The British are coming!Chalk it up to Princess Diana Noun 1. Princess Diana - English aristocrat who was the first wife of Prince Charles; her death in an automobile accident in Paris produced intense national mourning (1961-1997) Diana, Lady Diana Frances Spencer, Princess of Wales and her AIDS work. Chalk it up to British prime minister Tony Blair Noun 1. Tony Blair - British statesman who became prime minister in 1997 (born in 1953) Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Blair and the end of 17 years of Tory repression. Chalk it up to Elton John Sir Elton Hercules[1] John CBE[2] (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March, 1947) is a five-time Grammy and one-time Academy Award-winning English pop/rock singer, composer and pianist. or such out-of-the-closet actors as Antony Sher Sir Antony Sher KBE (born 14 June 1949) is a British actor, novelist and painter. Biography Sher has a South African background, being born into a Lithuanian-Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa (his cousin is Ronald Harwood), but he has worked mainly in the United , Simon Callow, Rupert Everett, and Sir Ian McKellen Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CBE (born May 25, 1939) is a British stage and screen actor, the recipient of a Tony Award and two Oscar nominations. McKellen is best known to moviegoers in recent years for his roles as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings . Whatever the reasons, there's a new wave of gay cinema coming out of England. We've already enjoyed such post-Thatcher exports as Beautiful Thing, Hollow Reed, Different for Girls, Alive & Kicking and the film version of Martin Sherman's landmark play Bent. In the coming months we'll see Wilde, written by Julian Mitchell (Another Country) and starring Stephen Fry Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English comedian, writer, actor, novelist, filmmaker and television personality. The former comedic collaborator of Hugh Laurie, he is perhaps best known for his recurring role in the BBC TV series Blackadder. as the brilliant Irish poet-playwright Oscar Wilde and Jude Law David Jude Heyworth Law (born 29 December 1972) is an Academy Award-nominated English actor. His succession of leading roles in many high profile Hollywood films has seen him become one of the top A-list actors in the industry today. as his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (22 October 1870 – 20 March 1945) was a poet, a translator and a prose writer, better known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde. ; a film biography of painter Francis Bacon starring Sir Derek Jacobi Sir Derek George Jacobi, CBE (IPA: /ˈdʒækəbi/) (born 22 October, 1938) is an English actor and director, knighted in 1994 for his services to the theatre. ; Richard Kwietniowski's Love and Death on Long Island, with John Hurt and Jason Priestley performing a new twist on Death in Venice; and Vanessa Redgrave Vanessa Redgrave, CBE (born 30 January, 1937) is an Academy Award-winning English actress and member of the Redgrave family, one of the enduring theatrical dynasties. She is also a social activist for human rights. as the title character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway [see review on page 55], directed by Marleen Gorris (Antonia's Line). "It's the new liberation," says stage director Sean Mathias (Indiscretions), who is openly gay and who made his film debut with Bent. "Britain's undergoing so many changes. We've got a new government, a new attitude. The old guard is gone." Granted, gay cinema isn't new in England. In the early '60s the Brits paved the way for a mature look at gay life with Victim, The L-Shaped Room, and A Taste of Honey
A Taste of Honey is the first play by British dramatist Shelagh Delaney, written at the age of 19. . Jump forward 30 years to My Beautiful Laundrette laundrette launder (Brit) n → Waschsalon m and The Crying Game. "The difference today," says documentary maker Ian MacMillan, "is that gay film is becoming more mainstream. " MacMillan, 33, whose three-part documentary on gay life, It's Not Unusual: A Lesbian and Gay History, was televised in prime time on BBC BBC in full British Broadcasting Corp. Publicly financed broadcasting system in Britain. A private company at its founding in 1922, it was replaced by a public corporation under royal charter in 1927. 2 last March, says the climate is so receptive to gay subject matter now that Beautiful Thing, the story of working-class teenage boys who fall in love, actually became a crossover hit with straight audiences. "That was a telling point," adds MacMillan. "It said, `We don't want to be on the art-house screens. We want to be at the multiplexes, with people buying their popcorn and having a good time, and--guess what?--the central characters in this film are gay.' That can only be a good thing." Apart from inevitable pockets of bigotry, MacMillan says, "people are more accepting now. More people have come out, more gay characters appeared on the telly, more articles were written. So more people just think it's not an issue anymore." Things are so relaxed, in fact, that England now has an openly gay National Heritage secretary, Chris Smith, in addition to three gay members of Parliament: Ben Bradshaw, Stephen Twigg, and Angela Eagle, a lesbian who came out last September. And then there's Diana. Nearly everyone contacted for this article credited the late princess with removing the stigma from AIDS--and, by extension, from homosexuality--when she was photographed embracing a hospital patient suffering from the disease. Says Mathias: "I think she opened the door to a more compassionate attitude to possibly everything." If the social climate for gay artists has improved in England, the financial climate for filmmakers is even brighter. Tax breaks are now available, and the national lottery has awarded more than 47 million pounds ($77.4 million) for film production--with 92 million pounds in lottery funds allotted al·lot tr.v. al·lot·ted, al·lot·ting, al·lots 1. To parcel out; distribute or apportion: allotting land to homesteaders; allot blame. 2. to film consortiums that will finance 90 films over the next six years. "Suddenly we're part of a very healthy industry," says Mathias, who received lottery funds for Bent. Mitchell agrees. "We're going through an uplift at the moment," the veteran writer says, adding that the poor quality of British television ("It's just crap") has driven creative artists away from the tube and onto the big screen. In film, Micthell says, "we can deal with [gay] subjects honestly now. We can portray the sexuality in Wilde without having to make a hassle about it. We don't have to make it entirely about the sex life [of Wilde and Douglas], but we can do the sex, and it would be ridiculous not to do it. I don't know whether we could have done that ten years ago. " Sherman, who wrote the script for Alive & Kicking and adapted his 1979 play Bent for the screen, says British filmmakers are also freer to tackle mature themes because their budgets are lower and their financial stakes are correspondingly smaller. "No one makes any money here compared with Americans," he says, laughing. "That's how you get $2-million budgets. So you can make films like Hollow Reed or Alive & Kicking because it isn't an outrageous financial gamble." MacMillan agrees. "They don't have to recoup huge amounts of money," he says. "So you can afford to fake more risks. And the more you take them, the less it looks like a risk." |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion