Champagne before you go?

[sovay]

Michael Gough. The way these last few months have gone, I have sort of been waiting for some artistic figure I cared about to die, but I just saw him in Wittgenstein (1993). He was ninety-four. Kuala Lumpur was still in Malaya when he was born there. Still.

He wasn't a childhood favorite: I don't know, actually, when he became an actor I paid attention to. Maybe in the fall of 2008, when I remarked on his "lovely strange face" as Captain Stuart in The Small Back Room (1949), or a few months later when TCM showed The Man in the White Suit (1951). He was one of my impetus for tracking down Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland (1966), but I still mistook him initially for Robert Stephens in The Horse's Mouth (1958). I think he was even more of a character actor than my usual run—I never saw him in anything I would consider a defining role, although I am close to counting his Cardinal del Monte and Bertrand Russell for Derek Jarman. But he kept turning up in films by Jarman or the Archers, alongside Alec Guinness or Peter Cushing, with that slightly gritty, warmly pitched voice and his long-lipped cat's mouth that lent itself so well to ironies and ambiguities (and in later years, some truly impressive eyebrows, same), and without once playing a leading role or a character I loved, between one cast list and the next I found he'd turned into someone I'd watch for. There are some astonishingly terrible-sounding horror films I was contemplating simply for his name in the credits. I might still watch them in his honor, although probably Dennis Potter's Blackeyes (1989) is a better idea. But last month I had Olivier's star-studded Richard III (1955) playing on TCM as I worked and there he was as a genuinely tough First Murderer, with a long-legged swagger: he could turn up anywhere. I was glad whenever he did.

I am sorry he was never filmed as Dillwyn Knox in Breaking the Code, or Ernest in Bedroom Farce. I liked to know he was out there, and I'm sorry he's not. But he was here, and at least there are the movies to remind us. And I'll take that for immortality, whatever else comes along.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I am sorry he was never filmed as Dillwyn Knox in Breaking the Code...

Gods yes. That's one for the Streaming in the Sky.

A marvellous face, and it got better and better. He aged like pu-erh tea.

Nine

[sovay]

Gods yes. That's one for the Streaming in the Sky.

I've got nothing against Richard Johnson, but I know which one looked like a Knox brother.

He aged like pu-erh tea.

And never gave me a migraine.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I know which one looked like a Knox brother.

Truly.

Dillwyn Knox

Michael Gough

And never gave me a migraine.

If only you could brew such tea!

Nine

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

He was of course known to the world as Alfred in the original Tim Burton-instigated Batman movies, which I've never seen (the first installment being the exemplar of a movie I looked forward to intensely but never got out of the house to see when I was sick in the 90's).

Not that I remember him, but I first saw him in a reasonably significant role in the first U.S. broadcast episode of the inconsistent but often excellent Hammer-produced TV suspense anthology series "Journey to the Unknown," which was broadcast here in (IIRC) the summer of 1969. I will whistle you the "memorably famous whistled theme tune" (says Wikipedia; it accompanied POV footage from a roller coaster in a seemingly abandoned amusement park (which, I now learn, was in fact the Big Dipper at the Battersea Fun Fair, which was closed a few years later after five children were killed in an accident). And perhaps some reader will now say, "Oh, that show!").

I appear to have also seen him in a small role in Top Secret! before seeing him in The Small Back Room. I wish I had seen more of him.

pu-erh tea

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

>My very limited Chinese is leading me to guess that that's "not-second" (i.e., first) tea? Written 不二?

Honestly, I repeat myself. I remember now that this is just plain wrong. For one thing, the Chinese word for "two" is "ni," not "erh" For another, I recall we had this conversation last time you mentioned the tea.

Forgive me--the brain, she weakens.

Wait, no, wrong again. It **is** erh--but still that's not what the tea's name means. ... And maybe it wasn't you I had the conversation with, maybe it was cucumberseed

Now I'm going to tape my fingers together to prevent myself from committing more comment madness on this insanely irrelevant topic.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Blackeyes is a very self-indulgent work- one that gives full range to all that was creepy in Denis Potter's make-up. It's been a good while since I saw it, but Gough's shambling and rebarbative performance is hard to forget.

[sovay]

It's been a good while since I saw it, but Gough's shambling and rebarbative performance is hard to forget.

So noted. I've liked everything I've seen by Dennis Potter: Alice (1965), Brimstone and Treacle (1976), Dreamchild (1985). I should get around to the famous ones sometime.

[sovay]

Now I'm going to tape my fingers together to prevent myself from committing more comment madness on this insanely irrelevant topic.

That doesn't help me find out what pu-erh means!

[sovay]

I wish I had seen more of him.

Fortunately, the films are still out there.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

But you see, now I realize, three ill-conceived comments later, that I myself have no idea what it means, either. I think it must have been cucumberseed with whom I had this conversation last. I'm betting he knows what it means.