."

CR: Yeah.

AR: And the same is true with this. You know, people are saying, "Well, we didn't know that there was this depth in the play."

We're not making it up. It's there if you look for it.

CR: Yeah.

The movies and all that business of Die Hard and all that. My guess--it's made your life richer in more ways than one.

AR: Financially, you mean?

CR: Yeah, of course, financially. Yeah.

Yeah, but it also gave a certain interesting dimension to you. I mean, you were already recognized as a very good actor. You know? And here they come to you for that reason and others--whatever the moviemakers and directors mandate was or imperative was.

But it's probably added dimension and has people see you in a sort-of different and more--

AR: I think--well, yes. I mean, obviously, because there's a worldwide audience.

CR: Yeah.

AR: But it also makes a difference in terms of your work on stage. It's taught me--I think--I think I'm better at the stage work because of film work.

CR: Ah. How do you think that is? How do you--

AR: Because you learn to trust your listening faculties. You know, when a camera is put onto the face of somebody who's truly listening, I think it's very interesting.

CR: The face is?

AR: Yeah.

CR: Yeah.

AR: And, you know--

CR: And that happens in film because of the fact that that's the nature of the medium.

AR: Well, your cut to somebody 'cause you need a reaction. But you need to see them receiving some information.

And so I learned that and about stillness and truthfulness.

CR: Truthfulness? Meaning that the face can't lie. Or something more?

AR: Yeah, and--

Well, it's in close-up. That's the other thing. You know, on stage it's like you're always in a wide shot.

CR: Exactly. That's--[crosstalk]

AR: Right, you're always seen--

CR: And so you don't have to worry about a response shot, you know, 'cause people look at the whole thing.

AR: Well, and so--

And anyway what I've discovered, having done a few years of film, and there are a few sequences in this play that I'm doing now where almost nothing seems to be happening.

And there is one sequence in the play where there is actually two minutes of complete silence because they have this game where if they're rowing, which they do rather a lot, one of them calls out this word "solix" and it means that they now have to have two minutes of silence.

And that actually takes place on stage. So, there are two minutes nobody says a thing. And you've got no option but to play it for real.

And to hold 1,400 people's attention with silence--

CR: Is not easy.

AR: It's not easy, but film work gives you a little bit of film courage to do that.

CR: Why do you think they wanted you? Other than that--you know, other than you were good at your craft.

AR: On film?

CR: Yeah.

Did you have a certain look?

AR: I think I was cheap.

CR: If you're good and cheap, that's a great bonanza for them.

AR: Yeah. And I was English. And I was--I had been playing in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and I think it had a kind of a quality that they needed for the film.

CR: And are you happy with all of those experiences?

AR: Well, when I did Die Hard, it was I had never, ever made a film before. So, I was a complete innocent. And so I just took my rag-bag of ideas.

CR: Yeah. And put it on film.

AR: Put it on film.

And John McTiernan--God bless him--tolerated me saying things--taking my process to a film set. "Yes, but what does this person think?" And "What kind of--what did have for breakfast?" And "What's his background?"

CR: No, you were saying all those things?

AR: I'm saying all these things.

CR: And he said.

AR: Like he cared. He's just trying to get this--But actually--

CR: We may care about Bruce, but we don't care about you in this case.

AR: But it was a validation--

CR: Yeah--ah.

AR: --because between us, you know, we made it much more interesting.

CR: Between you and Bruce? Or you and the director?

AR: Between all of us. [crosstalk] Yeah.

Because you have to find, again, the other side of the coin. And I thought it was important that there was a proper relationship between my character and Bruce's. And even though it was only over these walkie-talkies.

And that there was some mutual respect so there were things to delve into.

CR: Yeah, that's always necessary. That sorta sense of respect because you want a villain that has credibility.

Roll tape.

Here it is, Die Hard.

[excerpt from "Die Hard": AR meets BW face-to-face for the first time - Hans pretending to be a Nakatomi employee]

AR: Subtle stuff.

CR: Subtle stuff.

But you never watch yourself, you said.

AR: No, no. It's torture to me.

CR: Why is it torture?

AR: Because all you can see is what you got wrong.

CR: Exactly.

AR: You don't see anything that's any good.

CR: Oh, you must have seen something good. You never see anything good?

AR: Not really. You just--

CR: You see all the things you could improve.

AR: I mean, "That wasn't what I was trying to do."

CR: And stage--Obviously you can't see yourself. But do you get more satisfaction from it? Or less? Or different?

AR: The trouble in the theater is that, you know--I can only speak for myself--is that there's this huge fear factor that you have to deal with.

At least on film if you screw up, you know, there's another take. And it doesn't go away--the fear thing.

CR: I read that you said that. That somehow today, with all that you have done, the fear factor is there as you begin. Now, does it go away during the run of piece?

AR: On certain nights, if you can--you know, if you can get it to push down into the right place. I mean, it's something that I guess is connected to adrenaline and focus and energy and all of those things.

But it's a useless thing. It's not--it's not really very positive. And it's just like a little gremlin that sits on your shoulder and tries to make you fail.

And often succeeds.

CR: Really?

AR: It's a negative. It doesn't do any good.

Now, I'm seriously thinking of trying to find some kind of hypnosis that will get rid of it because it's useless.

CR: Seriously trying to find hypnosis to get over the fear of being on stage.

AR: Yeah.

CR: Coming from one of our better--best--actors.

AR: Well, I'm not alone. You know, it's a common problem.

CR: Does it--do you think it is a common problem simply because the people who go into acting and feel passionate about it somehow are a breed that is likely to be fearful?

AR: I don't know. I think it's an individual thing.

Olivier had years of terrible stage fright.

CR: Yeah. It's--

We talking about something much more than simply forgetting your lines, aren't we?

AR: It's a lot about that--fear of that. You know, of just--

No, I mean, you know, but that's a terrible thing to have happen.

CR: Oh, I would think. I would think--I would scare me to death.

AR: But then it becomes a self-generating problem because, unless you can get your concentration into the right place, then this little gremlin goes up into your head and, while you're speaking, it's saying, "You know this line, but there's a line coming up in four lines time that you don't know."

CR: Oh, no.

AR: I mean, your brain is going forward and backwards and trying to speak at the same time.

CR: And [crosstalk] and be motivated and all that stuff. And thinking about the position of where-am-I-going-to-be and when-do-move and where-do-I-move and what-am-I-supposed-to-get-from-her and more.

AR: Exactly.

I mean, you must have it because you're--Yes, we're having a conversation. On some level, I assume you're listening to what I'm saying and responding--

CR: Well, isn't that clear to you.

AR: You are. Of course you are.

But there's also some bit of you that's thinking, "And next" or "Did I cover this?"

CR: Some cases. Not with you.

Now, this is a list of questions right here that I--I haven't asked a single one of them. You know?

AR: Good.

CR: You know? Not one.

Simply because you're searching something more important at this table, which is something like what I think we have here. I mean, you know, I had no idea. I didn't know you, hadn't met you.

And the idea--and haven't even seen the play yet and want to very much 'cause I--for a lot of--all the reasons. But wanted to--

But what were you looking for? And think you're looking for this every night, too. You're just looking to make it as authentic as you can.

AR: I want to turn a key in the hearts and minds of somebody.

CR: Exactly. Me, too.

And you know--I mean, it's easier for me than it is for you, simply 'cause I got a lot to work with--your whole life and your career and all of that other stuff that I can sorta call up.

AR: It's not enough to get up there and just show off. You know, that's kind of pointless. You can do that with a child at birthday parties. You know, we have a job to do.

And I think the actor still has an important to do and fulfill.

CR: I want to talk about Winter Guest, where you directed. But first, Sense and Sensibility. I mean, how--

That's what? What does that say? What about that? What would we say about that? For you, as an experience.

AR: It was a very, very happy experience. Emma Thompson had written a really brilliant adaptation. It's so difficult to adapt a book like that--Jane Austen--to the screen, which is--

CR: Emma Thompson wrote the adaptation?

AR: Mm-hmm [affirmative], and one--

CR: The Emma Thompson we know as an actress.

AR: Absolutely. And she's in Sense and Sensibility.

CR: Yeah, I know.

AR: She wrote the script, the screenplay, and she won an Oscar for that.

CR: Ah.

AR: So--

CR: For her screenplay.

AR: Yeah. And she did a brilliant, brilliant job of it.

And then there was an inspired choice of director, which was Ang Lee.

CR: Yeah.

AR: To come and--you know, this Hong-Kong-born director to come and--or was he Taiwan? Anyway, to--

CR: Yeah, Asian.

AR: Well, I don't wish to insult him, but anyway he's a brilliant director, but to have him come and direct this kind of quintessentially English comedy of manners. But it was a brilliant choice because, of course, he understands all of that from his own culture.

So, on those levels it was an extraordinary experience, and the film was peopled by a lot of actors who knew each other from the theater so there was a sense of process. Ang had lots of rehearsals.

We had to write essays about our characters, write letter about our characters, have movement classes, all of that--all of which helped enormously.

And I was playing somebody who was--it was an enormous challenge because he was--he is 110 percent a good person. And to try to make somebody who's so thoroughly good and honorable interesting was a challenge.

CR: Roll tape.

Here it is.

[excerpt from "Sense and Sensibility": AR and ET - Col. Brandon asks if everything's settled between Marianne and Willoughby, gets the bad news, wishes her every happiness]

CR: You first.

AR: I don't know. I just watch it and go, "Wrong, wrong."

CR: Oh, did you really? What was wrong about that?

AR: Oh, I don't know. You just wish you could do it again.

CR: But nothing was wrong with that, now come on. It might have been different but not wrong.

AR: It could have been a little quicker, cleaner.

CR: Quicker. Cleaner.

AR: Simpler.

CR: Simpler. The Winter Guest--you direct this? It was something you enjoyed?

AR: I did, yes. I mean, the prospect was pretty terrifying. But then I suppose experience tells you and it proved to be the case that the wonderful thing about film is that you're surrounded by experts because if they don't do their job well, they'd never make it. So you've got this unbelievable bank of support behind you. And in a way, a lot of the work has been done in pre-production.

CR: In terms of cinematographers and everybody.

AR: Once you actually hit the first day of shooting, you just watch and everybody else is kind of doing it for you, in a sense.

CR: And you say things like, "Louder. Slower. Simpler."

AR: Well, those are good words to say.

CR: All the things that you were saying to yourself--all the things you were saying to yourself about that performance. Just simple words.

AR: Henry used to say some extra--but that was because his English wasn't so good. And he used to say--he said to me once, he said, "Alan, be more subtle. Do more." Which you kind of stare up and--

CR: Yeah, exactly. It's one or the other.

All right. Here's a scene from The Winter Guest. Take a look. Emma Thompson and her real-life mother, Phyllidia Law.

AR: Phyllida.

CR: Phyllida.

[excerpt from "The Winter Guest" - ET and PL have an argument]

CR: Also, Harry Potter, which was a huge success. You played Professor Snape in that. What's next after this? This runs--Private Lives is playing at the Richard Rodgers Theater through September. Do you know where you're going after--[crosstalk] Where are you going after September 8th? Where will you be?

AR: Possibly in a rest home. But--

CR: Where would you like to be?

AR: There are various things I have to organize around the fact that I will almost definitely be shooting another Harry Potter sometime between September and the following February.

CR: You'll be shooting another Harry Potter for the rest of your life.

AR: Fortunately, or unfortunately, no, there will only ever be seven of these books.

CR: Oh, is that right?

AR: Yeah, because it's--Jane Rowlings already said that. It's one a year from the time--from him being 11 to 18. So it's just his school time.

So when Harry gets to be 18 and leaves school, that's it. And she's already written the last paragraph of the last book and it's locked away in a safe somewhere.

CR: Do you know her?

AR: Yeah.

CR: Is she interesting?

AR: She's a terrificly interesting woman, yeah. Well, how could you not be when you were a single parent with no money coming in, trying to feed your kids and writing these books in coffee bars in Glasgow and exercise books by hand with the kids in the stroller and not quite knowing how to feed them?

CR: Yeah. A great pleasure to have you here.

AR: A pleasure to be here.

CR: Alan Rickman, Private Lives, through September at the Richard Rodgers Theater.

We'll be right back. Stay with us.

*****

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Copyright Ú 2002 CharlieRose.com

Anne
Manhattan - Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Re "Big Night Out". I can`t add much more, sorry. Got the info from yesterday`s Mail magazine [called YOU]. It stated the book`s due for publication by HarperCollins on 1st July, price £6.99 & the charity is indeed WarChild. Apparently Mr R`s illustrations accompany Beatie Edney`s short story.
Amanda
London, - Monday, June 24, 2002

And another Snape Pic

Not sure how I am going to deal with those spiders!
Sue
England - Thursday, June 20, 2002

Here is a link to one of the Snape Pictures on The Leaky Cauldron
Sue
England - Thursday, June 20, 2002

And the Videogram is ready too:

• HPcosTrailer.exe: 2.3 MB, 2 min, 2 secs

The "Chamber of Secrets" trailer is up at the Warner Bros. site.
Georgiana <gellis@drizzle.comfoo>
Seattle - Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Cut and paste this addy to order AR in "Romeo and Juliet" on dvd region 1. sorry I don't know how to link this http://www.documentary-video.com/displayitem.cfm?vid=817 good luck..
Juliana <daltrey63@hotmail.comfoo>
- Tuesday, June 18, 2002

The PL poster I mentioned last week is a lot bigger than I thought, 14x22. It's called a "window card" and is the only PL item they have at the moment. You can order online for $18.50 plus shipping or buy it at the Broadway New York store on the ground floor of the Marriott Marquis, Broadway at 45th Street (you can enter from 46th where the Richard Rodgers is), for $20 + tax + $1 for optional cardboard.
Anne/Manhattan
- Tuesday, June 18, 2002

The New York Review of Books has an article about Private Lives; the first half is a discussion of the play and the last half a review of the AR/LD production. Unfortunately, the reviewer doesn't care for it although he blames Howard Davies rather than the actors. Here is the relevant AR/LD stuff:

But in his quest to get the feeling back into Private Lives, Davies has grossly miscalculated; he fails to understand just where the feelings are. No doubt there was a superficial allure to the idea of reuniting Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, the stars of the 1987 Dangerous Liaisons that he'd directed, as his Amanda and Elyot: the vicious, big-cat murderousness of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont is a distant ancestor of what Coward's leads, "biting and scratching like panthers," do to each other. Yet Davies doesn't even let his actors have that feline fun, because he's too busy having them emote-stretching out their lines, and the spaces between them, with long pauses, giving each other burning glances, and in every other way apparently trying to get behind the characters' witty repartee and excavate their true feelings.

In an interview with The New York Times, Rickman and Duncan reveal why. Davies, who'd never read the play until he got this job, wanted them to say the lines "without any of the usual stuff that comes with Noël Coward"-to "make these people real." The problem is that there's nothing "real" about them. In the stagey worlds of Coward's comedies, the witty repartee isn't a cover for feelings, as Davies seems to have felt; it is the feelings, or rather the vehicle for expressing them. In their recordings of Private Lives, Coward and Lawrence delight in their dialogue as if it were a tennis match, speaking briskly, each capping the other's lines; Rickman and Duncan, by contrast, took so much time delivering their volleys that it sometimes seemed as if they were hoping a "message" would pop up in the pauses, if they could only make them big enough.

One result was to throw the play's delicate dynamics off-kilter: by making Amanda and Elyot comparatively normal (well, neurotically normal), their mates come off looking like morons, whereas they're just nice people unlucky enough to have drawn too close to the leopards' cage. (Preparing to revive the play, John Gielgud hoped to find a Sibyl and Victor as nice as Adrianne Allan and Laurence Olivier, who'd created the roles.) What should fascinate us is the leopards: their danger, their beauty, the way they're lethal to others but necessary to each other. The other result was what must be the longest Private Lives on record: Act One alone took nearly an hour. No wonder people asked Duncan if the play had been rewritten.

Deprived of Coward's fizzy pacing, Private Lives does just what an early reviewer of the play, for whom it "hardly mov[ed] farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub," feared it all too easily could do: become "a shapeless, sodden mass." (That, incidentally, is a good way to describe Louise, the hapless French maid to whom Davies, presumably out of desperation, gives a distracting series of vulgar pratfalls, as if to compensate for the lack of laughs elsewhere.)

Part of the way in which Coward kept his little boats afloat was, in fact, to juxtapose, with giddy hilarity, his characters' fantasy with soggy everyday "reality" (which is what Davies is interested in). There's a wonderful moment in the play, during the extended second-act love interlude, when Elyot starts getting frisky and Amanda rebuffs his advances on the grounds that it's "so soon after dinner." Angrily, Elyot accuses Amanda of having "no sense of glamour, no sense of glamour at all." For all its ravishing décor, this Private Lives is devoid of glamour; it's so suspicious of camp style that it ends up having no style at all. "I see you're determined to make me serious, whether I like it or not," Amanda sulks at Victor toward the end of the play. It's a line Coward might well address to Davies, if only he were here. That he isn't is all too obvious.

Magda
Canada , - Thursday, June 13, 2002

Hi everyone! I just wanted to let you know, I bought the Harry Potter Video for my niece for her birthday which was yesterday and we watched it (of course) and right after the credits, they have the extra potions class!! How neat that was to see!! I think I am going to buy the video instead of the DVD after hearing from a lot of you how difficult it is to get to those extra scenes on the DVD. I just wanted to let you know that the extra potions class is on the video first right after the credits for those who would rather get to it easier!
Leanne
WI USA - Thursday, June 13, 2002

For the color version of the 'duel' pic with Snape in the background, go to here

Enjoy!
Suze
NY - Wednesday, June 12, 2002

There is a new Prof. Snape picture in the June 10, 2002 edittion of the newspaper USA Today. Harry and Malfoy are having a duel and Snape is watching the action. I am sorry to say I do not have a scanner.
Juliana <daltrey63@hotmail.comfoo>
- Monday, June 10, 2002 at 13:29:25

Another reminder -- King of the Hill's "Joust Like A Woman" episode is supposed to be on FOX tonight at 7:30 Eastern. (Alan as the voice of King Philip Motzinger, for those who missed it first time around.)
Posted by Christine
USA - Sunday, June 09, 2002

Here's the next Videograms from the Tonys:

• PL Best Revival (TonyPLrevival6202.exe, 4.1 MB, 1 min, 57 secs)

VCR ALERT!!!! This just in from Anne/Manhattan:
Alan Rickman will be on Charlie Rose TONIGHT (Friday) at 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time on PBS (Channel 13 in NY). I checked their web-site and it looks like it's going to be broadcast Nation wide, but it might be a good idea to check your local listings for exact times.

Yippee-kay-yea!!! :-)
Suzanne <Suz@mail.usa.comfoo>
TX USA - Friday, June 07, 2002

I just went to the RADA website, and they have a VHS tape about RADA, and it seems to include graduates "including ... Alan Rickman ...". I was having problems navigating; nothing I clicked on went anywhere. Has anyone seen this tape? Is it worth buying? I couldn't get to the order form, so I don't know how much it costs.
Ann
NJ USA - Friday, June 07, 2002

Here are the next couple of Videograms from the Tonys:

• PL costumes (TonyPLcostumes6202.exe, 1 MB, 41 seconds)
• PL Director (TonyPLdirector6202.exe, 626 kb, 25 seconds)

An article at Yahoo.com on the the growing role of women as action heroes in the movies, Bad girls get their chance at the movies, contains this:

Bad guys seem to have more fun, cracking clever one-liners and thrilling audiences with their freedom and panache. "Look at Alan Rickman in Die Hard or Denzel Washington in Training Day," says Mary Jane Skalski, producer of Myth of Fingerprints. "A lot of male actors had their most memorable performances playing bad guys. I just hope that these kind of roles remain great parts when these roles are written for women."

Georgiana <gellis@drizzle.comfoo>
Seattle - Thursday, June 06, 2002

BECKETT ON FILM Premieres in 2002 on PBS
Two special evenings showcasing new films of the plays of Samuel Beckett Produced by Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney.

I assume this is the series of which Rickman, et al., in "Play," directed by Anthony Minghella, is a part.

Georgiana <gellis@drizzle.comfoo>
Seattle - Thursday, June 06, 2002

Tonight (Thursday) at 7:00 the Metro Channel will broadcast that fashion award show at which Alan was a presenter.
Ann
NJ USA - Thursday, June 06, 2002

Apparently as he can't actually win one Mr.Rickman has been doling out Awards instead!
Sue
USA - Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Here's a link to a photo from "Chamber of Secrets" up at Entertainment Weekly which they titled, FREAKY FACULTY: Rickman's Snape is arguably "Potter"'s most mysterious character,

Georgiana <gellis@drizzle.comfoo>
Seattle - Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Don't know if anyone's seen it, but there's a pivcture of Snape at the duelling club from the COS trailer: Snape (It's very fuzzy, but it's something, eh ;-) )
Becky <astrokini@supanet.comfoo>
Manchester, UK - Wednesday, June 05, 2000

Ann (NJ) sent some lovely photos from her recent backstage visit (thanks for sharing, Ann!):

• Backstage
• AR & Ann 1
• AR & Ann 2
• AR & Ann 3
• AR & Ann 4
• PL marquee

I made a Videogram from the Tonys and I'm working on more. I will post them over the next few days as I finish them. Here's the first (ohhhh, that kiss!):

• Set Design (TonyPLset6202.exe, 5.2 MB, 2 min, 42 secs)

Found this bit of HP info. in the latest issue of Newsweek. Looks like they've added a couple of other names (Kenneth Branagh, for one) to the potential directors list:

Help wanted: Major studio seeks energetic filmmaker (avg. workday: 15 hrs.) to take over multibillion-dollar franchise. Must love flying broomsticks, magic wands. Big $ for right person. Warning: Could also end promising career.
THINGS ARE LOOKING A little hectic over in Pottersville. Not only has publication of J. K. Rowling’s fifth wizard book been delayed, but now Warner Bros. must replace director Chris Columbus, who’s finishing “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” due this November. Columbus, who also made the first “Potter” blockbuster, says he’s weary of never seeing his family, and Warners is shopping for someone to take over the third film, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” The shortlist includes “Thelma and Louise” screenwriter Callie Khouri, whose directing debut, “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” opens Friday; Kenneth Branagh, who plays Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Columbus’s “Chamber of Secrets,” and-honest-Alfonso Cuaron, Mexican director of the sexually explicit “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” who made a charming children’s film, 1995’s “A Little Princess.” Warners production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura won’t tip his hand: “We like all three choices.”
Meanwhile, the three young stars are aging faster than their characters, and may need to be replaced for the fourth film, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” What’s more, “The Prisoner of Azkaban” doesn’t hit theaters until summer 2004, interrupting the once-a-year flow. But if we were Warners, we wouldn’t lose any sleep. “Harry Potter” DVDs are flying off shelves, and Rowling’s new book-whenever it arrives-should reignite the magic.
Annette
Mansfield, Tx - Tuesday, June 04, 2002

Here is The Independents Report on the Tonys,
Sue
England - Tuesday, June 04, 2002

The New Republic has finally got around to reviewing Private Lives. As it doesn't keep articles around long, I've copied and pasted here:

Noël Coward's career was dedicated to making comedy look easy, even facile, a kind of dry verbal concoction that coats the tongue like sour candy. Private Lives, in its current rehabilitation at the Richard Rodgers Theater, is the most accomplished of these bittersweet confections. It is also Coward's most gossamer play, and the one most likely to evaporate in the process of performance. John Lahr, whose Coward the Playwright is the locus classicus of Coward scholarship, quotes another admiring Coward critic prophesying that "within a few years, the student of drama will be sitting in complete bewilderment before the text of Private Lives wondering what on earth those fellows in 1930 saw in so flimsy a trifle." And yet here we are, more than seven decades later, in post-September America, being entertained by a comic soufflé with no plot, no characters, no theme, and no apparent purpose other than to consolidate its author's reputation for witty sangfroid.

You can see why the morally earnest, socially conscious, politically engaged radicals of the 1930s found Coward's characters to be the very essence of callous sophistication and heartless aestheticism. There is a typical moment in Private Lives when Amanda and Elyot, pursuing a kind of metaphysical chic, discuss the possibility of life after death:

Elyot: Don't you believe in--? (He nods upwards)
Amanda: No, do you?
Elyot (shaking his head): No. What about--? (Points downwards)
Amanda: Oh dear no.
Elyot: Don't you believe in anything?
Amanda: Oh yes, I believe in being kind to everybody, and giving money to old beggar-women, and being as gay as possible.

This is so shallow that it is almost profound. Such passages made Coward an extremely easy mark for impassioned rhetoric about the political purblindness of the upper classes. On the first night of their twin honeymoons, Elyot and Amanda blow off their new spouses with as much indifference to the feelings of others as they show to their own responsibilities. Aside from pitching pennies at the needy and "being kind to everybody," they are endowed with no purpose in life whatsoever. We do not know how they got their money or how they kill their time, except for honeymoons on the beaches of the French Riviera or ski trips down the slopes of St. Moritz while formulating epigrams.

Lahr characterizes this sort of thing as the very embodiment of camp, of life as a game or a charade; but it is actually the flip side of a deep sentimentality. The same Coward who imagined people lounging in silk dressing gowns, or sipping cocktails on the patios of posh beach hotels while chattering about the Duke of Westminster's yacht, was capable of the most saccharine expressions of patriotism. In wartime films such as In Which We Serve, he combined swelling Hail Britannia speeches with the most tremulous tributes to the noble qualities of the English lower classes (usually played by John Mills).

Having discharged my own responsibilities to the importance of being earnest, let me now admit that we probably have no choice but to enjoy Private Lives on its own terms--as a play that exults in its total lack of a public dimension. Coward's acerbic wit, his submerged sensibility, and his clipped semantics actually had a profound influence on the styles of virtually all the English dramatists who followed him, including Pinter and Osborne, Stoppard and Frayn. He was the one stylist who linked the past and the future of English drama.

Indeed, if one can ignore the really stunning scope of its superficiality, even Private Lives takes on a certain historical dimension. It is the culmination of a whole genre of love comedies, beginning with Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, continuing through Congreve's The Way of the World, and climaxing with Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In all those plays, the objective of the central characters is to find some way to express their romantic feelings without losing their reputations as wits.

Like Beatrice and Benedict, or Millamant and Mirabel, or Gwendolen Fairfax and Jack Worthing, Amanda and Elyot are so clearly meant for each other that it takes a tremendous amount of authorial ingenuity to keep them apart until the final curtain. Coward's hero and heroine are divorced, but (in a familiar example of the coincidences that drive this play) they meet again on the balconies of adjoining hotel suites where they are honeymooning with the twits they have married. It is evident within minutes that they will abandon their new spouses and renew their old relationship. Coward fills the interstices with re-enactments of the epic battles that separated them in the first place, alternating with a few tender reprises of his cocktail-hour song "Somewhere I'll Find You." ("Change partners and dance" might have been more appropriate theme music.)

Noel Coward wrote this play for himself and Gertrude Lawrence. The current replacements pay homage to their predecessors without the deference of imitation. For Coward's raised eyebrow, Alan Rickman substitutes a deeply curled lip; for Lawrence's slightly dotty insouciance, Lindsay Duncan provides a peaches-and-cream sophistication. These two accomplished English actors were last seen on our stage being equally unfaithful to each other and other lovers in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (also directed by Howard Davies). Since then, they have ripened into a couple with the finesse of experienced dancers in a play that resembles a ballet even more than it does a drama.

Rickman's film roles, which include a variety of cosmopolitan villains, have exposed an edge of menace the comic side of which he hones here. His legato baritone, issuing from interior regions without any apparent sign of articulation by his lips, is a splendid instrument for Coward one-liners such as "Certain women should be struck regularly--like a gong" (as well as his response to Amanda's "Whose yacht is that? ... I wish I were on it"--"I wish you were too").

Duncan brings to the stage some of the wry helpless wisdom that made Madeleine Carroll so appealing in The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is she who carries the more dangerous stuff of the play--namely its sincerity, an excess of which can be death to this kind of comedy. Emma Fielding and Adam Godley as Sibyl and Victor, the underwritten stick figures of the evening, perform with heroic commitment to the physical and intellectual stiffness of their characters. At one point Amanda says: "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." The same tribute can be paid to the potency of superficial wit comedies.

Magda
Canada - Monday, June 03, 2002

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited
Sunday Times (London)
June 2, 2002, Sunday
SECTION: Features
HEADLINE: And the winner isn't..
. BYLINE: Matt Wolf

Even in a bumper year for the British on Broadway, few will go home with a Tony, says MATT WOLF

When Broadway's 56th annual Tony Awards are handed out tonight, here are just some of the potential British nominees who won't be competing: the directors Nicholas Hytner, Jeremy Sams, Sean Mathias and Phyllida Lloyd; the playwrights Alan Ayckbourn and Terry Johnson; the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon; the designers Anthony Ward and Mark Thompson; the performers Simon Callow, Rupert Graves and past Tony-winner Sir Ian McKellen.

What, then, of Broadway's supposed love affair with British talent? Elements clearly remain in the frontrunners for actor and actress in a play: Alan Bates for Turgenev's Fortune's Fool, a version of which previously played at Chichester in 1996; and Lindsay Duncan for Private Lives, the same Noel Coward revival that was a recent West End smash. Duncan's languorous co-star, Alan Rickman, is up for a trophy as well, while the line-up in her own category includes Helen Mirren, a 1995 Tony nominee for A Month in the Country, cited again this year for her partnering of McKellen last autumn in Strindberg's Dance of Death. Still, while Bates and Duncan may well fly the flag for Britain (and deservedly so, with Bates's sozzled and destitute estate-dweller marking the least fussy performance from this actor in years), a more telling indication of New York's current thinking about London may be found in the sorry saga of Henry Goodman. It was just over a month ago that Goodman, a two-time Olivier Award-winner in Britain, was unceremoniously dumped from his big Broadway break in The Producers. The producers behind The Producers (not to mention its creator, Mel Brooks) panicked before Goodman was due to face the critics. In his place, they promoted Brad Oscar, understudy to the Tony-winning Nathan Lane, who had earlier taken the role. The reviews were tepid, so, hopefully, Goodman is having the last laugh. Nor was he the only visiting Briton to whom Broadway bade a swift farewell. Once a Tony season mainstay, Andrew Lloyd Webber received surprisingly churlish reviews for one of his most charming scores, By Jeeves. Opening next door to The Producers, By Jeeves was gone just after Christmas and has not a single Tony nomination.

No less surprisingly underrepresented is the reigning musical smash Mamma Mia!, with just five nominations, its British director (Phyllida Lloyd), designer (Mark Thompson) and choreographer (Anthony van Laast) not among them. That leaves the Abba songfest's writer, Bristol-based Catherine Johnson, to slug it out in a category she will probably lose to the improbably titled Urinetown, a well-executed one-joke show, spawned on the New York fringe, about a community where people must pay to pee.

Mamma Mia! is up for the top prize, best musical, but that category seems to have devolved into a photo-finish between Urinetown, and the more conservative choice, Thoroughly Modern Millie, which has ridden out a tough notice from The New York Times to find the audience nightly on its feet. (Admittedly, that's not saying much in a city obsessed with standing ovations.) Completing the best-musical line-up is Sweet Smell of Success. This adaptation of the cult 1957 film is fielding a likely Tony recipient in its leading man, John Lithgow. The performances aside - and Lithgow's blazing co-star, Brian d'Arcy James, is the real lynchpin of Nicholas Hytner's staging - Sweet Smell got surprisingly short shrift from the same New York press that pretty well forgave Mamma Mia! its inanities. The evil-wins-out Sweet Smell, by contrast, has barely an inch of slack, suggesting perhaps that what New York emphatically doesn't want now is a feel-bad musical.

For the first time in years, no new British drama is in the running for best play, unless you include the Yorkshireman Mike Poulton's adaptation of Fortune's Fool. Never previously seen on Broadway, the Turgenev play is thereby eligible to compete against the septuagenarian Edward Albee, for The Goat, and the black American writer Suzan-Lori Parks, whose scabrous, brilliantly acted Topdog/Underdog has already won her a Pulitzer Prize. They could all well lose to the Chicago writer-director Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, an Ovid adaptation that has been well received. (Zimmerman travels here in the autumn with her opera Galileo Galilei, part of the Bite season.) The revival categories may find more British accents at the podium - or not. In a season top-heavy with plays, Richard Eyre's starry revival of The Crucible made the shortlist of four, but it looks likely to get pipped at the post by Howard Davies's richly moving take on Private Lives. Which in turn, though, could find itself bested by Morning's at Seven, a sweetly astringent American play from 1939, acted to kill by a cast that includes Estelle Parsons and Frances Sternhagen, the elegant matriarch of ER and Sex and the City. A flop the first time around, Paul Osborn's back-porch drama has led a charmed life since, winning acclaim and a few Tonys in its last Broadway revival in 1980.

Best musical revival, meanwhile, returns Britain's own Cameron Mackintosh to a horse race he dominated during the 1980s, with his (largely recast) National Theatre Oklahoma! up against only one show - a new staging of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods. Oklahoma! would seem to have more muscle behind it, coming in this centenary year of the composer Richard Rodgers's birth, but Into the Woods in the same category did win the Drama Desk award (New York's equivalent of the Golden Globes) on May 19. And anyway, even if Oklahoma! loses, Mackintosh has a lavish consolation prize in store: he is being honoured the next night at a gala of the sort New York does so well, in which case a post-Tony hangover should indeed give way to a beautiful mornin'.

Matt Wolf is Variety's London theatre critic


Georgiana <gellis@drizzle.comfoo>
Seattle - Monday, June 03, 2002

Copyright 2002 The Press Association Limited
Press Association

June 3, 2002, Monday 02:06 AM Eastern Time
SECTION: HOME NEWS
HEADLINE: BRIT STARS SHINE ON BROADWAY
BYLINE: Tom Kelly, PA News, in New York

British stars Alan Bates and Lindsay Duncan were today named the best performers on Broadway.

The pair picked up coveted Tony awards - Broadway's answer to the Oscars - at a ceremony in New York's Radio City Music Hall.

Gosford Park actor Bates said he was "astonished" after beating off Schindler's List star Liam Neeson and villain extraordinaire Alan Rickman to be named best actor in a play. "This is like a hallucination," he added as he was awarded the trophy by Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart.

Bates impressed critics in his role as a Russian nobleman cheated out of his riches in Turgenev's 19th century classic Fortune's Fool.

The 68-year-old said he had loved every minute of his return to Broadway following an 18 year absence.

"There's no audience like a New York audience. They have such energy. If they don't like the play they let you know, but they want to like it."

Duncan defeated fellow British nominees Helen Mirren and Kate Burton to pick up the best actress award.

The Mansfield Park star joked she had abandoned her husband and child to perform alongside Rickman as a world-weary sophisticate in Noel Coward's comedy Private Lives.

"That's just the kind of girl I am," she said.

The Howard Davies production, which recently transferred from London's West End, also won Tonys for best revival of a play and best scenic design.

National director Trevor Nunn's production of Oklahoma picked up only one of seven nominations, with Shuler Hensley winning best featured actor in a musical.

Thoroughly Modern Millie was named Best Musical, one of six Tonys for the hit show.

It defeated Mamma Mia, a show based on the songs of Abba which was first performed in London.

Urinetown, a musical about a city where everyone must pay each time they go the lavatory, won three awards.

John Lithgow took the prize for best actor in a musical for his role as a powerful New York gossip columnist in the Sweet Smell of Success, which received scathing reviews from many US critics.

But the evening ended on a sour note when Elaine Stritch criticised US broadcaster CBS for cutting her off after her acceptance speech for the best theatrical event award rambled on past the scheduled time slot.

At a press conference following the ceremony, the tearful 77-year-old actress said the TV station had pulled the curtain down before the show was over.

"It's pretty emotional for a woman of my age to win her first Tony, and to be cut down like that has spoiled it for me.

"This is an evening I wanted for a long time but now I'm glad it's over."

The actress, who had been nominated for four previous Tony awards, gave a 20-minute acceptance speech at the New York Drama Critics' Circle awards ceremony last month.

The Tonys are presented by the American Theatre Wing, which founded the awards in 1947. Nominees in 22 categories were chosen by the 27-member Tony nominating committee of theatre professionals. Winners then were voted on by 731 theatre professionals and journalists.
Georgiana <gellis@drizzle.comfoo>
Seattle - Monday, June 03, 2002

Hi, all! Just wanted to let you know that I've added a page to my site about PL at the 2002 Tonys, complete with a good number of pictures. Come by and check it out: the alan rickman forum website
Jen
Jen <jelleebaby@yahoo.comfoo>
USA - Monday, June 03, 2002

And Tim Hatley's speech:

"Wow. Thank you very much indeed. It has been a fantastic kick off on Broadway doing The Crucible and Private Lives. I've had a great time. Thank you very much. I must thank Howard Davies for asking me to do the show in the first place. My fellow collaborators who have made the design work: Jenny Beavan for her marvelous costumes and Peter Mumford for his fantastic lighting. The producers, Manny Azenberg over here and Duncan Weldon in London, thank you very much for kicking it all off. And also I must thank Michael Brown, who was my trustee associate over here, and Rusty, my partner, for his love and support. Thanks very much indeed, this means a lot. Thank you!" -Tim Hatley, Best Scenic Design, Private Lives
sue
Still getting over the fireworks, - Monday, June 03, 2002

Here is Lesley Duncan's acceptance speech courtesy of Broadway.com

Thank you so much. If only this job had more to offer: I'm playing Amanda in a fantastic revival of Private Lives on Broadway. I've got fantastic costumes, I've got hats and I've got Alan Rickman. I mean, somebody shoot me! Thank you to everyone who works at the Richard Rodgers. Thank you to the rest of the cast for watching this on TV with my son, and if you can't say that when you've won a Tony, what can you do? Also, to Howard Davies who is quite simply a brilliant director. And the person with whom I've had a perfect acting relationship twice-I could not play Amanda without Alan Rickman as Elyot. I can't ever thank you enough. This is what acting should be. And by the way, I abandoned my husband and my child to play this part because that's the kind of girl I am. And because I've got this tonight, my husband and my child and I are in the same city on the same day. So for that and for that, thank you!" -Lindsey Duncan, Best Actress in a Play, Private Lives
sue
- Monday, June 03, 2002

Just found another Tony pic on Broadway.com
Sue
England - Monday, June 03, 2002

There is a Long Interview with LD on the Tony's page Just click on her name (Under D).You will need realplayer

Sue
England - Monday, June 03, 2002

A lovely picture of Alan and Lindsay arriving last night and they both look stunning in it.
http://www.tonys.org/news/gallery/imagepages/97dba5240c20d70e86256bcd000bd0ef.html

Sharon
Oxford, England - Monday, June 03, 2002

In case you're interested in who received what:

The Winners List for "The 56th Annual Tony Awards"
From Radio City Music Hall

On PBS
In order of presentation:

Best Choreography: Rob Ashford "Thoroughly Modern Millie"
Best Orchestrations: Doug Besterman & Ralph Burns "Thoroughly Modern Millie"
Best Book for a Musical: Greg Kotis "Urinetown The Musical"
Best Original Score: Mark Hollmann & Greg Kotis "Urinetown The Musical"
Best Scenic Design: Tim Hatley "Private Lives"
Best Lighting Design: Brian MacDevitt "Into the Woods"
Best Costume Design: Martin Pakledinaz "Thoroughly Modern Millie"
Best Direction of a Play: Mary Zimmerman "Metamorphoses"
Best Direction of a Musical: John Rando "Urinetown The Musical"
Regional Theatre Award: Williamstown Theatre Festival

On CBS
In order of presentation:

Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical: Harriet Harris "Thoroughly Modern Millie"
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play: Katie Finneran "Noises Off"
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play: Frank Langella "Fortune's Fool"
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical: Shuler Hensley "Oklahoma!"
Best Revival of a Play: "Private Lives"
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical: John Lithgow "Sweet Smell of Success"
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play: Lindsay Duncan "Private Lives"
Best Special Theatrical Event: "Elaine Stritch At Liberty"
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play: Alan Bates "Fortune's Fool"
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical: Sutton Foster "Thoroughly Modern Millie"
Best Revival of a Musical: "Into the Woods"
Best Play: "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?"
Best Musical: "Thoroughly Modern Millie"

Presented earlier in the evening:
Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre: Julie Harris and Robert Whitehead

***I LOVE TiVo! Makes it so easy to transcribe things quickly . . .
Jen <jelleebaby@yahoo.comfoo>
USA - Sunday, June 02, 2002

Friday's Calgary Herald had this to say about the HP DVD: "Harry Potter Adaptation Letter Perfect." The short article ends by saying (about the extra scenes) "one of the best is a prolonged classroom exchange between Harry and Prof. Snape."
Julia, last time
- Sunday, June 02, 2002

The same USA Today goes on to do a should win/will win article: Leading actor: Any of them could, but if you put a gun to my head, I would go with Neeson over Bates, the favourite among thater insiders. Tony voters love movie stars as much as anyone else-- especially movie stars with Neeson's feral presence and brutal honesty.

Leading Actress: Again, there's not a lemon or dark horse in the bunch. But Duncan gave a performance of absolute comic perfection and has already garnered other awards for it.
Julia, again, again
- Sunday, June 02, 2002

More relevant tidbits from Fridays USA Today, "With No Producers, Tonys Look Wide Open This Year.", Elysa Gardner, USA Today. "...In contrast, while no play produced on Braodway this season inspired a Producers-like frenzy, several offered enough high-profile talent to make for interesting competition. The tightest race is bound to be in teh category of Best Leading Actor, which will pit established movie star Liam Neeson and rising movie star Billy Crudup against noted virtuosos Alan Bates, Alan Rickman, and Jeffrey Wright. All five performances are Tony-worthy, as are those in the Leading Actress category, which boasts a similarly impressive roster of stage and screen favourites: Laura Linney, Mercedes Ruehl, Helen Mirren, Kate Burton, and Lindsay Duncan.
Julia, again
- Sunday, June 02, 2002

A relevant excerpt from Thursday's Calgary Herald: "9/11 Didn't Dim Broadway Lights", by Desmond Ryan. Knight-Ridder Newspapers, New York.

A very long article in today's New York Times on tonight's Tony Awards contains the following:

Revivals of straight plays were plentiful, but many caught the seasonal disease of self-sabotage. And only a few gave intriguing answers to the question that any revival must pose: What am I telling you that you haven't heard before?

Certainly, Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman brought a sensual freshness to the battling lovers of Howard Davies's sublime revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives." . . .

In an article in today's New York Post, talking about this year's theatre season, Barbara Hoffman has the following to say:

"Here are our top 10 highlights of the year in theater, ranked in the order in which they dazzled:

1. In "Private Lives," Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman - as Noel Coward's estranged Amanda and Elyot - are honeymooning with their respective new spouses, only to find themselves on adjoining hotel terraces. Suddenly they meet, and the looks of horror as they recognize one another are priceless.

Nevertheless, Elyot soon has his ex-wife in his arms. "There isn't a particle of you that I don't know, remember and want," he murmurs, with the smoldering intensity that Rickman does so well.

Then he kisses her, and you swoon along with Duncan. No wonder they're both up for Tonys. "

Here's a link to her complete article, "Bright Lights".

Kiki
- Sunday, June 02, 2002

For any who want it transcript of Tony brunch video (questions summarised):

What's it like to play a man in love?

AR: Well I have done that a few times too you see so S&S and TMD are very much about men in love so it isn't an area I haven't gone down.

How did the play evolve?

AR: I think it probably took its tone maybe from the first day we rehearsed the balcony scene, you know it is such a famous piece of writing and I think because of where Lindsay and I and Howard come from and what our priorities are I suppose we right from the word go when we heard lines like 'I love you' from deep down inside we said them like we meant them whereas I think perhaps in previous productions there is a kind of brittle surface quality and you don't actually feel the weight of that love and so on a nightly basis that is our concern really and that-that partly determines the nature of the production that it was for real.

Politically correct lines?

AR: We did talk about some of those lines and you know I talk about being in love with a woman in south Africa and Lindsay says 'did she have a ring through her nose.' And we did talk about what are we going to do about all this male violence. But it is a play of its time so we didn't cut it. And I think it was the right decision especially given the fact that my experience of playing Ellyot was basically one of playing an 11 year old and that he is so emotionally behind her that I think and hope that when I say lines like you know, "Women should be struck regularly like gongs" you are hearing that from the heart and soul of a somewhat immature man.

Judy
Sydney, NSW Australia - Saturday, June 01, 2002

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