Hi everyone, I had to step away from all my sites for awhile, in late August I very unexpectedly lost my Grandma, who I was very close too, so naturally it’s been a tough few months, but to add to it, I fell very behind at uni and was having a very hard time coping, so I had to focus just on that.
But I am pleased to say the site is completely up-to-date again, bar The Fades. Over the next week or so I will catch the site up with screen caps and video clips. I will also be converting our media archive to wordpress media and I am considering organizing the photoshoots by year since there is a few now.
The least surprising thing to happen in Venice this month has not been a tourist going slack-jawed at the price of a gondola ride, or at least one Bellini cocktail being sunk in Harry’s Bar, but that, at the city’s annual film festival, Madonna’s new film should have been widely panned. Widely but not universally, for while its harshest critic (from The Guardian) dismissed her Wallis Simpson biopic, WE, as “a primped and simpering folly”, The Independent’s man on the Lido, Geoffrey Macnab, found much to admire in Madonna’s second turn behind the camera – noting that, while “the film is no masterpiece… many in Venice were anticipating (and some actively hoping) for a prize turkey and they’ll have been disappointed by the sheer zest and craftsmanship of WE.”
Andrea Riseborough’s sympathetic portrayal of the monarch-marrying American divorcee was particularly admired, but there has yet to be word on the actress playing Simpson’s dedicated foe, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future consort of King George VI. Those of us with any interest will therefore have to wait until the film’s general release next January to catch Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of a woman we are used to thinking of as ‘the Queen Mum’, but who, as far as Madonna is concerned, is the villain of the piece.
“It’s true… she is the baddie,” says Dormer when we meet.” There are two sides to every story, and this is the counter-argument. What has timed very nicely is the success of The King’s Speech, which means that the general public is informed about the abdication from the other side, as well.”
But more of Madonna and the Queen Mother later, because those readers not acquainted with a certain TV history drama called The Tudors may not be familiar with Natalie Dormer, either. Those of us who were glued to this sudsy mix of sex and 16th-century politics will however know that the spark went out of the series when Dormer’s Anne Boleyn was sent to the scaffold, leaving centre-stage to Jonathan Rhys Meyer – never the most compelling of leading men – as a rather too trim King Henry VIII. Or as the Boston Herald put it: “Dormer’s unconventional beauty and frantic scheming made the first two seasons crackle every week and her departure leaves a void.”
“I didn’t just want to play her as this femme fatale – she was a genuine evangelical with a real religious belief in the Reformation,” says Dormer, showing how she might have been accepted for a place to study history at Cambridge University (fatally, she misread a question in her A-level exam and didn’t get the necessary grade). “The show was an absolute joy because it was an amalgamation of my two greatest passions – drama and history. I read everything by Starkey… good old Starkey… opinionated Starkey [this was soon after the historian’s controversial utterances about the August riots]… Antonia Fraser, all of them. But there is a lot of sex and violence in the programme, so it’s hard to explain it to the guy in the street who’s saying, ‘The Tudors? Tits, man!’.”
What can you tell us about your character, Sarah?
“She’s married [to Mark, played by Miranda’s Tom Ellis] and Sarah has this double existence, because she is an Angelic. Her gift is that she’s a seer, she can see the future, and she has visions which she then relays to other Angelics. So she’s normal, but she’s got a history of mental illness and it’s obviously something she’s really struggled to come to terms with. Mark has been her saviour from that. The marriage has broken down for a plethora of reasons, the most pertinent being that she’s living a double existence that he doesn’t understand, which creates a lot of friction. She’s been clutching at straws, trying to maintain a normal life, pretending to herself, lying that she can have a normal, average, uneventful life – and she can’t.”What attracted you to The Fades?
“The strength and the dexterity of Jack’s writing. Everyone loves a good love story, and everyone loves a bit of action, and everyone loves a bit of guts and gore, you know, even the girls do. Nothing in this is gratuitous – everything that is done is done to create true, weighty emotion. So there’s no horror pornography in this. When it gets really dark, it gets dark for intelligent reasons.”Does Sarah see her gifts and status as an Angelic as a blessing or a curse?
“When you meet her at the beginning of the series she would definitely say it was a curse, because her marriage and her life have been destroyed by it. And that’s something that Iain’s character Paul has to face. It’s about finding your place in the world, where you belong, and not denying who you really are. Identity and self-identity is a very strong theme of the show. There is real, genuinely intelligent writing behind it, behind all the fun and the running around and the entertainment.”
I have added to HQ stills of Natalie in The Fades. to the gallery:
Gallery Link:
– Promotional Stills
A scan of Natalie in D Magazine has been added to the gallery, looks like a gorgeous photoshoots is coming soon!
Gallery Link:
– D Magazine (2011) x1
I have added 2 MQ images of Natalie and her fiance at an after party to the gallery:
Gallery Link:
– Sep 27 | ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ Press Night – After Party x2
I have added two MQ images of Natalie at the London Fashion Week:
Gallery Link:
– Sep 20 | Storm Model Agency – London Fashion Week x2
So I have almost got all the pages back up, all that’s left is online and some pages in site. Google cache was very useful because I wasn’t able to get a copy of the site from archive.org, but thankfully google cache had cached some of my pages, which was very helpful because I had done a really good biography for Natalie and I was able to get a hold of that, more over I was able to get a cached version of the affiliates so as soon as I finish the pages I’m going to restore the affies and broken sidebar content.
I have added two HQ images of Natalie at the Gucci Awards in Venice.
Gallery Link:
– Sep 02 | Gucci Award for Women in Cinema at Hotel Cipriani
