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Slow West star Ben Mendelsohn with Anne-Katrin Titze in New York Photo: Omar Gonzales

John Ford's Stagecoach and The Searchers, Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo and Red River, and Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven come to mind for Ben Mendelsohn, who stars with Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee in John Maclean's untamed Slow West. He has recently been seen in David Mackenzie's prison drama Starred Up with Jack O'Connell, Kevin Macdonald's treasure-hunting tale Black Sea with Jude Law, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly with Ray Liotta, Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy and James Gandolfini and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond The Pines with Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper and Eva Mendes.

Michael Fassbender (Silas) and Ben Mendelsohn (Payne): "At that stage, he is starting to make a move towards taking the boy."

When I met up with Ben the day before...

Powerful stage and screen actor often cast as an aristocrat, king or moustachioed villain

When the whisky flowed, according to the writer John Heilpern, the actor Nigel Davenport looked "as if he might knock you through the wall for sport". However, words such as "imposing" and "heavyweight", both often applied to his performances on stage and screen across more than 40 years, do not do sufficient justice to his lightness of touch and comic energy.

Davenport, who has died aged 85, was a founder member of the English Stage Company (Esc) at the Royal Court – in the first season, he was in every production except Look Back in Anger – and a distinguished president of Equity, the actors' union; he played leads in Restoration comedy and absurdist drama as well as King Lear.

In a recent rerun of the BBC's Keeping Up Appearances, he loomed as a lubricious old navy commodore coming on...

Actor who played many major Shakespearean roles on the stage

Few actors played as many major Shakespearean roles as did Paul Rogers, a largely forgotten and seriously underrated performer, who has died aged 96. It was as though he was barnacled in those parts, undertaken at the Old Vic in the 1950s, by the time he played his most famous role, the vicious paterfamilias Max in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Aldwych theatre in 1965 (and filmed in 1973).

Staunch, stolid and thuggish, with eyes that drilled through any opposition, Rogers's Max was a grumpy old block of granite, hewn on an epic scale, despite the flat cap and plimsolls – horribly real. Peter Hall's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company was monumental; everything was grey, chill and cheerless in John Bury's design, set off firstly by a piquant bowl of green apples and then by the savage acting.

The Homecoming...

The largely forgotten Polish professor, who drew a connection between Shakespeare and 20th-century European theatre, had a huge impact on modern-day theatrical culture

Does anyone still read Jan Kott? For those unfamiliar with the name, Kott (1914–2001) was a Polish professor whose book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, published in English in 1964, had a profound impact on theatre. Reading it again today, I am stunned by how much of it has been absorbed into our theatrical culture. Although we live in an age of great Shakespearean scholarship, represented by figures such as James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate and Stephen Greenblatt, I can't think of anyone today who influences production in quite the same way as Kott.

Partly, that stemmed from Kott's experience of living in a Poland that was either under Nazi occupation or Soviet domination. As Peter Brook wrote in the introduction to the English edition, Kott is the only Elizabethan scholar to...

What happens when you strip Shakespeare’s King Lear down to its basic plot, shuffling all the subplots and most of the comic bits off to the wayside? You end up with something almost maliciously pessimistic about what humans are capable of, but also something that moves with a malevolent sense of purpose. Lear is maybe the greatest work ever written in the English language, but it’s amazing how much one of the greatest works in the English language resembles a grim, gritty action film at its core. Mounted in 1953 for CBS’ Sunday-afternoon arts-and-culture program Omnibus, Peter Brook ...

He may not have lived to see 100, but his films will see 1000 and beyond.

This coming 23rd of March would have been Akira Kurosawa's 100th birthday. The master died in 1998, but his films continue to fascinate and enthrall entire generations of people who may not have even heard of him until after his death. Should you find yourself realizing that you haven't seen enough from Kurosawa's filmography, you're in luck—Turner Classic Movies is planning a hell of a centennial.

For the month of March beginning the 9th, TCM will air five of Kurosawa's films every Tuesday, with a 24-hour marathon on his birthday. 26 films in total are involved, which covers nearly all of Akira Kurosawa's body of work. 25, technically, since Sanshiro Sugata is split into two parts.

Yes, these are the same 25 movies in Criterion's Ak 100 DVD box set released back in December. You can buy that...

#232 (Vol. 2 #4): David Levine On Stage

The great caricaturist David Levine, who passed away at the close of 2009, was the subject of a sad profile article, “Levine in Winter“, written by David Margolick in Vanity Fair in November of the previous year. It was yet another variation on what has become an all too familiar theme: the troubles of the comics or cartoon art professional when, for whatever reason, his career goes into decline. Levine’s brilliant caricatures of politicians, authors, and other notables had regularly appeared in The New York Review of Books for over forty years. His work appeared in other publications as well, but the Review published half his work over the years. But, in his eighties, Levine suffered from macular degeneration, which greatly dimmed his vision, hence handicapping his ability to draw. This led to an awkward situation: though Levine believed he could adapt and continue working,...

Orson Welles wasn't just thwarted on the silver screen. His plans to shake up television with innovations that anticipated the YouTube era were foiled, too

When we think of Orson Welles and television, the impulse is often to smirk. The innumerable talk-show appearances, though reliably entertaining, couldn't help but seem sad in comparison to his earlier triumphs. And those ads for the likes of Findus frozen foods and Paul Masson wine were hard to take seriously even before viral video made us familiar with Welles's absurd on-set relationship with hack copy, which ranged from perfectionist quibbling to ostensibly drunken slurring.

Fair enough. Such undertakings could hardly be counted among the highlights of any career, let alone one that included Citizen Kane and Chimes at Midnight. But it's worth bearing two things in mind in between chuckles. First, the proceeds from these appearances were invariably funnelled toward one or other of...

James Earl Jones is apologizing for running late. Calling from his upstate New York home, he explains that he was outside shoveling ice when he remembered he had an interview. "The trees are frozen solid," he says. "I can hear the limbs snap." That booming basso profundo, the gravitas he gives to each sentence, the way he accentuates the word snap -- you can almost feel the freezing wind. Without even trying, Jones is speaking poetry.Of course, the actor, who turns 78 on Jan. 17, is known for being much more than just a pretty voice. In more than 50 years in the theatre, he has tackled such classic roles as Othello and King Lear and created indelible characters like prizefighter Jack Jefferson in Howard Sackler's Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Great White Hope. His work in films ranging from the classic (Field of Dreams, as the voice of Darth Vader...

Paul Scofield, the imperious British actor of stage and screen who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, died Wednesday; he was 86. Scofield, who passed away at a hospital near his home in southern England, had been suffering from leukemia. Scofield began his acting career onstage, where it would always be centered, and he found his first successes in taking on a variety of Shakespearean roles during and after World War II. His towering presence and amazing performances quickly drew comparison to fellow thespian Laurence Olivier. While continuing his theater work, Scofield began appearing in a handful of films in the 1950s and early 1960s, most notably the John Frankenheimer thriller The Train. In fact, he had only three films to his credit when he was asked to reprise his celebrated role as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film adaptation of A Man for All Seasons, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Fred Zinnemann. The story of King Henry VIII's Chancellor of England, who refused to go along with the monarch's break from the Roman Catholic Church and was executed for it, the film was a sumptuous adaptation of the Robert Bolt play and a critical and commercial success, winning six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Actor for Scofield.

Despite his acclaimed Oscar success, the actor continued to work mainly in the theater, with occasional forays into cinema, primarily in stage-to-film adaptations; notable films in the 1970s included Peter Brook's version of King Lear and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance opposite Katharine Hepburn. Scofield found the second role of a lifetime in the stage production of Amadeus, where he played the tortured and envious composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham would win an Oscar for the role in the 1984 film). Considered reclusive, a trait he would deny in many interviews, he hand-picked his film roles very carefully, appearing in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, and he received a second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor, for Robert Redford's Quiz Show. His last major film role was in 1996's The Crucible, which won him his third BAFTA award. Scofield is survived by his wife, the actress Joy Parker, whom he married in 1943, and their two children, Martin and Sarah. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff...