Actor portrayed Sybil Fawlty and later charmed viewers with her canal boat journeys alongside husband Timothy West Prunella Scales, the actor best known for playing Sybil Fawlty in the classic comedy series Fawlty Towers, has died aged 93. Scales, who was married to fellow actor Timothy West , was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2013 . Continue reading...

Star of Hollywood classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, dies aged 89 * ‘The star who changed Hollywood’: Peter Bradshaw on Robert Redford * Robert Redford – a life in pictures Back in 2019, Ryan Gilbey set about ranking Redford’s top ten performances. As always with Ranked, positioning and omissions are supposed to spark debate (or ignite endless arguing. Should Indecent Proposal have been excluded from the top ten? Was All the President’s Men only worthy of fourth place? The debate continues. Here’s Ryan’s number one entry, the aforementioned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Redford’s sole Oscar nomination for acting was, rather shockingly, for The Sting, a complacent 1973 con-man comedy. But it was his first pairing with Sting co-star Paul Newman that distils the performer’s essence. Although the movie is unable to fess up to its bromantic longings – did any woman in a buddy movie ever look more like a gooseberry than poor Katharine Ross? – it’s still worth seeing for Redford’s sunny charm. Even then, it seemed to trouble him faintly, as though he was worried we might take him for a himbo. The studio did. “He’s just another California blond,” said one executive. “Throw a stick out of a window in Malibu, you’ll hit six like him.” But Newman helped win him the part. Redford got a shock when he saw the first cut. “I said: ‘What the hell is that song doing in there? Raindrops? It’s not even raining. On a bicycle?’” Continue reading...

Family says actor who worked with William Wyler, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Steven Soderbergh, ‘leaves behind an extraordinary body of work’ Terence Stamp, who made his name as an actor in 1960s London and went on to play the arch-villain General Zod in the Hollywood hits Superman and Superman II, has died aged 87, his family said on Sunday. The Oscar-nominated actor starred in films ranging from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem in 1968 and A Season in Hell in 1971 to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994 in which he played a transgender woman. Continue reading...

Gary Imlach prepares for one final race as La Grande Boucle moves behind a paywall after 40 years on ITV and Channel 4

Film-maker who specialised in surreal, noir style mysteries made a string of influential, critically acclaimed works including Wild at Heart and Eraserhead David Lynch, the maverick American director who sustained a successful mainstream career while…

“Wicked” and “Gladiator II” both open Friday, and some fans hope to rekindle the excitement that greeted last year’s simultaneous openings of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”