Happy New Year 2018!
New Year’s Day 2018: Vienna Philharmonic Live Concert
What are you doing on New Year’s Day? Join WRTI 90.1 at 11 am for the 78th annual Vienna Philharmonic concert broadcast featuring the upbeat music of the Strauss family and their contemporaries, brought to you LIVE from the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria!
The coming New Year’s Day concert will be conducted by Riccardo Muti.
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Photography: English National Ballet’s ‘Nutcracker’ 2017
Benedict Cumberbatch on “Failing” as an Actor
When Yorke asks Cumberbatch if he ever feels “out of depth” after taking on a role. He responds, “Lots of times. But if you can’t fail, you can never get better. And these weren’t total failures, these enterprises, but there was a lot that wasn’t right about them. One of the first roles I had on stage was with a brilliant director in a brilliant play with a brilliant cast, but I just couldn’t find my way into the heart of the character. I found myself straining a lot.”
Cumberbatch continues by providing a specific example of when he felt lost at the start of working on a character. He says, “I felt lost. That was [the Eugène Ionesco play] Rhinoceros. I don’t mind saying the name, because I’ve talked about it. It was partly because of where my head was at, and it was a big leap of discipline. I don’t think I was prepared for that. I don’t think I had the full tool kit to do it justice. It’s a very difficult play, it’s an extraordinarily difficult part, and I never felt I really got it right. Far from it. To a degree, Hamlet was the same. But not to do with the production or anything else—the challenge of doing that night after night was just the most extraordinary.”
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Jodie Foster Recalls How She Got Her Role in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’
Foster reveals that there was a sizeable chance that she would not have played Starling even though she desperately wanted the role. She reveals, “I had just won an Oscar so I thought I’ve got a shot. It was going to be directed by Gene Hackman, who was going to play Crawford and he read the first draft [but] said that it was too violent and he dropped out. I thought I’d be considered to direct but the studio said that the next director was going to be Jonathan Demme and he’s not interested in you. I was devastated. So, I got on a plane and I said to him I want to be your second choice and eventually got the role.”
Though the interplay between Lecter and Starling is one of the most memorable aspects of the movie, Foster admits that the two actually didn’t work much with each other on set. She says, “I did the whole first part of the movie without him; he went off [after rehearsal] to go and shoot another movie. He only shot for 7 or 10 days or maybe even less. I never saw him until halfway through the movie. Much of the dialogue is straight to camera, a Hitchcock technique so some days I never even saw him. It was the last day of shooting and I was eating a tuna fish sandwich and I said ‘I was a little scared of you’ and he said ‘I was scared of you’ and then we had a big hug.”
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A Passionate Performance of Bohuslav Martinu’s Sonata for Viola and Piano
Merry Christmas!
