Actor Bernard Hill, best known for roles in Titanic and Lord of the Rings, has died aged 79.
Bernard Hill enjoyed a career spanning decades in film and television. He played Captain Edward Smith in the 1997 Oscar-winning film and King Théoden in the Lord of the Rings.
His breakout role was in 1982 BBC TV drama Boys from the Blackstuff, where he portrayed Yosser Hughes, a character who struggled – and often failed – to cope with unemployment in Liverpool.
He died early on Sunday morning, his agent Lou Coulson confirmed.
Alan Bleasdale, who wrote Boys from the Blackstuff, said Hill’s death was “a great loss and also a great surprise”.
“It was an astonishing, mesmeric performance – Bernard gave everything to that and you can see it in all the scenes. He became Yosser Hughes.”
He added: “I was desperate to work with him. Everything he did – his whole procedure for working, the manner in which he worked and his performance was everything that you could ever wish for.
“You always felt that Bernard would live forever. He had a great strength, physically and of personality.”
TCD/Alamy | Bernard Hill in full flow as King Théoden in the Lord of the Rings
Hill, who was from Manchesterand lived in Suffolk, was due to return to TV screens in series two of The Responder, a BBC drama starring Martin Freeman, which begins airing on Sunday.
Lindsay Salt, director of BBC Drama, paid tribute to him, saying: “Bernard Hill blazed a trail across the screen, and his long-lasting career filled with iconic and remarkable roles is a testament to his incredible talent.”
“From Boys from the Blackstuff, to Wolf Hall, The Responder, and many more, we feel truly honoured to have worked with Bernard at the BBC. Our thoughts are with his loved ones at this sad time.”
In Boys from the Blackstuff, Hill drew praise for his gritty portrayal of Yosser Hughes, an intense and memorable character who pleaded “Gizza job” as he sought work.
That show won a Bafta for best drama series in 1983, and in 2000 it was ranked seventh on a British Film Institute list of the best TV shows ever made.
Another of Hill’s memorable BBC TV performances came in the 2015 drama series Wolf Hall, adapted from Hilary Mantel’s book about the court of Henry VIII. Hill portrayed the Duke of Norfolk – an uncle of Anne Boleyn and an enemy of Cardinal Wolsey.
Hill was also much loved for his performances in Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
He joined the cast for the second film, 2002’s The Two Towers, and returned to the franchise for 2003’s The Return Of The King, which picked up 11 Oscars.
Other roles in his decades-long career included the 1976 BBC TV series I, Claudius, an appearance in 1982’s Gandhi, Shirley Valentine in 1989, The Scorpion King in 2002 and 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie.
Hill was meant to be at Comic Con Liverpool on Saturday, but had to cancel at the last minute, the convention said in a post on X. As news of his death broke, the organisers said on the platform they were “heartbroken” at Hill’s death, and wished his family “a lot of strength”.
Scottish musician Barbara Dickson also paid tribute on X, saying he was “a really marvellous actor”.
She added: “It was a privilege to have crossed paths with him. RIP Benny x.”
Today, Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks—earlier than most women know they’re pregnant—went into effect. The Florida legislature passed the law and Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed it a little more than a year ago, on April 13, 2023, but the new law was on hold while the Florida Supreme Court reviewed it. On April 1 the court permitted the law to go into operation today.
The new Florida law is possible because two years ago, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the modern court decided that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level.
Immediately, Republican-dominated states began to restrict abortion rights. Now, one out of three American women of childbearing age lives in one of the more than 20 states with abortion bans. This means, as Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, put it in The Daily Beast today, “child rape victims forced to give birth, miscarrying patients turned away from emergency rooms and told to return when they’re in sepsis.” It means recognizing that the state has claimed the right to make a person’s most personal health decisions.
Until today, Florida’s law was less stringent than that of other southern states, making it a destination for women of other states to obtain the abortions they could not get at home. In the Washington Post today, Caroline Kitchener noted that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year obtained abortions in Florida. Now, receiving that reproductive care will mean a trip to Virginia, Illinois, or North Carolina, where the procedure is still legal, putting it out of reach for many women.
This November, voters in Florida will weigh in on a proposed amendment to the Florida constitution to establish the right to abortion. The proposed amendment reads: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” Even if the amendment receives the 60% support it will need to be added to the constitution, it will come too late for tens of thousands of women.
It is not unrelated that this week Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, along with other Republican attorneys general, has twice sued the Biden administration, challenging its authority to impose policy on states. One lawsuit objects to the government’s civil rights protections for sexual orientation and gender identity. The other lawsuit seeks to stop a federal rule that closes a loophole that, according to Texas Tribune reporter Alejandro Serrano, lets people sell guns online or at gun shows without conducting background checks.
In both cases, according to law professor and legal analyst Steve Vladeck, Paxton has filed the suit in the Amarillo Division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where it will be assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the Trump appointee who suspended the use of mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, in order to stop abortions nationally.
Last month the Judicial Conference, which oversees the federal judiciary, tried to end this practice of judge-shopping by calling for cases to be randomly assigned to any judge in a district; the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas says it will not comply.
And so the cases go to Kacsmaryk, who will almost certainly agree with the Republican states’ position.
Republicans are engaged in the process of dismantling the federal government, working to get rid of its regulation of business, basic social welfare laws and the taxes needed to pay for such measures, the promotion of infrastructure, and the protection of civil rights. To do so, they have increasingly argued that the states, rather than the federal government, are the centerpiece of our democratic system.
That democracy belonged to the states was the argument of the southern Democrats before the Civil War, who insisted that the federal government could not legitimately intervene in state affairs out of their concern that the overwhelming popular majority in the North would demand an end to human enslavement. Challenged to defend their enslavement of their neighbors in a country that boasted “all men are created equal,” southern enslavers argued that enslavement was secondary to the fact that voters had chosen to impose it.
At the same time, though, state lawmakers limited the vote in their state, so the popular vote did not reflect the will of the majority. It reflected the interests of those few who could vote. In 1857, enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia explained that there were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote. “But we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”State legislatures, dominated by such men, wrote laws reinforcing the power of a few wealthy, white men.
Crucially, white southerners insisted that the federal government must use its power not to enforce the will of the majority, but rather to protect their state systems. In 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Act, they demanded that federal officials, including those in free states, return to the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Black Americans could not testify in their own defense, and anyone helping a “runaway” could be imprisoned for six months and fined $1,000, which was about three years’ income. A decade later, enslavers insisted that it was “the duty of the Federal Government, in all its departments, to protect…[slavery]…in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority extends.”
After the Civil War, Republicans in charge of the federal government set out to end discriminatory state legislation by adding to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing that states could not deny to any person the equal protection of the laws and giving Congress the power to enforce that amendment. That, together with the Fifteenth Amendment providing that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Republicans thought, would stop state legislatures from passing discriminatory legislation.
But in 1875, just five years after Americans added the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court decided that states could keep certain people from voting so long as that discrimination wasn’t based on race. This barred women from the polls and flung the door open for voter suppression measures that would undermine minority voting for almost a century. Jim and Juan Crow laws, as well as abortion bans, went onto the books.
In the 1950s the Supreme Court began to use the Fourteenth Amendment to end those discriminatory state laws—in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision that prohibited racial segregation in public schools, for example, and in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. Opponents complained bitterly about what they called “judicial activism,” insisting that unelected judges were undermining the will of the voters in the states.
Beginning in the 1980s, as Republicans packed the courts with so-called originalists who weakened federal power in favor of state power, Republican-dominated state governments carefully chose their voters and then imposed their own values on everyone.
Just a decade ago, reproductive rights scholar Elizabeth Dias told Jess Bidgood of the New York Times, a six-week abortion ban was seen even by many antiabortion activists as too radical, but after Trump appointed first Neil Gorsuch and then Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the balance of power shifted enough to make such a ban obtainable. Power over abortion rights went back to the states, where Republicans could restrict them.
Trump has said he would leave the issue of abortion to the states, even if states begin to monitor women’s pregnancies to keep them from obtaining abortions or to prosecute them if they have one.
Vice President Kamala Harris was in Jacksonville, Florida, today to talk about reproductive rights. She put the fight over abortion in the larger context of the discriminatory state laws that have, historically, constructed a world in which some people have more rights than others. “This is a fight for freedom,” she said, “the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have their government tell them what they’re supposed to do.”
Gwenifer Raymond began playing guitar at the age of eight shortly after having been first exposed to punk and grunge. After years of playing around the Welsh valleys in various punk outfits she began listening more to pre-war blues musicians as well as Appalachian folk players, eventually leading into the guitar players of the American Primitive genre. It was then that Gwenifer began writing her own moody and often-times manic original American Primitive styled compositions and started playing shows around the UK.
Sir Michael Palin has revealed that his fellow ‘Monty Python’ star Terry Jones once threw a typewriter at John Cleese during a row.
By Chris Edwards
Sir Michael Palin has revealed that his fellow Monty Python star Terry Jones once threw a typewriter at John Cleese during a row.
In a new interview with the Radio Times, Palin opened up about the “huge” arguments that occurred within the comedy group, which consisted of himself, Cleese, Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.
“Since Python split up, and even in our time together, we have all had huge arguments,” said Palin.
“The great thing is that we don’t all agree. I remember Terry Jones once threw a typewriter across the room at John.”
The troupe split up in 1999 before briefly reuniting in 2014 for the variety show Monty Python Live (Mostly). However, a row between Idle and Cleese and Gilliam over the way the group’s finances have been handled emerged earlier this year.
Palin, who has become known for his various travel programmes, said he wasn’t surprised to see the remaining group members fight over finances.
“What’s happening with Python now doesn’t surprise me greatly. It’s just a pity it’s not to do with comedy any more. It’s to do with people’s lifestyles,” he said.
In February, Idle claimed on X (formerly Twitter) that the finances of the troupe, founded in 1969, were still a “disaster”.
He blamed their financial issues on Holly Gilliam, daughter of fellow Python Terry and manager of the troupe, saying: “We own everything we ever made in Python and I never dreamed that at this age the income streams would tail off so disastrously.
“But I guess if you put a Gilliam child in as your manager you should not be so surprised. One Gilliam is bad enough. Two can take out any company.”
In a series of subsequent posts, the actor and comedian said he had to keep working into his 80s to make up for his losses, and that his fellow Pythons have had to do the same. Cleese is currently working on a reboot of Fawlty Towers, Palin continues to make travel shows, and Gilliam is directing films.
The group made their debut on television with the BBC sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which ran from 1969 to 1974. They later turned their attention to the big screen, making Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975, Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983.
Elsewhere in the Radio Times interview, Palin dismissed the idea of another Python reunion, saying that the one they did in 2014 allowed them to “bow out gracefully”.
Jones passed away in January 2020, with Palin leading the tributes. Chapman died in 1989 at the age of 48.
The director reveals why he finally came round to doing a play based on the cult film that made his name
By Robert Gore-Langton
Bruce Robinson is ramming a huge log into the grate of his ancient fireplace in mud-clogged Herefordshire. He’s 77 and the film for which he is famous, Withnail and I, is about to open as a play. Isn’t it curious it hasn’t happened before, given that the comedy is about two thirsty, unemployed actors and is a sort of love-hate letter to the theatre?
‘I was living on 30 bob a week – I could either afford fish and chips or ten gold leaf’
‘I wasn’t fond of the idea of staging it,’ says Robinson, who wrote and directed the 1987 film based on his own boozy life as an actor in the 1960s. ‘I’d done it, you know; it’s decades ago and it’s over. There was a time when Withnail was stuck to me like a colostomy bag. I just wanted to move on. But a while back, a lovely geezer called George Ward wanted to buy the stage rights. He is a very generous man and coughed up a good chunk of dough. So I’ve written the script but I am not the director. I’ve deliberately stayed away from rehearsals. I’d only bring a ball and chain as I would be looking to do what I did before.’
The show is being directed at the Birmingham Rep by Sean Foley, a seasoned comedy director who recently turned the Ealing classic The Man in the White Suit into a stage show. Two young actors play the leads. Robert Sheehan is Withnail, Adonis Siddique is ‘I’ (based on Robinson himself) with stage veteran Malcolm Sinclair playing Monty, Withnail’s fruity, lecherous, Old Harrovian uncle. It’s not a musical but there’s a live band to replicate the film’s soundtrack, which was notable for its doses of Jimi Hendrix. The film is set in 1969 and yet it remains oddly timeless. It made the names of Richard E. Grant (as Withnail) and Paul McGann (as ‘I’) as the two reprobates. Continue reading →
The HOBBLEDEHOY 