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David Lynch, whose death was announced Thursday, was my motion picture lodestar.

When his 1977 movie Eraserhead played at an obscure film festival, now long gone, in Woolwich, London, it was like nirvana for a kid raised on The Sound of Music, Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday and Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence!

It was my kind of weirdness. Thank heavens my sister loved Bob Dylan, otherwise I’d have been really weird.

I was getting high on Lynch’s movies, and the price of admission at the Odeon in Richmond was all it cost me.

A few years later, as a reporter on the London Evening Standard, I was charged with tracking the progress of The Elephant Man, the film Lynch was shooting about John Merrick starring John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft and John Gielgud. They were on location at a crumbling old wing — so dilapidated that it...

Quentin Tarantino turns 60 today, and to celebrate the fact he was ambushed with cake by Jamie Foxx in front of 2,000 people at the London Palladium last night. Don’t go looking online for photographs of the occasion, though: the surprise came at the end of a two-night event promoting the director’s recent memoir Cinema Speculation, for which all in attendance had to turn off their mobile phones and put them into lockable pouches for the duration. Phones are famously forbidden on Tarantino’s sets, and his live appearances are no exception.

Originally set to be a one-off, Saturday night turned out to be a warm-up for Sunday’s main event. As Ike and Tina Turner’s version of “Whole Lotta Love” faded, the house lights dipped and a quick blast of Pete Moore’s “Asteroid” — Aka the kitsch 30-second Pearl & Dean jingle famous to all British moviegoers over...

Comedy is what we need right now, says Nicholas Hytner, who ran London’s National Theatre for a decade.

It’s fine to have heavy-lifting dramas by Ibsen or Schiller, but boy-oh-boy laughter is an increasingly uplifting necessity.

Which is where Guys & Dolls and James Corden, post his life on The Late Late Show, come in.

Hytner, partnered with longtime executive Nick Starr, now own and control London’s Bridge Theatre and is overseeing a fully immersive revival of the classic Broadway musical Guys & Dolls, choreographed by Dame Arlene Phillips (Strictly Come Dancing) and now in early previews.

It stars Daniel Mays as Nathan Detroit, Andrew Richardson (A Call to Spy) as Sky Masterson, Celinde Schoenmaker (Rocketman) as Sarah Brown and Marisha Wallace (Aladdin) as long-suffering Miss Adelaide. Cedric Neal plays Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Also in the cast are Jordan Castle,...

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Monty Norman, the British composer who wrote the propulsive theme for the James Bond films, died Monday after a short illness, according to a post on his official website. He was 94.

Producer Cubby Broccoli, who had worked with Norman by backing the stage musical Belle, about murderer Hawley Crippen, asked the composer to come up with the score for the first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), after he and Harry Saltzman had acquired the rights to Ian Fleming’s spy.

The deal was sealed when the producers offered to fly Norman and his then-wife, actress-singer Diana Coupland, to Jamaica, where the movie was being filmed, all expenses paid. “Well, that was the clincher for me!” Norman said in a story posted on his website. “I thought, even if Dr. No turns out to be a stinker, at least we’d have sun, sea and sand to show for it!

Monty Norman, composer of the instantly familiar “James Bond Theme” first used in Dr. No and now synonymous with 007, died today following a short illness. He was 94.

His death was announced on his official website. (Hear the theme below.)

Hollywood & Media Deaths In 2022: Photo Gallery

The British film composer got his start in show business as a big band singer in the 1950s, but by the end of the decade had pivoted to songwriting, penning tunes for, among others, Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Bob Hope.

In 1958, he contributed to such West End musicals as the English-language version of Irma la Douce and Make Me An Offer, drawing the attention of James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, who recruited Norman to compose the score for 1962’s Dr. No. According to the BBC, Norman reused a theme from one of his earlier, and unproduced, project, a stage version of Vs Naipaul...

BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge says, 'That this episode of Broadway Rewind features something Toxic, something Royal and something Academic.' We drop by New World Stages for a look at the David Bryan and Joe DePietro musical, The Toxic Avenger.We also visit with two-time Tony Award winner Matthew Broderick and the cast of Roundabout's production of The Philanthropist, but we kick it off at the opening night of director Neil Armfield's production of Eugene Ionesco's Exit The King, which starred Academy Award winners Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon, Tony Award winner Andrea Martin and Lauren Ambrose. Geoffrey Rush told Ridge, 'I just phoned my wife and said, 'Darling I just made my Broadway debut and it's a marker. It's not what I aimed for. I had never really, seriously ever thought about it... I used to listen to a lot of Broadway musical theatre back in the mid 60's...

Robert “Bob” Ullman, a longtime Broadway and Off Broadway press agent whose career spanned Ethel Merman, A Chorus Line, Curse of the Starving Class and many others, died of cardiac arrest on July 31 in Bayshore, Long Island, New York. He was 97.

His death was announced by longtime friend (and former Broadway press agent) Rev. Joshua Ellis.

Among the many Broadway productions on which Ullman worked were Ethel Merman and Mary Martin: Together on Broadway, A Chorus Line (from workshop to Public Theater to Broadway), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in The Visit, Lauren Bacall in Cactus Flower, The Dining Room, Driving Miss Daisy, Sunday in the Park with George, and over 150 additional Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals.

Actors and theater greats with whom Ullman worked include Tallulah Bankhead, Luise Rainer, James Dean, Dame Edith Evans, Geraldine Page, Phil Silvers, Bert Lahr, Rosemary Harris, James Earl Jones, Sam Waterston, Colleen Dewhurst,...

Despite his preference for growing flowers, a sensitive calf cannot escape his destiny in the bullring in this enjoyable family animation

Here’s an animation conceived on traditional and indeed unoriginal lines, rather like The Lion King – but entertaining and likable for all that. Ferdinand is a young bull calf, brought up in the Spanish countryside and trained to fight matadors in the ring, but this sensitive soul would rather grow flowers. When an emotionally wrenching disaster strikes, Ferdinand escapes the farm and finds brief happiness with a human family who are in the flower business. He grows to a mighty size, content with his floral lot, but this gentle giant cannot escape his destiny in the terrible gladiatorial arena of blood and sand.

Perhaps bizarrely, this brought to mind Tommy Steele playing a hapless bullfighter in an ancient 50s British comedy called Tommy the Toreador, singing a cheesy number called Little White Bull.

J. K. Rowling is back with a wizard world tale over which she has complete control — a diverting period adventure starring Eddie Redmayne and scores of fanciful magic creatures that belong on an endangered species list. Yep, it’s 2+plus hours of CGI illusions — in glorious 3-D for those so equipped, and Ms. Rowling has populated it with charming, personable actors. “You know — for adults.”

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

3-D Blu-ray

J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

2016 / Color / 2:40 widescreen /133 min. / Street Date March 28, 2017 / 3-D 44.95; Blu-ray & DVD 35.99

Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Colin Farrell, Katherine Waterston, Samantha Morton, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Carmen Ejogo, Ron Perlman, Jon Voight, Josh Cowdery, Dan Hedaya, Johnny Depp. .

Cinematography: Philippe Rouselot

Film Editor: Mark Day

Original Music: James Newton Howard

Written by J. K. Rowling

Produced by J.K. Rowling, Lionel Wigram

Directed by David Yates

“And lo, the magical super-franchise of Harry Potter doth continue.

“Before I said I was going to do Finian’s Rainbow I should have read the book.”Finian’s Rainbow (1968)

Commentator: Francis Ford Coppola (director)

1. Regarding the film’s opening frame featuring the word “overture” onscreen, he says it’s because this was what was referred to as a roadshow production. “They were like a night at the theater. You were given a program, it was an event, and as you came to your seat there was an overture playing.” It’s a long absent format, but Quentin Tarantino recently revived it for some screenings of The Hateful Eight.

2. He says a benefit of 70mm productions was that “the soundtrack would be in six-track magnetic stereophonic sound and was very high quality.”

3. The Warner Bros/Seven Arts logo reminds him of his time spent at the latter company working as a staff writer when they bought WB. “It was quite a coincidence related to my directing this...

As a musical it’s excellent — fine tunes and lyrics, great singing and dancing by the ever-youthful Fred Astaire, the glorious songbird Petula Clark, and the impishly weird Tommy Steele cast appropriately as a grimacing Leprechaun. The update of what was a politically acute Broadway hit in 1947 is awkward but the show is a melodious pleasure — great color, fine voices and peppy direction by Francis Ford Coppola on his first big studio feature.

Finian’s Rainbow

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 145 141 min. / Street Date March 7, 2017 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Fred Astaire, Petula Clark, Tommy Steele, Don Francks, Keenan Wynn, Barbara Hancock, Al Freeman Jr., Ronald Colby, Dolph Sweet, Wright King, Louis Silas.

Cinematography: Philip Lathrop

Film Editor: Melvin Shapiro

Original Music: Ray Heindorf

Written by E.Y. Harburg, Fred Saidy

Produced by Joseph Landon

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Finian’s Rainbow is a unique musical with a strange history.

Ron Moody in 'Oliver!' movie. Ron Moody: 'Oliver!' actor nominated for an Oscar dead at 91 (Note: This Ron Moody article is currently being revised.) Two well-regarded, nonagenarian British performers have died in the last few days: 93-year-old Christopher Lee (June 7, '15), best known for his many portrayals of Dracula and assorted movie villains and weirdos, from the title role in The Mummy to Dr. Catheter in Gremlins 2: The New Batch. 91-year-old Ron Moody (yesterday, June 11), among whose infrequent film appearances was the role of Fagin, the grotesque adult leader of a gang of boy petty thieves, in the 1968 Best Picture Academy Award-winning musical Oliver!, which also earned him a Best Actor nomination. Having been featured in nearly 200 movies and, most importantly, having had his mainstream appeal resurrected by way of the villainous Saruman in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies (and various associated merchandising,...

We're already into the fifth week of Strictly Come Dancing live shows, so things are getting very serious indeed. We've lost Tim Wonnacott, but the big question is who will be following him out of the ballroom?

Well, there are 12 celebrities left in the competition, so read on to find out what they'll be dancing - and what they'll be dancing to - in an attempt to win your votes on Saturday...

Alison Hammond & Aljaz Skorjanec

Dance: Tango

Song: 'Addicted To You' - Avicii

Caroline Flack & Pasha Kovalev

Dance: Paso Doble

Song: 'Live and Let Die' - Paul McCartney & Wings

Frankie Bridge & Kevin Clifton

Dance: Foxtrot

Song: 'Daydream Believer' - The Monkees

Jake Wood & Janette Manrara

Dance: Quickstep

Song: 'I'm Still Standing' - Elton John

Judy Murray & Anton Du Beke

Dance: Charleston

Song: 'Varsity Drag' - Pasadena Roof Orchestra

Mark Wright & Karen Hauer

Dance: Samba

Song:...

Our mother, Jean Harvey, who has died aged 83, declared at the age of six that she wanted to be an actress. She went on to a successful stage and screen career, receiving widest recognition for her work in television over more than 30 years.

Her most famous role was in Compact (1962), one of the BBC's first soaps, as the editor of the magazine from which the show took its title. She appeared in several classic serials, including North and South (1975) and two versions of Jane Eyre, playing Mrs Reed in the 1973 adaptation and Mrs Fairfax in 1983. Her favourite TV role was as Sally, the wife of Max (George Cole) in A Man of Our Times (1968), for which she received a Bafta nomination.

Jean was born near Birmingham, daughter of Dorothy and Frederick Hillen-Harvey, and studied at the city's Central School of Speech and Drama before joining Birmingham Rep as a junior member,...

BBC One has confirmed the song choices and dance styles for this weekend's Strictly Come Dancing grand final.

Abbey Clancy, Susanna Reid, Natalie Gumede and Sophie Ellis-Bextor are the four female finalists battling it out to win the Glitterball Trophy this Saturday (December 21).

In the first ever all-woman lineup, each couple will initially perform two routines in a bid to win the eleventh series of the show - a former dance picked by the judges and then a showdance.

One couple will then be eliminated from the competition, and the remaining three finalists will go on to dance their favourite routine from the series.

The songs and dance styles in full are as follows:

Abbey Clancy and Aljaz Skorjanec - Waltz to 'Kissing You' by Des'ree (judges' choice); 'Sweet Child o' Mine' by Guns N' Roses (showdance); Quickstep to Katrina and the Waves' 'Walking on Sunshine' (couples' favourite).

Sophie Ellis-Bextor...

Musicals have been tap dancing their way into moviegoers' hearts since the invention of cinema sound itself. From Oliver! to Singin' in the Rain, here are the Guardian and Observer critics' picks of the 10 best

• Top 10 documentaries

• Top 10 movie adaptations

• Top 10 animated movies

• Top 10 silent movies

• Top 10 sports movies

• Top 10 film noir

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Oliver!

Historically, the British musical has been intertwined with British music, drawing on music hall in the 1940s and the pop charts in the 50s – low-budget films of provincial interest and nothing to trouble the bosses at MGM. In the late 60s, however, the genre enjoyed a brief, high-profile heyday, and between Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence (1967) and Richard Attenborough's star-studded Oh! What A Lovely War (1969) came the biggest of them all: Oliver! (1968), Carol Reed's adaptation of Lionel Bart's 1960 stage hit and the recipient of six Academy awards.

Before Jerusalem, a 24-year-old Jez Butterworth electrified British theatre with a swaggering story of pill-popping Soho gangsters. Nearly two decades on, he tells Ryan Gilbey why it's time to put it back on the jukebox

Theatrical monster hits of recent years don't come much bigger than Jerusalem, which bounced from the Royal Court to the West End and on to Broadway, scooping awards and prompting all-night camp-outs for tickets. But more than a decade earlier, Jerusalem's writer, Jez Butterworth, and director, Ian Rickson, had launched another stage phenomenon at the Royal Court.

The rock'n'roll thriller Mojo, Butterworth's first play, was set amid the pill-popping frenzy of 1950s Soho where two gangland bosses are locked in a power struggle over the pretty young heartthrob Silver Johnny. The reviews were glowing: this paper's Michael Billington called it "the most dazzling main-stage debut in years", while the Telegraph's Charles Spencer said of the...

Tune in alert as the teens of yesteryear are on the rampage this summer, making it the perfect time to celebrate some of Hollywood's most popular teen idols. Each Thursday in June, TCM will feature an entire night of teen idol movies, with Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, James Dean and Tab Hunter on June 7; Sal Mineo, Troy Donahue, Tommy Sands and Bobby Rydell on June 14; Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Darin and Ricky Nelson on June 21; and Tommy Steele, Peter Noone and Paul Anka on June 28. Also on that last day, TCM will present Head (1968), starring Davey Jones and The Monkees. Thursday, June 78 p.m. . Jailhouse Rock (1957) . starring Elvis Presley10 p.m.

Director of eerily atmospheric Hammer horror films including The Kiss of the Vampire

In 1962, Don Sharp was a minor ex-actor, hack writer and jobbing director of British B-films, when he was offered the chance to make a gothic horror movie for Hammer, "the studio that dripped blood". In the event, The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) rescued both Sharp, who has died aged 90, and Hammer from the doldrums.

The studio, which had suffered several expensive flops, turned to Sharp due to his experience in low-budget film-making. Sharp, who claimed to have never watched a horror movie, let alone directed one, quickly steeped himself in the Hammer style by spending a week or so watching past successes, principally those directed by Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis. The Kiss of the Vampire, made with a smaller budget and an unstarry cast, recruited mostly from television, scored at the box office, and Sharp became associated with horror movies thereafter.

Charles Schneer, a producer who collaborated with special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen to make such film fantasy classics as "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" and "Jason and the Argonauts," died Jan. 21 at a hospice in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 88.

Also among Schneer's 25 films as producer was "Hellcats of the Navy" (1957), in which former President Ronald Reagan and former first lady Nancy Reagan made their only screen appearance together.

Schneer and Harryhausen also teamed on "The 3 Worlds of Gulliver" (1960), two other films about the mythical nautical adventurer Sinbad, "It Came from Beneath the Sea" (1955) and their last film together, "Clash of the Titans" (1981).

On his own, Schneer produced "Half a Sixpence," the 1967 film version of the London and Broadway musical starring Tommy Steele. He also was responsible for the 1960 biographical film on the life of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, "I Aim at the Stars," and several World War II action dramas,...

Actress Carrie Nye has lost her battle with lung cancer at her home in New York. She was 69. The Emmy-nominated The Scarlett O'Hara War star - the wife of beloved US talk show host Dick Cavett - was born in Mississippi in 1936 and attended Yale Drama School in Connecticut. She made her name on Broadway, where she enjoyed a distinguished career in hits like Cop-out, A Second String and Tommy Steele musical Half A Sixpence, which earned her a Tony nomination for her performance as Helen Walsingham. Nye was also a favorite at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where she appeared in 24 productions, including Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. She went on to receive an Emmy nomination for playing Tallulah Bankhead in TV film The Scarlett O'Hara War, and had two recurring roles on daytime drama The Guiding Light.