Drawing: Robert Redford

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The second Sundance London Film and Music Festival has just concluded after a four day run at the O2 Arena. It’s a condensed version of the original Sundance Festival held earlier in Utah. It’s founder and President, the legendary Robert Redford, also returned this year after a successful inaugural event in 2012.

Mr Redford… or “Bob” to some, is not known to be an accommodating signer in public. I attended his Q+A last year and was one of three people waiting at the exit , but his PA said, “Mr Redford doesn’t sign autographs.” He was right.

This year he attended all four days, including the History of the Eagles, Part I documentary and Q+A with the band members after the screening. I don’t know anyone who got his autograph, or even tried. However, when he’s around his numerous offices, he is apparently a good signer, according to the autograph aficionados.

Late in 1994 I was in Los Angeles, more specifically in Santa Monica. He has an office on Montana Ave. I found out he was around that day. I duly found it and left my sketch with a nice note and a reply envelope. It duly arrived back, signed!

In 1998 I had the pleasure of working with ‘Bob’ and Sam Neill to arrange the New Zealand Premiere and Charity Screening of The Horse Whisperer, when I managed Movieland 5 in Invercargill. He not only secured a print for us from the distributors, but sent a signed message from the event’s programme.

Drawing: James McAvoy and Claire Foy in Macbeth

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Glasgow-born James McAvoy has just completed the lead role in a sell out season of ‘the Scottish play’, with English actress Claire Foy as Lady Macbeth.

After an eighty day run as London’s Trafalgar Studios, James goes straight into filming the next instalment of X Men alongside the two Knights, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, who have both also starred as the murdering Scot. James commented that it would be fun having three Macbeths in the one place “We might have a Macbeth-off – my Macbeth’s better than your Macbeth!”

The production received rave reviews, but the interaction with the audience didn’t always go to script. He suddenly stopped mid-scene when someone in the front was filming with his mobile phone. He refused to continue with the play until the device was firmly put away. James also stopped in the middle of the climatic sword fight to help an audience member who had collapsed. He called for help, cracked a joke or two, then continued the scene with the same intensity, according to one witness who tweeted the event. On another occasion, he told two drunk women who kept talking through the early scenes to “shut up”. They eventually complied and later fell asleep.

When he signed my sketch, going in for the Friday evening’s performance, he was telling the gathered ‘graphers that he had injured an eye and his hand due to the intense physicality of the play. Luckily it was his left hand, so he could still sign!

Drawings: Prunella Scales and Connie Booth

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

I left this drawing of Prunella Scales at the stage door of the Apollo Theatre, London, where she was performing Carrie’s War in July 2009. It was returned to me, signed, through the mail.

I also received my Connie Booth sketch signed back through the mail. She now works as a psychotherapist in London, after ending her acting career in 1995. I sent the sketch to her North London clinic. She very rarely signs, and had declined to talk about Fawlty Towers for 30 years until she had agreed to participate in a documentary about the series in 2009, so I was very happy to get it back signed and dedicated.

Drawing: Colin Farrell

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Colin Farrell signed my sketch at the Total Recall premiere in Leicester Square, London.

Colin is always very friendly and loved the drawing, chatting with me as he signed it – one of the nicest film stars.

Drawing: John Hurt and Sir Michael Gambon in Krapp’s Last Tape

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE is a one-act play for one actor by Samuel Beckett. I first saw it performed by John Hurt at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London in March, 2000. It’s genre is described as ‘minimalist monodrama’. It’s Krapp’s 69th birthday and he hauls out his old tape recorder, listens to a recording he did 30 years earlier, before making a new one.

Sir Michael Gambon performed a revival at the Duchess Theatre in October 2010.

Drawing: Priscilla Presley

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Priscilla Presley made her pantomime debut in London last Christmas, playing the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I sent this drawing to the theatre and received it back through the mail in January.

Drawing: Haydn Gwynne as Margaret Thatcher in The Audience

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’ died yesterday.The former and first (and only) female British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s passing has bought mixed reactions in the UK. Tony and Olivier nominated actress, Haydn Gwynne currently portrays her in Peter Morgan’s new play, THE AUDIENCE at the Gielgud Theatre. “I don’t know many people who would be neutral about Margaret Thatcher,” she wrote in the programme. “Everything about her was antithetical to what I believe in,but I would never play her through a filter of my own view of her…it’s not what is required. The weird thing is that, as soon as you are asked to play someone like this-and of course I watched bits of footage and read her biography and memoirs-you stop judging.”

I was going to do a sketch of Haydn anyway, along with other cast members,so it seemed appropriate to whip one up and have it signed by the Thatcher ‘stage surrogate’ on the day of Maggie’s passing. It was a surreal atmosphere around the stage door as cast and crew filtered in,with the occasional comment about ‘the event’ of the day. I missed Haydn going in, but did get to meet Peter Morgan,who signed my programme which was a bonus.

Everyone left relatively quickly after the performance and the group gathered at the exit soon dispersed once Dame Helen drove off, leaving only me, Phil, the stage door manager and one or two patrons from the gay bar opposite who had popped out for a ciggy….oh and the guy who feeds the pigeons. Haydn finally appeared around 10.45 and looked surprised..that someone was still waiting,let alone with a sketch. “I guess it must have been an interesting night?” I said. “Very interesting”, she replied. She liked the drawing-thought it was a nice touch and the poignancy of the moment felt as she signed it with a spirit-based sharpie.

Drawing: Helen Mirren as The Queen in The Audience

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

In 2006 Dame Helen Mirren won 29 major awards for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the film The Queen, including the Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG and BAFTA Awards for Best Actress.

In April this year she once again reprised the role for the stage production of Peter Morgan’s (who also wrote The Queen) world premiere of The Audience at the Gielgud in Shaftesbury Ave.

For the last sixty one years, the Queen has met with 12 Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said… not even to their spouces. The Audience breaks that code of silence and imagines a series of pivotal meetings, charting an arc through the second Elizabethan Age. Prime Ministers come and go through the revolving door of politics, while she remains constant.

The Audience opened to critical acclaim, and is nominated for five Laurence Olivier Awards, including a Best Actress nod for Dame Helen.

She is always very accommodating with autograph requests. If she doesn’t sign in person, the stage-door manager takes material to her. My programme was signed when she was leaving after an evening performance, but I left the sketch at the theatre. When time is limited and there are gazillions of graphs to do, she has abbreviate to ‘H. Mirren” so I was please to get a full signature and the customary wavy underline. I wonder if Elizabeth R will take in the play, after all she and Philip did go to War Horse and did invite Dame Helen to dinner at the Palace in May 2007.

Drawing: Tom Cruise

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

It’s April – not that the weather’s come to the party, as it continued to chuck down the white stuff…. but, as they say ‘there’s no business like snow business.’

Appropriately, a white carpet (or maybe originally it was red!) awaited Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko and director Joseph Kosinski for the UK premiere of the Sci Fi saga Oblivion at the BFI IMAX near London’s Waterloo station.

One of the highest paid and most sought-after actors in screen history, Tom Cruise, has played a bartender, soldier, pilot, special agent, samurai, contract killer, senator, magazine owner, lawyer, sports agent, student, vampire, race-car driver and pool player can now add one of the few remaining drone repairmen assigned to an Earth devastated by decades of war with the alien Scavs.

One forecast was guaranteed, whatever the weather, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV would not disappoint his frozen fans. Thankfully, he shortened his moniker, or it would be Summer before he finished signing. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tom doesn’t rush. He always arrives early, completes media commitments, and then spends as much time as it takes ‘signing the line’ (that’s graphers lingo for everyone).

The planet’s biggest star is also its biggest signer. An interesting fact: he’s actually left handed but signs with his right hand. He has been known to spend up to 3 hours signing siggies and posing for pics prior to screenings. That’s quality and quantity, but then he’s good with numbers. Each one of his three wives have been 11 years younger than the previous one. And they were all 33 when the marriages ended. So maybe he’s more of a numerologist than a Scientologist.

By the time he got to me which was around half an hour after he started down Sharpie street, he must have signed nigh on 100 ‘graphs. When he saw my sketch he was really pleased with it and we had a brief chat and he signed and dedicated it. Mission: Acccomplished

Drawing: Ben Whishaw and Judi Dench in Peter and Alice

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The Michael Grandage Company’s second of five theatrical treats at the Noel Coward Theatre is Peter and Alice written by John Logan, it’s a moving study of enchanchment and reality after a brief encounter between the real-life models for Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, laying bare the lives of two extraordinary characters shaped by JM Barrie and Lewis Carroll. The actual fleeting meeting took place at a literary event in 1932, when Alice Liddell Hargreaves was 80 and Peter Lleweullyn Davies was 35. Logan speculates on their imagined conversations, looking at how we are all shaped by our childhoods. The children who inspired two classics meet as emotionally bruised adults in a dusty old bookstore and explore their views of past relationships with the authors and the price that they have paid when fame is foisted on the child heroine and the boy who never grew up. It is a tale of two tortured souls with Peter struggling the most with the unwanted fame. “I think I know what childhood is for. It’s to give us a bank of happy memories against future suffering.”

Alice passed away peacefully and contented, Peter committed suicide, throwing himself under a train in Sloane Square. The principle characters are played by Dame Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw – transferring ‘M’ and ‘Q’ from the screen to Wonderland and Neverland from the recent Bond film Skyfall (also written by John Logan).

Both actors are terrific on stage and off stage. They are great signers, but the problem is that they leave at opposite ends of the theatre. Alice through the front looking glass (barriered) and Peter flies out the back. In order to avoid having to go back twice, signature strategy requires some prior intelligence. My spies told me that Ben usually exits first, then the mob hot foot it to the front of the theatre for Dame Judi. And that’s exactly what happened. As all good bedtime stories should finish.