Has There Ever Been a Biopic of La Bernhardt? And Is Mayam Bialik Too Busy?

Is it just me? or is there a resemblance here....

The great Cheryl Campbell played Bernhardt on television once, IIRC, and she doesn't look anything like Amy Farrah Fowle, and yet she also looked somehow exactly right.
I love faces.

"Sin"

Don't you hate it when hysterics are right? (It's like when hypochondriacs are sick, or professional victims call attention to actual anti-Catholicism.)
Julia can be an hysteric.

(Diana Quick was extraordinary, she didn't act that unactable monologue, she simply was. that. person. That character whom Waugh had tried un- almost successfully to write, she made real the unrealistic words he had given her, she created Julia Flyte Mottram who simply had not existed until her performance.)

He's quite right. They know all about it... All in one word - one little flat word that covers a lifetime. "Living in sin". Not just "doing wrong", as I did when I went to America, doing wrong, knowing it's wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting it. That's not what they mean...
He means just what it says. Living in sin - every hour, every day, year in, year out. It's always the same. It's like an idiot child, carefully nursed, guarded from the world.
"Poor Julia," they say, "She can't go out. She's got to take care of her little sin. It's a pity it ever lived, but it's so strong. Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little mad sin."
All those years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead. Putting him away, forgetting him. Finding you - the past two years with you, all the future with you or without you.
It's a word from so long ago - Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart.
Me and Cordelia with the Catechism in Mummy's room before luncheon on Sundays.
Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it. Mummy dying with my sin, eating her more cruelly than her own deadly illness.
Mummy dying with it.
Christ dying with it nailed hand and foot, high among the crowds and soldiers. No comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief. Hanging forever, over the bed in the night-nursery. There's no way back - the gate's barred. All the saints and angels posted along the wall. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down. Nameless and dead. 

And -

How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I'll be bad again - punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean, starting a life with you - without Him. One can only see one step ahead.
But I saw today there's one thing unforgivable, like things in the school-room, so bad they're unpunishable, that only Mummy could deal with.
The bad thing I was on the point of doing that I'm not quite bad enough to do - to set up a rival God to God.
It may be because of Mummy, Nanny, Sebastian, Cordelia, perhaps Bridey and Mrs Muspratt - keeping my name in their prayers.
Or it may be a private bargain between me and God.
That if I give up this one thing I want so much, how ever bad I am He won't quite despair of me in the end. Now we shall both be alone. And I shall have no way of making you understand.  
Yes, I've been thinking way too much, or at least too disjointedly, about sin.

But I think the Synod fathers would have made a much better go of it if they had just watched the last two episodes of the grandest, finest mini-series of all time.

The Catholic blogosphere is full of hysterics right now. And some of them, even when they are right, are so hate-filled I am ashamed for them.
And that goes for both Ratzingerites and Kasperites, which division of the Body of Christ doesn't exist, of course, Cdl Marx, sorry to have brought it up!

A Foxy Fox on Foxes

In the category of There'll Always Be an England, the possibility of a repeal of a ban on fox-hunting is getting people hot under the... you know, so many people wear collarless shirts even when "dressed up," I don't know how that phrase should end.

But Inspector Hathaway doesn't like the creatures.

When Mr S caught up with Laurence Fox at the Spectator summer party, the Lewis actor – who used to go hunting in his youth when it was legal – had little time for his namesakes:

‘I love the Countryside Alliance. Anyone who has had chickens loves fox hunting. I mean I had chickens, I don’t like foxes.’

"Luvvie"

Those Interwebs are good for expanding ones vocabulary.
Thanks to the Catholic Herald, I have now looked into the meaning of "luvvie," and it seems about right.

A piece by Madeleine Teahan, (I adore British names, don't you? even real ones sound as as if they could be Dickensian, or Byatt-esque,) explores why celebrity actors are all on board with everyone going Young Werther, or Lupe Velez:

the luvvie attraction to assisted suicide goes much deeper than a mere yearning for control. Explaining his support for the practice, [someone of whom I'm afraid I have never heard] said: “The issue is not really of death but of how you live out that last chapter, those last sentences.” Luvvies, you see, regard death as the final scene in their personal drama, and that is why they take their departure extremely seriously.

They Don't Give IQ Tests at Auditions

Himself is an old movie buff.
More than that, he still crushes on the heroes of his childhood and the idols of his youthful theatrical ambitions.
Among the latter are Richard Burton, the former are dominated by John Wayne and Clark Gable.
Much as he loves Clark Gable, he likes to quote Wayne on Gable - Gable's an idiot. You know why he's an actor? It's the only thing the dumb son of a bitch is smart enough to do.
Of course there are different kinds of intelligence, (and there are far greater gifts than brains.)

But it does seem relatively easy to be an actor, even one whose usual persona radiates intelligence, and yet  be pretty dumb, as well as ignorant of the history of ones own medium, not to mention ill-informed on cultural matters by which one would think it was imperative for ones portrayals to be, well... informed.

This holiday season marks the first showing of a number of Christ-themed documentaries, tv movies and docu-dramas, including one based on the book "Killing Jesus".

This is the first time we see Jesus as the man, not as this kind of spiritual divinity...
Even though all that is there — and I think that's important, because the main teachings about Jesus was to teach men how you could become better....
If you look at this person and you see an angel or a God, you're not going to be able to relate to it. But if you see a man with all His faculties you say, 'Wow, He's like me.' He's a working class intelligent man. Every person can see something in them that Jesus has. That's what you're going to get from this story. The real human side of Jesus...

Frank Finlay ROCKS! (and he chains and strong-boxes and keys and shackles...)

I was doing a little baking, and there was nothing we cared to watch on TV, so when Himself suggested we begin Scrooge-apalooza, I suggested a version not in my top faovrites' list, since it woudln't have my undivided attention.

Yeah, right....

I mean, Christmas Carol! Even if not ,a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044008/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Christmas Carol,
still... CHRISTMAS Carol!

And while George C. Scott, fine actor though he was, misses the mark entirely, (not to mention that his Scrooge enjoying life so much forces the usually impeccable Roger Rees to be woeful as Nephew Fred,) as does the obviously-in-no-fear-whatever-of-unemployment Cratchit of David Warner, the 1984 version has its own delights.

Chief among them are Frank Finlay as Marley, and the late, great Edward Woodward as Christmas Present.

Both of them OWN their roles.

And Woodward owns his without qualification or challenge, (whereas Marley has been played well by a few other people, all very different but valid interpretations - Hordern, Lloyd, Carroll... heck, Guinness is hysterically funny and entertaining flouncing his way through the role.)

The Tiny Tim is also frighteningly perfect, yes, too young, and reads his lines like a six year old, but perfect somehow, nonetheless, (although I do miss the sass of the family dynamic in the 1999 version, where Tim is teased lovingly as are all the children, instead of being treated like Mother Teresa.)
Every time I watch it I think he's going to die before they finish filming.

I was sure I had looked this up before, but apparently not, I'd been telling people that that was Anthony Walter's only credit, maybe they HAD cast him out of a sick ward, and then returned him to his bed, (Himself gave me side-eye and asked, you mean like Max Shreck really WAS a vampire?)

No, not just Tiny Tim, but the little actor playing him "did NOT die."