Last modified on Thu 20 May 2021 05.01 EDT Rikki Beadle-Blair was just 15 when he caught the attention of a film director. It was 1976 and the Bermondsey Lamp Post, the experimental, anarchic south-east London free school he attended, had financially collapsed and been shut down. With little to occupy him, he began writing and producing plays in the streets where he lived. Bugsy Malone had recently been released at the cinema, and Beadle-Blair thought it would be perfect for a big neighbourhood production. Today, the writer and director of the pioneering Channel 4 show Metrosexuality can look back on a career that includes writing six films, directing three more and writing and directing more than 40 plays. But back in the 1970s, he was advertising his show in shop windows and asking local children and other teenagers to audition. “What was great about Bugsy Malone,” he says, “was that it was a multiracial film. So it encouraged a multiracial turnout.”
Daniel Kaluuya with his Best Supporting Actor Oscar Credit: Getty Daniel Kaluuya, the Camden-born son of Ugandan immigrants who, at the age of 32, won his first Oscar for his role as Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in political thriller Judas and the Black Messiah, got his first big break while taking a nap. It happened one Wednesday afternoon in 2007 in the writer’s room of Skins, the warts-and-all cult E4 show about a bunch of Bristol sixth-formers drinking, sleeping together, and generally dealing with the kinds of issues faced by real teens. That realism was the result of the show’s genuinely youth-led creative process – it was important to creator Bryan Elsley that the stories, not just the actors, reflected authentic experiences. He and his team trawled London’s youth theatre groups and assembled a bunch of teenagers to come in once and week and advise on the scripts. Among them, plucked from a Hampstead Theatre after-school club, was 17-year-old Daniel Kaluuya.
Daily Monitor Sunday March 07 2021 Tony Mushoborozi In 2017, an American film called Get Out achieved such great acclaim that it would soon become among the most talked about films of that year. For any film to create the kind of buzz that Get Out did is superb. For a horror film to do so is extremely rare. Naturally, it did very well in cinemas (for obvious reasons) and grossed an impressive $255m (Shs938b) worldwide against a budget of $4.5m (Shs16.5b). A year later, the film received loads of nominations for prestigious awards, including two Golden Globes nominations and four Academy Award nominations, where it eventually won an Oscar for best original screenplay.
10 Things You Never Knew About Daniel Kaluuya | Anglophenia bbcamerica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bbcamerica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Gemma Jones in Bridget Jones s Diary Credit: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo Euphoria rings in her voice before Gemma Jones breaks off to explain why. “I’m feeling slightly hysterical this morning”, she admits. “I’ve had my first coronavirus inoculation and I’m so relieved. I live near the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead and every time I left the house I felt I was playing Russian roulette. Now I can go to the corner shop without fear. I don’t have to jump out of the way if people jog by, puffing and blowing.” Jones, a much-loved actor of the unstarry variety, is 78, a fact she finds astonishing. She made her name as Louisa Trotter, the Cockney cook-turned high-class hotelier in the Seventies television hit The Duchess of Duke Street but is best known now as Bridget’s meddling mother in the Bridget Jones films – or as Hogwarts’ hospital matron Poppy Pomfrey in three Harry Potters. For her performance in the unforgettable BBC television film Marvellous, alongside Toby Jones as her son with learning difficulties, she won a Bafta for best supporting actress in 2015.