On This Day

RichardTheBruce

May 13th

1946: Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith is born--Rugby, Warwickshire, England.
(He dies 7 April 2017 at age 70--Northampton, England.)

Tim Pigott-Smith obituary

See the complete article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/apr/09/tim-pigott-smith-obituary

Stage and screen actor best known for his role in the TV series The Jewel in the Crown
Michael Coveney | Sun 9 Apr 2017 13.34 EDT

Tim Pigott-Smith as Ronald Merrick, with Siddharth Kak (right),
in The Jewel in the Crown, Granada TV’s adaptation of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels.
Photograph: ITV/Rex

The only unexpected thing about the wonderful actor Tim Pigott-Smith, who has died aged 70, was that he never played Iago or, indeed, Richard III. Having marked out a special line in sadistic villainy as Ronald Merrick in his career-defining, Bafta award-winning performance in The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Granada TV’s adaptation for ITV of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels, he built a portfolio of characters both good and bad who were invariably presented with layers of technical accomplishment and emotional complexity.

Tim Pigott-Smith in the title role of
Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III at the
Almeida theatre in 2014. Photograph:
Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

He emerged as a genuine leading actor in Shakespeare, contemporary plays by Michael Frayn – in Frayn’s Benefactors (1984) he was a malicious, Iago-like journalist undermining a neighbouring college chum’s ambitions as an architect – and Stephen Poliakoff, American classics by Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee, and as a go-to screen embodiment of high-ranking police officers and politicians, usually served with a twist of lemon and a side order of menace and sarcasm.

He played a highly respectable King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011, but that performance was eclipsed, three years later, by his subtle, affecting and principled turn in the title role of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III (soon to be seen in a television version) at the Almeida, in the West End and on Broadway, for which he received nominations in both the Olivier and Tony awards. The play, written in Shakespearean iambics, was set in a futuristic limbo, before the coronation, when Charles refuses to grant his royal assent to a Labour prime minister’s press regulation bill.

The interregnum cliffhanger quality to the show was ideal for Pigott-Smith’s ability to simultaneously project the spine and the jelly of a character, and he brilliantly suggested an accurate portrait of the future king without cheapening his portrayal of him. Although not primarily a physical actor, like Laurence Olivier, he was aware of his attributes, once saying that the camera “does something to my eyes, particularly on my left side in profile”, something to do with the eye being quite low and “being able to see some white underneath the pupil”. It was this physical accident, not necessarily any skill, he modestly maintained, which gave him a menacing look on film and television, “as if I am thinking more than one thing”.

Tim Pigott-Smith: a man born to play kings
Born in Rugby, Tim was the only child of Harry Pigott-Smith, a journalist, and his wife Margaret (nee Goodman), a keen amateur actor, and was educated at Wyggeston boys’ school in Leicester and – when his father was appointed to the editorship of the Herald in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962 – King Edward VI grammar school, where Shakespeare was a pupil. Attending the Royal Shakespeare theatre, he was transfixed by John Barton and Peter Hall’s Wars of the Roses production, and the actors: Peggy Ashcroft, with whom he would one day appear in The Jewel in the Crown, Ian Holm and David Warner. He took a part‑time job in the RSC’s paint shop.

At Bristol University he gained a degree in English, French and drama (1967), and at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school he graduated from the training course (1969) alongside Jeremy Irons and Christopher Biggins as acting stage managers in the Bristol Old Vic company. He joined the Prospect touring company as Balthazar in Much Ado with John Neville and Sylvia Syms and then as the Player King and, later, Laertes to Ian McKellen’s febrile Hamlet. Back with the RSC he played Posthumus in Barton’s fine 1974 production of Cymbeline and Dr Watson in William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, opposite John Wood’s definitive detective, at the Aldwych and on Broadway. He further established himself in repertory at Birmingham, Cambridge and Nottingham.

Tim Pigott-Smith as the avuncular businessman Ken Lay in Lucy Prebble’s Enron
at the Minerva theatre, Chichester, in 2009.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

He was busy in television from 1970, appearing in two Doctor Who sagas, The Claws of Axos (1971) and The Masque of Mandragora (1976), as well as in the first of the BBC’s adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1975, as Frederick Hale; in the second, in 2004, he played Hale’s father, Richard). His first films were Jack Gold’s Aces High (1976), adapted by Howard Barker from RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, and Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews (1977). His first Shakespeare leads were in the BBC’s Shakespeare series – Angelo in Measure for Measure and Hotspur in Henry IV Part One (both 1979).

A long association with Hall began at the National Theatre in 1987, when he played a coruscating half-hour interrogation scene with Maggie Smith in Hall’s production of Coming in to Land by Poliakoff; he was a Dostoeyvskyan immigration officer, Smith a desperate, and despairing, Polish immigrant. In Hall’s farewell season of Shakespeare’s late romances in 1988, he led the company alongside Michael Bryant and Eileen Atkins, playing a clenched and possessed Leontes in The Winter’s Tale; an Italianate, jesting Iachimo in Cymbeline; and a gloriously drunken Trinculo in The Tempest (he played Prospero for Adrian Noble at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2012).

Tim Pigott-Smith: how Ian McKellen made me raise my acting game
The Falstaff on television when he played Hotspur was Anthony Quayle, and he succeeded this great actor, whom he much admired as director of the touring Compass Theatre in 1989, playing Brutus in Julius Caesar and Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. When the Arts Council cut funding to Compass, he extended his rogue’s gallery with a sulphurous Rochester in Fay Weldon’s adaptation of Jane Eyre, on tour and at the Playhouse, in a phantasmagorical production by Helena Kaut-Howson, with Alexandra Mathie as Jane (1993); and, back at the NT, as a magnificent, treacherous Leicester in Howard Davies’ remarkable revival of Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1996) with Isabelle Huppert as a sensual Mary and Anna Massey a bitterly prim Elizabeth.

In that same National season, he teamed with Simon Callow (as Face) and Josie Lawrence (as Doll Common) in a co-production by Bill Alexander for the Birmingham Rep of Ben Jonson’s trickstering, two-faced masterpiece The Alchemist; he was a comically pious Subtle in sackcloth and sandals. He pulled himself together as a wryly observant Larry Slade in one of the landmark productions of the past 20 years: O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida in 1998, transferring to the Old Vic, and to Broadway, with Kevin Spacey as the salesman Hickey revisiting the last chance saloon where Pigott-Smith propped up the bar with Rupert Graves, Mark Strong and Clarke Peters in Davies’ great production.

He and Davies combined again, with Helen Mirren and Eve Best, in a monumental NT revival (designed by Bob Crowley) of O’Neill’s epic Mourning Becomes Electra in 2003. Pigott-Smith recycled his ersatz “Agamemnon” role of the returning civil war hero, Ezra Mannon, as the real Agamemnon, fiercely sarcastic while measuring a dollop of decency against weasel expediency, in Euripides’ Hecuba at the Donmar Warehouse in 2004. In complete contrast, his controlled but hilarious Bishop of Lax in Douglas Hodge’s 2006 revival of Philip King’s See How They Run at the Duchess suggested he had done far too little outright comedy in his career.

Tim Pigott-Smith as King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2011.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Television roles after The Jewel in the Crown included the titular chief constable, John Stafford, in The Chief (1990-93) and the much sleazier chief inspector Frank Vickers in The Vice (2001-03). On film, he showed up in The Remains of the Day (1993); Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002), a harrowing documentary reconstruction of the protest and massacre in Derry in 1972; as Pegasus, head of MI7, in Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English (2003) and the foreign secretary in the Bond movie Quantum of Solace (2008).

Tim Pigott-Smith: a life on stage and screen – in pictures
In the last decade of his life he achieved an amazing roster of stage performances, including a superb Henry Higgins, directed by Hall, in Pygmalion (2008); the avuncular, golf-loving entrepreneur Ken Lay in Lucy Prebble’s extraordinary Enron (2009), a play that proved there was no business like big business; the placatory Tobias, opposite Penelope Wilton, in Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Almeida in 2011; and the humiliated George, opposite his Hecuba, Clare Higgins, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, at Bath.

At the start of this year he was appointed OBE. His last television appearance came as Mr Sniggs, the junior dean of Scone College, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, starring Jack Whitehall. He had been due to open as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in Northampton prior to a long tour.

Pigott-Smith was a keen sportsman, loved the countryside and wrote four short books, three of them for children.

In 1972 he married the actor Pamela Miles. She survives him, along with their son, Tom, a violinist, and two grandchildren, Imogen and Gabriel.

• Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith, actor, born 13 May 1946; died 7 April 2017

This article was amended on 10 April 2017. Tim Pigott-Smith’s early performance as Balthazar in Much Ado About Nothing was with the Prospect touring company rather than with the Bristol Old Vic.

Tim Pigott-Smith (1946–2017)

Actor | Miscellaneous Crew
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0683116/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

1958: Macmillan publishes Ian Fleming's non-fiction book The Diamond Smugglers in the US.

THE DIAMOND SMUGGLERS
With an introduction by ‘John Blaize’,
formerly of the International Diamond
Security Organization

A major campaign against the greatest
smuggling racket of the world - the smug-
gling of diamonds from Africa, to the tune
of some ten million pounds a year - has
just been completed. It took three years,
Paris was involved and Antwerp, Beirut,
Freetown, Johannesburg - and Moscow.
Now this underground battle was waged in
the greatest spy story since the war.

All the facts have come into the hands
of Ian Fleming. He has been in Africa with
the secret agent chiefly responsible for
penetrating the international smuggling
network. Ian Fleming has written this
man’s story: it is a true story, and breath-
taking.

1963: Agente 007 contra el Dr. No (Agent 007 against Dr. No) premieres in Madrid, Spain.

1964: Sean Connery practices his golf swing at Northolt Airport, South Ruislip, England.

1967: Title song "You Only Live Twice" charts this date. Also, British weekly Melody Maker declares “Nancy meets James Bond … in the recording studio.”

https://nancysinatra.com/blog/2017/04/nancy-meets-james-bond-you-only-live-twice-at-50/

1971: Diamonds Are Forever films the craps game with Bond and Plenty O'Toole.

https://twitter.com/007/status/598517510133182464

1974: Bond comic strip The Nevsky Nude begins its run in The Daily Express.
(Finishes 21 September 1974. 2542–2655) Yaroslav Horak, artist. Jim Lawrence, artist.

‘The Nevsky Nude’ centres on a rather revealing mystery
https://www.popoptiq.com/the-nevsky-nude/
By Edgar Chaput




https://spyguysandgals.com/sgLookupComicStrip.aspx?id=1012


Swedish Semic Comic 1982 https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/comics/semic_1982.php3?s=comics&id=02218

Fallen Från Skyarna ("Fall From Sky" - The Nevsky Nude)

Danish 1976 http://www.bond-o-rama.dk/en/jb007-dk-no38-1976/

James Bond Agent 007 no. 38: “The Nevsky Nude” (1976)

1987: Happy Anniversary, 007 hosted by Roger Moore celebrates Bond's 25th anniversary.

Commentary version, Moore looks great

1993: MGM through Variety announces work on BOND 17 resumes with writer Michael France.
1999: UNICEF Envoy Roger Moore visits a Stankovac refugee camp to raise funds for Kosovo children.

2008: Thomas Dunne Books publishes the US hardcover version of The Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel by Samantha Weinberg (as "Kate Westbrook").

2014: The Norwegian press says Norwegian actresses compete for Bond Girl roles in BOND 24.

Norwegian actors in race to be next Bond
girl

See the complete article here:

https://www.thelocal.no/20140513/headhunters-star-in-running-to-be-next-bond-girl

Synnøve Macody Lund (right) and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal (left) Photo: Magnet

Releasing/Resolve film | The Local | [email protected] | @thelocalnorway
13 May 2014 | 09:11 CEST+02:00
Norwegian actresses Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and Synnøve Macody Lund are both among the Scandinavian women competing to become the next 'Bond girl'.

Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, the 34-year-old Norwegian star of the upcoming Hollywood film Hercules, auditioned for the provisionally named "Bond 24" last year, her agent Anne Lindberg told The Local.

According to Norway's Dagbladet newspaper, Synnøve Macody Lund, the 38-year-old star of the film Headhunters, has also recently filmed audition scenes in Copenhagen for the film which, like Skyfall, will star Daniel Craig as James Bond and have Sam Mendes as director.

According to Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper two Swedish actresses have also auditioned: Disa Östrand, a 27-year-old known for her role in Känn Ingen Sång, and Ida Engvoll, a 28-year-old who starred in 2013's Bäst Före.

The film's producers have confirmed they are recruiting a woman with typical Scandinavian features to play "a woman with a difficult history" in the film.

If Lund gets the role and is cast as one of Bond's love interests, the mother of two will become the eldest Bond girl in the history of the franchise. In Ian Fleming's 14 Bond books, Pussy Galore, the eldest of Bond's lovers, is described by Bond as "in her early thirties" .

According to Dagbladet, Lund would only confirm that she had met Sam Mendes at Pinewood Studio outside London.

"It was a great moment for me as a film enthusiast, and I was more than a little nervous," the former TV2 film journalist told the newspaper. "Just to look inside Pinewood Studios, with all its Bond props on display, was amazing."

Norway has already had one Bond girl, Julie Ege, who played Helen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969). Sweden, on the other hand, has already had no fewer than six Bond girls (click here for a full list https://www.thelocal.se/20121026/44070). Swedish actor Ola Rapace played one of the villains in Skyfall.

According to Lindberg, the film's producers have over the past year auditioned almost every suitable actress in Denmark, Sweden and Norway without yet giving any indications of who will get the role.

"In Denmark, there was a lot of castings last year and this year for the Bond girl but nobody knows anything yet," she said. "I don’t think anyone knows yet what the outcome is."

According to the film journalist Morten Steingrimsen, who edits James Bond magazine, Lund would fit into the new trend for more psychologically complex Bond girls.

"Synnøve has something Bond-like about her, and it is easy to imagine that she could develop a good dynamic with Craig and create a complex, interesting and different Bond girl," he said.

"In recent years there has been a clear trend towards making Bond's female counterpart something more than a sex symbol."

Synnøve Macody Lund


Ingrid Bolsø Berdal


Disa Östrand


Ida Engvoll