This film profile of one of today’s most critically and commercially successful British novelists includes dramatised scenes from his book Talking It Over, which deals with his perennial themes of love and jealousy. Barnes talks about his work in interview and admits to being obsessed with obsessions.
Seamus Heaney
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, confirming his stature as one of the greatest poets writing in the English language today. This film looks back over his career and presents a rare opportunity to hear him discussing his work. It focuses on his volume Seeing Things, in which he returns to the rural childhood territory of his early work. Readings of Heaney’s poems are intercut with a central interview, which is also illustrated with footage of the Irish landscapes that have inspired him.
John Osborne
Dramatist John Osborne (1929-94) was catapulted to fame in 1956 with his play Look Back in Anger. He created an icon for a generation of ‘angry young men’ in the character of Jimmy Porter, whose hatred of the Establishment voiced the frustrated hopes of post-war Britain. In this programme Osborne talks about the decade of success that followed – a period of public triumph but private turmoil. The interview is illustrated with extracts from his plays.
August Wilson
One of the most important US playwrights to emerge since Arthur Miller, Wilson explores the same territory – the American Dream – but, as a black writer, his perspective is different. To show the background to his work, this film was made with Wilson in his home territory, The Hill district of Pittsburgh, a black ghetto shattered by unemployment and drug dealing. It centres on specially-staged extracts from his plays and a major interview.
Charles Dickens
This programme explores the world of the great novelist Charles Dickens, through the eyes of his biographer Peter Ackroyd. Weaving through the many phases of Dickens’ life, this film shows the recurrent influence of his childhood on his obsessive vision of darkness and light. The mercurial actor John Sessions assumes the role of the writer in a virtuoso performance recalling Dickens’ celebrated Public Readings.
Salman Rushdie
This exclusive interview with writer Salman Rushdie was the first television broadcast he made after going into hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat in the wake of the Satanic Verses controversy. It coincided with the publication of his novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his young son. He talks frankly about his experiences and about his life and work, which is illustrated with readings and dramatisations.
John Updike
This profile of the celebrated American author focuses on his quartet of novels about a character called Rabbit, an ex-basketball star who lives in a small Pennsylvanian town, modelled on Reading, where Updike lived as a child. Through an in-depth interview, sequences filmed with Updike at his old stamping grounds, and dramatisations from the Rabbit books, this programme defines the major themes and social issues in his work, relating them to his own past and his strongly-held beliefs.
A Footnote in History
Filmed in East Berlin after the dismantling of the Wall, when bitter controverse raged in the press concerning the role writers had played in the German Democratic Republic, this programme considers the experiences of four writers from different generations – Christa Wolf, Christoph Hein, Helga Königsdorf and Bert Papenfuss.
Helen Hayes
The American actress Helen Hayes, whose career spanned six decades, died in 1993. In this portrait, made when she was in her nineties, she revealed herself as never before in a series of interviews about her life in theatre and cinema. There are film clips showing her opposite the likes of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and Burt Lancaster and she re-enacts scenes from two of her greatest stage triumphs: Mary of Scotland and Victoria Regina. Colleagues including José Ferrer, Angela Lansbury and James Stewart, contribute to this profile.
Stella Adler
Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, Warren Beatty and Candice Bergen are among the noted performers who studied with Stella Adler, the charismatic and influential American acting teacher who died in 1992, three years after this evocative portrait was made. Combining an interview with archive stills and film footage, recollections of colleagues and students, and sequences of her at work with actors, the programme shows that the terms ‘style’, ‘scope’, ‘size’, ‘power’ – key words she used in class – aptly describe Adler herself.