Considered by many as possibly the greatest player of all time, Rod “Rocket” Laver is the only tennis player to win two Grand Slams (1962 and 1969). He signed my caricature at his residence in California in June 1994.
Richard Wilson played Malvolio in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Twelfth Night in 2010, a role which dragged him some way out of the shadow of the nation’s favourite misanthrope Victor Meldrew in the hugely successful sitcom One Foot in the Grave. Virgin territory, playing his first Shakespearean part and donning the yellow stockings to play the puritan steward duped into erotic humiliation.
It transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End and Richard signed for me in January 2010 at the stage door, well, more the public pathway on St Martin’s Lane since the stage door is inaccessible.
For the past two years, Hollywood legend Robert Redford has brought his Sundance Film and Music Festival to the O2 in Greenwich, London. On both occasions, the Sundance Kid himself has attended. I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to his Q&A last year and this year he introduced the History of the Eagles doco and the band members themselves. I have not seen or heard that he signs for anyone at the Festival. He politely slipped past us after the Q&A to his waiting limo and this year I didn’t even attempt to ask.
Instead, I did a quick sketch of him and mailed it to his office at the Sundance Resort in Utah. I was told by a seasoned collector the he is a very good signer ‘when round the office’ and that proved to be the case.
See my earlier Redford drawing here.
‘Hawking’ has been used at the All England Club since 1999 as an ideal environmentally-friendly method of pest control. They use a company called Avian Environmental Consultants, strangely enough. For years, pigeons fluttered onto Wimbledon’s prestige courts, distracting the players and distrupting the world’s premier tennis tournament. Unimpressed by officials flapping their arms around at them, a hawk has been used to scare the pigeons each morning before spectators arrive for the days play. It doesn’t kill the pigeons, but his presence is enough to frighten them away. The Davis family operate the company – not just during the fortnight of the tournament, but they visit every week of the year as pigeons do not register the hawk’s presence in their memories for very long and need regular sightings to keep them roosting at SW19.
In her films Charlotte Rampling often conveys a sense of severity that is accentuated by her unique beauty: the prominent cheek bones, the narrow mouth, adorned at times by an enigmatic smile and of course those narrow, cat-like eyes whose colour, depending on the light, can vary from green to grey and even yellow.
Meeting her in person is far less forbidding than her films and features suggest. At the rear entrance to the renowned Savoy Hotel in London on a chilly November night in 2010.
Charlotte was a guest presenter at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. In fact, it was too cold to be standing around for any length of time, so I left it to the last possible moment to enter the fray.
My arrival coincided with hers. I did intend to go behind the barriers, but didn’t get time. She stepped out of her car, saw the sketch, signed it then added the inscription when I asked. She smiled and said thank you, I returned the thank you. It was very all very symmetrical and pleasant…. I then had to contend with the hunters and collectors behind the barriers, but that’s another story.
Dame Judi Dench – one of the greatest stage and screen actresses of all time, is also one of the best signers. Her most recent stage performance was as Alice in Peter and Alice at the Noël Coward Theatre in London. There was huge demand for her ‘graph and she always obliged – a real trouper!
I did this quick ‘portrait study’ in March 2010 and dropped it into the Rose Theatre in Surrey, where she was playing Titania as Queen Elizabeth I in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – almost 50 years after she first played the role for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Martin McDonagh’s acclaimed comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan is currently running at the Noel Coward Theatre as a part of Michael Grandage’s five play season with the with the wizard himself, Daniel Radcliffe.
McDonagh’s earlier play The Beauty Queen of Leenane – a black comedy set in a village in County Galway, revolving around a plain, lonely woman in her forties with her first and possibly final chance at love and her manipulative mother who sets about to derail it.
It premiered in 1996 in Galway, then transferred to London’s Royal Court Theatre before an extensive National tour of Ireland, then returning to London’s West End at the Duke of York’s in November 1996. In 1998 it opened off-Broadway, receiving six Tony nominations and winning four.
The play was revived at The Young Vic in London. The excellent cast – Derbhle Crotty, Rosaleen Linehan, Frank Laverty and Johnny Ward all gladly signed my sketch after I saw the afternoon matinée on 31 August 2011
Theatre of Blood is a cultish 1973 MGM film that featured Vincent Price as Edward Lionheart, an old, vengeful Shakespearean ham actor and Diana Rigg as his Cordelia -like daughter, Edwina.
Having been robbed of the coveted ‘Critics Cirtcle’ award, Lionheart decides to murder seven critics – each representing one of the seven deadly sins, one by one.
The butchery takes place in a crumbling derelict theatre and each critic’s demise is inspired by the deaths of characters in the plays Lionheart performed in his final season of Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, Othello and Henry VI, Part I.
The National Theatre produced the stage version, which was adapted from the film by British Company ‘Improbable’ with Oscar winner Jim Broadbent playing Lionheart and two time Olivier nominee Rachael Stirling (Diana Rigg’s daughter) playing his daughter Miranda (not Edwina).
The adaption ran at the National’s Lyttleton Theatre between May and September 2005.
Winner of three Olivier Awards, Alex Jennings is one of Britain’s most revered actors and has been lauded as the new John Gielgud. His latest stage appearance was in the National Theatre’s critically acclaimed double bill, Untold Stories by Alan Bennett. Alex plays Alan in two autobiographical recollections “Hymn” a touching story of music and childhood and “Cocktail Sticks” which revisits some of the themes and conversations of the author’s memoir A Life Like Other People’s.
It transferred to The Duchess Theatre in April this year and completed its run last Saturday evening.
On press night, Alex stopped the curtain call applause to recall his old friend and colleague Richard Griffiths. He delivered a tear choked address and reminded the packed auditorium that the lights had been dimmed across the West End at 7.28pm in honour of the actor who had died the previous week following complications after a heart operation.
Amy Adams portrays Lois Lane in the rebooted Superman franchise Man of Steel. The 38 year old, three time Academy Award nominee braved the wind and the rain in Leicester Square, London to sign for as many people as possible. Including my sketch. Even though the wind was flapping it around and the rain was turning it into maché she took her time to sign an dedicate it and compliment me – which I returned – a real trooper.
