Showing posts with label John Patterson. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Kathy Bates / 'I told Clint that after 50 years, I feel like I've hit the big time'

‘I’m over never being the romantic lead’ … Bates. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

Kathy Bates: 'I told Clint that after 50 years, I feel like I've hit the big time'

This article is more than 4 years old

With her fourth nomination for an Oscar, Kathy Bates talks about overcoming brutal criticism about her looks, her pride at playing real women and why she loved working with Clint Eastwood

John Patterson
Friiday 17 January 2020

‘Oh, I’m a bumper!” says Kathy Bates as I reach out to shake her hand. A small fist comes towards me with a large, round, pink-rose ring on the middle finger. We bump and laugh and one of the truly unique American acting powerhouses of the past half-century beams back at me. She has a splendid smile, full of mischief and wisdom: a small and compact woman buoyed by that straight-up, unfeigned southern warmth that abides no matter where you encounter it. She fusses over me kindly, offering drinks – a world away from the nervous, shy, deeply rattled and easily hurt woman I have just watched in Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Richard Jewell.

John Patterson / Welcome back, Sissy Spacek

Welcome back, Sissy

By John Patterson John Patterson is thankful to still get a glimpse of Sissy Spacek - the artist formerly known as Rainbo

Saturday 30 October 2004

he good name of the great state of Texas may currently be mud among 50% of Americans, but in truth, Texas isn't just the home of Halliburton KBR, Enron and a fast-track death-penalty process. Lots of cool things have come out of the Lone Star state: Jewish country singer and comic mystery novelist Kinky Friedman, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the Dallas Cowboys' Cheerleaders, T-Bone Walker, Patricia Highsmith, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson - and Sissy Spacek.

Al Pacino by John Patterson

Profile: Al Pacino
by John Patterson

John Patterson is relieved to see Al Pacino finally getting his teeth into a juicy role - rather than the scenery

Saturday 7 February 2004 01.37 GMT

t's been a while since Al Pacino was last seen working at full strength. That's not to say he hasn't been busy. Far from it, he's been churning out the movies at a fair old rate the last couple of years. It's just that, although Al never gives less than his full-throated, mad-eyed all, most of his recent projects haven't come close to deserving him.

The Conversation / No 12 best crime film of all time

The Conversation: No 12 best crime film of all time

Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

John Patterson
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.44 BST

he finest of the four great paranoia thrillers of the 70s – alongside The Parallax View, All the President's Men (both from director Alan J Pakula), and Sidney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor – The Conversation drew attention because it was Coppola's first movie after his hugely successful The Godfather, but also because it dealt, quite coincidentally, as it happened – with wiretapping and surveillance at exactly the moment the Watergate crisis was reaching its climax.

Not that Coppola was making a movie about Nixon; he was reflecting – in the movie's fatefully ambiguous phrase "he'll kill us if he gets the chance" – on the critical response to The Godfather's perceived amorality. He wanted to show there are two ways of seeing everything (and one of them may prove fatal). Gene Hackman's bug-man Harry Caul is a guilt-ridden, sex-phobic Catholic haunted by the murder of two former targets and determined to prevent another killing. But in this universe of dislocation and paranoia, made up of half-heard sound fragments and deconstructed images, nothing is as it seems.

THE GUARDIAN