‘A gift of a role for a mother’: Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer on playing Tolstoy’s tortured Anna Karenina
From Anne Boleyn to Lady W to Game of Thrones, she has played tough women who kick against society’s constraints. What will the actor bring to the great Russian character who leaves her husband and son?
Emine Saner Monday 9 June 2025
It was back in 2019 that the role of Anna Karenina was first mentioned to Natalie Dormer. Six years, many screen roles, one pandemic and two children later, Dormer is finally set to take on the titular role of Leo Tolstoy’s epic as Phillip Breen’s adaptation comes to Chichester Festival theatre. The delay has ended up working out well, says Dormer, since Tolstoy’s characters are at the “cutting edge of technology”. The new railways were transforming Russia, and that wasn’t all. “Electric light!” exclaims Dormer. “We talk about it in the play, how that’s going to revolutionise their lifestyles. That trepidation about new technology is so adaptable to today: the terror of the AI train that’s coming our way. That generation of adults in the story – they’re on the precipice of a futuristic world. I think we can identify with that.”
Yayoi Kusama: ‘A letter from Georgia O’Keeffe gave me the courage to leave home’
This article is more than 8 years old
The artist on a miserable childhood, moving from Japan to the US, and pumpkins
Rosanna Greenstreet
Saturday 21 May 2016
Born in Japan, Yayoi Kusama, 87, studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York in 1957. She has staged polka-dot orgies and naked anti-tax protests; her work spans painting, drawing, sculpture and performance, as well as literature, fashion and product design. Her latest paintings, pumpkin sculptures and mirror rooms are showing at the Victoria Miro gallery in London from 25 May. Since 1977, she has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Japan.
Sofi Oksanen: Art and Literature Help People to Feel Empathy
23 December 2021
Maybe the big narration of our time is the narration of who gets to control the data and the information. That seems to be essential for both dictators, authoritarian rulers and social media giants... – says Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen in the latest edition of The State of Things, an interview series.
Place of birth: Woodhaven, New York, United States
Occupation: Actor, film producer
Emma Robertson
Mr. Brody, would you say you have more creative energy these days than ever?
I'm lit up! I mean, I've always had creative energy, I think I just have more inspiration now. I think we've all lived through this difficult time and it has awakened in all of us a concept of time, and how fleeting our time is and can be... I want to apply my energy doing good and creating and hopefully not squandering that. That's what I live for. I do it each day in several mediums: I paint incessantly till my back is broken. I make music — I've been making music for 30 years now — and compose and create soundscapes. I just have this yearning to create.
“I STILL LOVE GOING TO MOVIES”- AN INTERVIEW WITH PAULINE KAEL
(1999)
Pauline Kael is a singular voice in the history of American film criticism. Cineaste interviewed Kael in the summer of 1999, discussing her critical career and early influences, her philosophy of criticism, great American films of the Seventies, her thoughts about retirement, and her provocative views on some recent American movies.
by Leonard Quart
Pauline Kael shook up the critical scene with her controversial 1963 Film Quarterly article, “Circles and Squares,” which attacked auteurist critics for their attempts to promote hack Hollywood films as serious works of art. During the mid-Sixties, she freelanced, writing for McCalls’s, The New Republic, Sight and Sound, and Life, among other magazine. From 1968 on she wrote length critical essays and reviews on film for The New Yorker, retiring in 1991. Today, at age eight-one, she lives alone in a handsome, book-filled, large stone-and-shingle house on the heights overlooking Great Barrington, a bustling, gentrified town in the Berkshires. For a number of years she has suffered from Parkinson’s, and can no longer write. Though she is fragile, and age and disease may have slowed her down, her passion for film and her intellectual combativeness, vitality, and independence remain intact.
'I’d say 90% of the book is an accurate description of Oslo as a city, but if the things I need for my stories aren’t there, I’ll put them there' … Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø. Photograph: Alexander Widding
Interview
Jo Nesbø interview: 'The thing about Scandinavia is that we take things for granted. Things can change very fast'
Norway's best-selling writer on why in the 'happy valley' of one of the richest countries in Europe, nothing – even a Russian invasion – is unthinkable
Susanna Rustin Friday 4 April 2014
Norway's bestselling writer is ensconced, back against the wall, in a smart bar on a residential west Oslo street. It is 9am and pouring with rain.
'I would use anything in order to tell a story, anything at all to make the story work'
Lisa Allardice Saturday 5 September 2009
"I have been interviewed by the Guardian before," William Trevor declares triumphantly when, finally, we meet. "It was way back in 1964, so maybe it doesn't count." For such a prolific and internationally celebrated writer, Trevor's reluctance to submit to the demands of today's publicity machine almost qualifies him for reclusive author status. It's no exaggeration to say this interview has taken several years – and a small cache of postcards in the author's tiny handwriting – to set up. "But I do always say no," he concedes. "It kills you in the end, anything you are doing that isn't just writing. It's no joke."
Watership Down author Richard Adams: I just can’t do humans
Watership Down, a story Richard Adams made up to scare his kids in the car, was rejected seven times before it became a classic. As a new illustrated edition is published, the author tells Alison Flood why he loves making children wince and weep
Alison Flood
Sunday 4 January 2015
R
ichard Adams, no stranger to terrifying children with his tales of rabbits being snared or gassed, narrows his eyes and recites, word-perfect, a lengthy passage from an intensely creepy short story by MR James called The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. The author of Watership Down has been remembering, with some pride, how he used to petrify his children with scary stories at bedtime. “When you’re little,” he says, “you don’t distinguish between fiction and reality. It’s all reality. And thank goodness for that. I do not believe in talking down to children. Readers like to be upset, excited and bowled over. I can remember weeping when I was little at upsetting things that were read to me, but fortunately my mother and father were wise enough to keep going.”
Suns New, Long, and Short: An Interview with Gene Wolfe
Conducted by Lawrence Person
Nova Express Volume 5, Number 1, Fall/Winter 1998
Lawrence Person: I'm given to understand that there are going to be at least two more books in the Long Sun cycle. Is this true, and will they take place on Blue, the planet settlers reach at the end of Exodus From the Long Sun?
I read Being Lolita in two feverish, painful, clarifying, enthralling, disturbing sittings, over the course of two nights, while my toddler daughter slept in the next room. I found myself wanting to reach into its pages and save the girl who was caught in them, but as I kept reading, I started to understand she didn’t need my saving. Her author was the woman she’d become, and her voice was electric, alive, rigorous, humane, allergic to reduction.
'My ties to England have loosened': John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit
Ahead of publishing his 25th novel, le Carré talks to John Banville about our ‘dismal statesmanship’ and what he learned from his time as a spy
John Banville Friday 11 October 2019
I
have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.
‘At Massimo’s funeral, his film double walked behind the coffin in homage – and all the Neapolitans thought it was his ghost’
Tue 23 October 2018
Michael Radford, director
Massimo Troisi was a huge star in Italy. He loved a film I’d made called Another Time, Another Place, about Italian PoWs in Scotland. We looked at various projects to do together, and he’d bought the rights to this Chilean novel called Burning Patience, about the death of Pablo Neruda and his friendship with a 17-year-old fisherman.
He’d had an adaptation written already, but it was awful. Massimo and I started again, working with Anna Pavignano, his former girlfriend, in a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica. We made the fisherman a 40-year-old postman, played by Massimo, and Neruda’s exile was our invention, too. One moment in the book stood out. In the 1970s, Neruda had asked the fisherman to send him tape recordings of his house at Isla Negra. I saw that it could be built up as an expression of the postman’s desire to do something creative. For me, that was the key.
I called up Philippe Noiret, who looked astonishingly like Neruda. Within an hour, he called me back and said: “If you give this to anyone else, I’ll be incredibly angry.” I also needed Neapolitan actors of 70-plus who looked like fishermen in the 50s. They came in, and I recognised many of them from Fellini movies. But they were all fat, completely unsuitable. I said to the casting director: “I can’t take any of them.” He said: “Thank goodness.” He pointed to a guy sitting in the hallway with a white suit, white fedora, white shirt, white shoes and a red tie. He was smoking with a cigarette holder. The casting director said: “He’s from the Camorra. He controls all actors in Naples over the age of 70. If you take one of them, he’s going to be on the set, he’s going to have a producing credit.”
Meanwhile, Massimo, whose heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever when he was a child, had gone to Houston for a checkup. When he came back six months later, he didn’t seem like the same person.
He collapsed on the set on the third day. He was in a terrible state. He could only film for about an hour a day, so we had to work our way around it. I just shot him in closeup. Whenever there was a wide shot, we used a double. In lots of scenes, he arrives on a bicycle, but that’s not him. Every dialogue sequence was done sitting down. I made him sit on a sound stage in Cinecittà and speak his entire dialogue just in case he didn’t make it.
In the most famous sequence, the tape recordings, he was never in shot. I got the telegraph worker character to wander around with the recorder and used my own hand to double for Massimo’s with the mic in the foreground. Philippe did all his lines in French, so in the scene where they’re discussing metaphors on the beach, he and Massimo couldn’t understand what the other was saying. Yet it looks as if there’s such understanding between them.
We ran completely over schedule. After Massimo’s last day, he went to stay with his sister in Ostia. I was listening to the radio in my apartment in Rome, and suddenly it was saying he’d died. I jumped in the car straight to his sister’s. I was crying as I was driving, and suddenly realised I was being photographed by a truckload of paparazzi. At his funeral, his double walked in homage behind the coffin; all the Neapolitans, who are superstitious as hell, assumed it was his ghost.
Harvey Weinstein bought the film to distribute. I remember him saying to me: “I’m going to sell poetry to the American people.” And he did. We were nominated for pretty much every big Oscar, and it made $21m, which made it one of the highest-grossing foreign-language films of all time. It was huge in India, though I don’t think anyone purchased a legal copy. I got a letter from Haruki Murakami saying it was his favourite movie. Everybody at some point thinks about writing a piece of poetry to express the better part of themselves.
‘You’re perfect as you are’ … Massimo Troisi and Maria Grazia Cucinotta. Photograph: Ronald Grant
Maria Grazia Cucinotta, actor
After five auditions, I got the role of Beatrice, who is wooed by Massimo’s postman. It was a complete shock. I’d had a few small roles on television, but it was my first time acting in a real movie. Massimo told me: “You’re perfect as you are. I need a quintessential southern Italian girl, so just be yourself.”
I’m from Messina, Sicily, so I grew up a little bit like Beatrice, a bit wild. The most difficult thing was not to move in a modern way. Women from the 50s were more sensual. So I watched lots of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida movies.
I was nervous among all these famous people. They were all very nice, apart from when they were shouting at me. But I deserved it. I needed to learn faster. Michael was the kind of director who needs everything perfect. I had to repeat the scene when I met the postman for the first time about 50 times. Michael said: “It has to be like you’re drunk.” I said: “I’m not drunk, I’m just in love.” He said: “Love is like wine sometimes, it makes you feel happy. But not exactly happy, more like you’re in another world.” It’s not easy to understand, especially when you’re not a professional.
The impact of the film was a shock. Before I was Maria Grazia, afterwards they started calling me “La Cucinotta”. In South America, I couldn’t walk by myself in the street. I was very young, only 24. I had my best friend crying on one side, me becoming so famous, and Massimo wasn’t there. But in a way, he’s still alive through the movie. I always say: he left his heart inside it.