joanna lumley profile piece

there’s a rather good profile piece on one of my utter favourites – joanna lumley – up on the guardian‘s website.

fell in love with lumley in her new avengers days, of course, when she played the lovely and luscious purdey. damn i wish they’d bring that lot out on dvd. never mind your diana rigg’s and your honour blackman’s, give purdey and give her now, say i.

one of my first clues, you might say.

Lumley has spoken before about the fact that she has throughout her career played good people, from the crime-fighting Purdey to the Bolly-swigging Patsy, via a brief turn as Ken Barlow’s love interest in Coronation Street. Add this to her Gurkha campaign and the 60 charities she supports, from Wateraid to Tibetan refugees, orphanages and schools, supporting the Pastoralists in the Horn of Africa and the Born Free Foundation, and you begin to sense that she is acutely aware of the importance of being good.

“God yes!” she says at the suggestion. “Terribly easy to be bad! It’s easy-peasy to kill something or break it! I’ve never been remotely impressed by people with guns killing people in films, it’s nothing to me. Of course you can kill people! I could get a gun out and shoot you dead now, you’re dead, it doesn’t make me powerful, it’s just completely stupid.” Indeed two years ago, she legendarily confronted a gunman in a Sheffield bar, engaging him in polite conversation until the police arrived. “Being good, however, is fabulously hard,” Lumley continues. “And we all fall off at every fence, you know? And there’s nothing wet about being good! I think sometimes there’s something quite wet about being bad!”

Badness, she explains, comes in various degrees. She rumples her brow. “I hate the hand that comes out of a car and just drops litter in the street,” she snaps. “I hate that! For some reason it just fills me with fury! It’s just utter laziness, lack of interest in other people, lack of interest in the planet, in the hedgehog who might eat the plastic bag, it’s a lack of concern.” Would she tell someone off? “Yes, but not horribly,” she says. “I would package it up and say, ‘I believe you dropped this.’” Her voice is buttery. “And if they were horrid I would think of a different way of dealing with it.” She pauses, smiles, leans a little closer. “I’ve got to tell you in service stations on big motorways I always clean up the ladies loo. I pick up all the bits of hankies, I tidy up the bins, I get using the towels, I clean the tops, I shut the doors, I pull the plugs . . . Because people live like animals. And surely if it looks nice people won’t go on making it look so bad? If you walk into a midden of filth maybe you just don’t care about it? But it does baffle me how people can behave so badly.”

total good egg, obviously. read the whole thing here.

cate blanchett in streetcar named desire

i’m on holiday from next monday and i would give my left breast and half of the right to get to see this production … but it’s all sold out. life’s not fair sometimes … *sigh*

Williams regarded the work as a “tragedy of misunderstandings and insensitivity”. Cate Blanchett – who is about to step on to the stage as the bourbon-soaked, sexual predator Blanche DuBois in a new Sydney Theatre Company production – describes it as a “big, aching wound” of a play. “The writing is so beautiful and poetic but the shadow side to that is an incredible ugliness,” she says.

The clock was set on this production – directed by the celebrated film actress Liv Ullmann – by Robyn Nevin, who secured the rights for the play during her tenure as artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company. Nevin always had Blanchett in mind for Blanche. But the timing wasn’t right for Blanchett – until now.

“Robyn had mentioned years ago that she had the rights when we were talking about doing Hedda Gabler and I thought, ‘Oooh, no,’ ” says Blanchett. “And then I met Liv in London – and I’d been desperate to work with her – and we were talking about various projects for quite some time and then Andrew [Upton, co-artistic director at the STC] brought up Streetcar. Suddenly the temperature in the room changed.”

Ullmann remembers the moment well. “When Andrew said that, I was thrilled,” she says. “I had been thinking about it before I met Cate but I thought she would be much too young for the role, so I never talked about it.”

Ullmann, 70, is best known as muse to Ingmar Bergman, appearing in nine of his films, including Scenes from a Marriage and The Emigrants. She says watching Blanchett in rehearsals has been thrilling.

“As an actress, I played many wonderful roles but I never had the chance to play Blanche. But I know from the bottom of my soul that I would never be the kind of Blanche she is. Cate is making choices that I would never have thought of. Even if I don’t say a word as the director, it is all magically happening in front of me. When I watch Cate, the hairs stand up on my arms.” Her voice softens and her eyes suddenly fill with tears.

“I admire Cate tremendously,” Ullmann says. “And if my eyes have tears that is because what she is doing in the rehearsal room is so magical.”

how good does that sound? bliss. *sigh*. you can read the whole thing at the sydney morning herald.

christopher hitchens on elizabeth edwards

i’ll read anything written by christopher hitchens, i admit it. the man is fantastic thinker and a writer without peer. here he reviews the latest book from elizabeth edwards, whom he counts as a friend.

Notwithstanding the fact that she has been the wife of a senator, presidential candidate, and vice-presidential nominee, the most important men in this story are her late father and her firstborn son. That the firstborn son is also “late,” having been killed by a freak traffic mishap in 1996, at the age of 16, is surely the eventual dominant motif of the book. Political defeat, cancer, infidelity, other family losses: you can somehow tell that if she could avail herself of the remedy in the Millay poem “Interim,” which she quotes so beautifully, but would have to choose to have just one thing put right again, it would be Wade. I remember once discussing with Elizabeth the brute evolutionary fact that people used to have large numbers of offspring because they had to count on burying at least some of them; however objectively one reasons such a thing, it will still, always, appear to be against nature for a parent to be at the funeral of a child, rather than the other way about.

… She has herself, meanwhile, become a best-selling model for many readers, and not, I am sure, only for female ones. She is a person with many friends and many internal and moral and intellectual resources, yet she confesses in the most disarming—and helpful—manner how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life. The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform—the abolition of loneliness—has not to my knowledge been better evoked.

you can read the whole thing … well worth it, trust me … at the atlantic.

awesome website: people of wal-mart

more hilarity over at people of walmart.

get it together, america

found here.

sometimes the classics are the best

mr nice hands never gets old.

he canna hold it together much longer, cap’n

found here.

awesome marriage equality ad from maine

uruguay votes yes on gay adoptions

look at the world getting all into the 21st century. who knows what will happen next? we might even get treated like other human beings? the shock, the horror.

this from AFP:

MONTEVIDEO: Lawmakers in Uruguay have voted to allow adoptions by gays and lesbians in a first for Latin America, an opposition deputy says.

“They just approved it by 40 votes out of 53,” said Jaime Trobo of the opposition National Party on Thursday.

The measure still needs to pass through the senate, a move considered a formality since it was already approved there on a first reading.

It places the nation of some 3.5 million people another step apart from its more traditionally conservative neighbours after it authorised civil unions for homosexuals last year.

The proposal came despite criticism from the country’s religious leaders and some right-wing politicians.

Tabare Vazquez, the first leftist president in the country’s history, in May opened access for homosexuals to military schools.

Gays and lesbians have in the past decade won the right to adoption in various European and North American states and territories, as well South Africa and parts of Australia.

The rights involved vary greatly, however, with some permitting gay couples to adopt children who are not related to them, and others only allowing the gay partner of a biological parent to adopt that person’s offspring.

ted kennedy: champion of gay rights

how will ted kennedy’s death effect the battle for same-sex marriage rights in the US? this from AP:

BOSTON: For decades, Edward Kennedy was considered the most powerful voice in the US Senate for gay rights as a strong supporter of HIV/AIDS funding, hate crimes legislation and same-sex marriage.

His death struck a blow to gay rights advocates, who say they’ve lost a key ally.

“Having somebody in the Senate who was never afraid to stand up and say, ‘This is the right thing to do’ lifted all of our spirits and made all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people know that there was hope,” said Chuck Wolfe, president of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a political action committee.

Kennedy was an early advocate for AIDS research and treatment, securing federal funding so patients could have easier access to experimental drugs, expanded home care and outpatient mental health care.

In 1996, he was one of only 14 senators who voted against the Defence of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from recognising gay unions. He also was a leading supporter of gay marriage in his home state of Massachusetts, which was the first to legalise same-sex marriage in 2004.

He also was a strong supporter of adding sexual orientation and gender identity to federal hate crimes and employment discrimination laws.

“Senator Kennedy has, more than anyone else, been our strongest voice in the United States Senate for the LGBT community,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “On every piece of legislation – every piece – Senator Kennedy has been the lead.”

Solmonese said that whenever he worked with Kennedy on legislation, the senator would constantly keep him apprised of the latest developments.

“He’d call to tell you the date a bill was going to move, or he’d call to thank you for something you did,” Solmonese said. “You never felt like he was doing you any kind of a big favour by being the singular champion on an issue that for a lot of people was by no means politically expedient. It was simply who he was.”

Lee Swislow, executive director of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the Boston legal group that spearheaded a lawsuit that led to the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts, said Kennedy cared about any issue that affected the rights of gay people, even if it was not on his US Senate agenda.

Swislow said that when she met Kennedy several years ago, GLAD was working to repeal a 1913 state law that barred most out-of-state gay couples from marrying in Massachusetts.

“I introduced myself and he immediately said, ‘We need to get rid of the 1913 law. We need to repeal it. It’s just not right,’ ” Swislow said. The state Legislature repealed the law last year.

David Wilson, one of 14 plaintiffs in the gay-marriage lawsuit, said he viewed Kennedy as a “beacon of hope” on gay rights issues. Decades earlier, Wilson saw Kennedy in a similar light on civil rights issues.

“For me, he was the bridge from the civil rights movement in the 60s to the gay rights movement in the 80s,” Wilson said. “Now, here I am a gay man and an African-American gay man, and I’m looking to that same person for that ray of hope.”

After gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts, Wilson and his husband, Rob Compton, would see Kennedy at fundraisers and other public events.

“He would always say, ‘I want to thank you for your courage, I want to thank you for your perseverance’ ” Wilson said. “We would tell him, ‘No, that’s what we want to thank you for’.”