News

Chicago – The presence of Sir Ben Kingsley – yes, he was knighted in his native Britain – is the first thing that commands a room. The regal and precise actor, who was awarded an Best Actor Oscar for his definitive performance in “Gandhi,” is back portraying a native of India in his latest film, “Learning to Drive.”

The film is a transition story for the two main characters. Darwan (Kingsley) is a Indian Sikh who gained political asylum in America shortly before September 11th. He is a driving instructor, and encounters a new student in Wendy (Patricia Clarkson). The woman is going through a bitter divorce, and is using the potential of learning to drive to gain more freedom. The two disparate souls help each other in essential ways, and at the same time weather the storm of some extreme life changes.

Sir Ben Kingsley as Darwan in ‘Learning to Drive’

Photo...

British star was known for performances in The Haunting and Tomb Raider among others.

Veteran British star Richard Johnson has died at the age of 87, his family has said.

Johnson was a distinguished stage and television actor whose screen career stretched over six decades.

He was under contract to MGM in the late 1950s, co-starring with Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen in Never So Few (1959).

Major roles followed in The Haunting (1963), The Amorous Adventures Of Moll Flanders (1965), opposite his second wife Kim Novak, Khartoum (1966) and Oedipus The King (1967).

Johnson was also active as a writer and producer and was a founding member of United British Artists, producing Turtle Diary (1985) and The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne (1987).

More recent film work included Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2008) and his final role in Radiator (2014), winner of the first Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival in March this year, which was attended...

"Legendary cult author Russell Hoban, whose apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker was described by Anthony Burgess as 'what literature is meant to be,'" has died at the age of 86, reports Alison Flood in the Guardian. "Hoban, born in Pennsylvania but a resident of London for more than 30 years, first made a name for himself with his children's books; his series about Frances the badger and his novel The Mouse and His Child are acclaimed as modern classics. Riddley Walker, set in Kent 2000 years after a nuclear holocaust and told in a distinctive version of English, was begun in 1974 and published in 1980 to huge praise. It has since been included in Harold Bloom's survey of literature, The Western Canon."

The Telegraph calls Hoban "a maverick writer of extraordinary imaginative gifts and highly original turn of phrase; although he was sometimes compared to Tolkien and to Cs Lewis, he conformed to...