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      Leslie Phillips, Comic Actor Who Sorted Wizards, Dies at 98

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      He made a name for himself in British satires, then late in his career reached a different audience as the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter movies.Leslie Phillips, a British actor who in a career that began before World War II played numerous comic roles, then reached new generations of filmgoers when he provided the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 98.His agent, Jonathan Lloyd, confirmed the death.Mr. Phillips began acting as a teenager, supporting his family after his father died in his 40s. His fledgling career was interrupted by military service at the end of World War II, but in the mid-1940s he resumed it, although at first mostly in “the murkiest, rat-infested old playhouses and music halls in the North of England,” as he put it in his autobiography, “Hello” (2006).He eventually began to have success on radio, most notably on the long-running comedy show “The Navy Lark,” and he went from bit roles in films and on television to larger ones. He drew good notices for his performance in the Gene Kelly film “Les Girls” in 1957.Mr. Phillips, right, drew good reviews for his performance in the 1957 movie “Les Girls” with, from left, Jacques Bergerac and Gene Kelly.via Everett CollectionWhen he returned to England from Hollywood after that film, he told The Daily Telegraph in 2010, “I had a whole load of scripts to choose from.”“I went against my agent and said I’d do ‘Carry On Nurse,’” he added — an early entry in what became a series of popular, quickly made film comedies that over the next decades satirized the military, the medical profession, British history and even the soft-core “Emmanuelle” movies.Mr. Phillips also appeared in “Carry On Teacher” (1959) and “Carry On Constable” (1960), but he wasn’t really part of the ensemble of actors who were the core of those movies. Years later, though, in 2010, he was the presenter for “Carry On Forever!,” a BBC Radio 2 look back at the franchise.He turned up in another satirical film series, in “Doctor in Love,” in 1960 and “Doctor in Trouble” in 1970. By 1978, The Evening Post of Reading could say that Mr. Phillips “has been one of Britain’s best known and loved actors for more than 40 years,” and his career was barely half over.He worked regularly in British television after that, including recurring roles on “Chancer,” “The House of Windsor” and other series in the 1990s. He continued to appear in film comedies but also turned up in dramas, including “Out of Africa” (1985) and “The Jackal” (1997).Mr. Phillips worked on the stage as well, and though he was known for comedic catchphrases — his distinctive delivery of “Well, hello!” and “Ding dong!” were famous from the movies — he sometimes felt compelled to point out that he had a wider range.“I’ve done all the classics,” he said in the 2010 interview. “I’ve been to Stratford.”He certainly put serious actorly thought into what may have been the performance experienced by more filmgoers than any of his others: his voice work as the Sorting Hat, the all-knowing headwear that sorted new students at the Hogwarts wizarding school into their houses in the Harry Potter films, which began in 2001 with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” directed by Chris Columbus.“I worked only with the director and was given a great deal of time to get the voice right,” he told the NewsQuest Media Group in 2002. “It is quite a moment in the movie, it was a very important role to get right.”He reprised the role in several of the sequels.Leslie Samuel Phillips was born on April 20, 1924, in the Tottenham area of London to Fred and Cecilia Phillips.“I grew up surrounded by illness,” he told The Daily Mail of London in 1999, and his father, who worked for the gas board, died when Leslie was young. His mother, hoping the boy could generate some income, sent him to a stage school, and by age 14 he was going on national tours.“Always people in the cast became my uncles and aunts,” he said. “I learned a lot. They encouraged me to read and taught me all the things I hadn’t done at home or school. It was as much an education as a job.”After the war he married Penelope Bartley, an actress, and they had four children before divorcing in 1965. She later died in a fire. His second wife, Angela Scoular, also an actress, died by suicide in 2011. His survivors include his third wife, Zara Carr.In the mid-1980s Mr. Phillips’s 92-year-old mother was left seriously injured in a mugging; he said the attackers had beat her unconscious because she wouldn’t give up her handbag, which contained some family mementos. She died after several months in the hospital.“It was the biggest tragedy of my life,” he told The Daily Mail in 1993. “Horrific. I used to go into hospital to visit her and then go walking round the streets, looking for a boy wearing the yellow sweatshirt she’d described to the police.”If his personal life was full of dark episodes, his career continued to give him satisfaction.“I seem to have a very overall appeal,” he said in 2002, the year after he had been in both the first Harry Potter movie and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” another movie aimed at a youthful audience. “I get the most wonderful letters from elderly people who follow my career, and then I get an enormous amount of letters from young people.” More

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      in Music

      When Technology Makes Music More Accessible

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      In Britain and Ireland, a series of recent projects show the rich possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are considered in the creative process.LONDON — As the audience at Cafe OTO, a venue here, settled down to hear Neil Luck introduce his ambitious new piece, “Whatever Weighs You Down,” bemused smiles flickered across many faces.The evening’s performances had already featured an intriguing selection of musical technologies, including sensor gloves, text-to-speech software and recordings of bird song processed by artificial intelligence.So when Luck launched into a low-tech étude, raucously inflating a balloon while gasping into a microphone, audience members couldn’t help but laugh.A dark humor punctuated “Whatever Weighs You Down,” a bizarre, violent 40-minute work for piano, video, electronics and sensor gloves. It was the centerpiece of an evening that presented works made with Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound ($1.6 million) project, led by the pianist and composer Zubin Kanga, to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.“Whatever Weighs You Down” is one of several experimental works that recently premiered in Britain and Ireland that show the rich musical possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are incorporated into the creative process. These works also point to newly developed technologies as both malleable tools for expressing diverse perspectives in experimental music, and as potentially enabling greater accessibility to composition, which traditionally has been a rarefied and exclusive world.In recent years, increasing attention has been paid, particularly in Britain, to making classical music more accessible. This includes the widespread adoption of what are called relaxed performances in concert halls — where audiences are allowed to make noise — and the creation of professional ensembles for disabled musicians, such as BSO Resound, part of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the Paraorchestra, which is based in Bristol, England.For “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Luck worked closely with the Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura, who in the piece appeared on a video screen and used sign language to retell her own dreams about falling, one of the main themes of Luck’s work.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world. Language in Evolution: Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.In “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Minamimura wanted to express a deaf perspective on sound and music. “I have hearing loss, but I can feel things — I can feel sounds,” she said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. Workshops to develop the piece involved Minamimura responding to vibrations wherever she could find them: pressing her full body against the lid of the piano, feeling the underside of the soundboard and even biting the strings of certain instruments.As the performance of “Whatever Weighs You Down” drew to a close, it reached a striking semi-synthesis. Onscreen, Minamimura’s gestures mirrored Kanga’s onstage hand movements. Both performers provided a kind of accompaniment for each other, experienced in entirely different ways by audience members, depending on their relationship to sound.“Traditionally, music is just heard in an auditory sense,” Minamimura said, “but, of course, we can see someone playing a piano or playing a flute. For me, technology means incorporating a film, visuals, or a general feeling of something else; we’re adding more sensory experiences for an audience.”Chisato Minamimura’s 2019 piece “Scored in Silence” was created with the aim of giving deaf individuals a comparable experience to hearing individuals.Mark PickthallZubin Kanga leads Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound project to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesCreating music that incorporates multisensory experience is just one of the areas Cyborg Soloists explores. The project, supported by the government-funded U.K. Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, also involves new types of visual interactions, including virtual reality, the creation of new digital instruments and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.The next frontier for Kanga, he said, is finding a way to translate brain activity from electroencephalogram caps into sound. And in Ireland, a recent installation explores a similar process.The visual artist Owen Boss described the first time he heard the sonic reproduction of a brain mid-seizure as “an absolutely extraordinary moment,” describing “a very low-end bass sound, kind of rhythmic, it just emerges in these sweeping, intense bass noises that whoosh in and whoosh out.”The sound files were created by Mark Cunningham, a professor of neurophysiology of epilepsy at Trinity College Dublin, who analyzed slivers of removed brain tissue that had been put through a process that simulated a seizure. He translated the analysis into binary code, and then into sound. Inspired by those deeply jarring reverberations and his family’s own experience, Boss then began piecing together an installation, “The Wernicke’s Area,” which is named after the part of the brain involved in understanding speech. The installation is showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.In 2014, Boss’s wife, Debbie Boss, had surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was successful — the tumor was removed from her brain’s Wernicke’s area — but there were some side effects: The former soprano developed epilepsy and also now finds communication challenging.The violist Stephen Upshaw and the mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton took performance directions for “The Wernicke’s Area” from diaries Debbie Boss kept about her seizures.Pat RedmondWith his wife’s permission, Boss and the composer Emily Howard created what he calls “a portrait of Debbie,” a multimedia work including details from the diaries she kept of her seizures, images of her brain, warped snippets of her favorite Handel aria and a variety of electroacoustic music drawn from data produced by artificially induced brain seizures.For all involved, the first performance of “The Wernicke’s Area” was an extremely moving experience, particularly for the Boss family. Debbie Boss became emotional “watching people do what she couldn’t do anymore,” her husband said. Yet, because she wasn’t directly involved in shaping the work, there’s a slight distance to “The Wernicke’s Area.”Lived experience plays a large role in the work of the composer Megan Steinberg, which places neurodiverse and disabled practitioners in all aspects of the creative process.Steinberg’s “Outlier II,” created with the Distractfold ensemble and the artists Elle Chante and Luke Moore, explores, in musical form, how artificial intelligence, or A.I., can exclude disabled people by working off a generalized understanding of human experience. “Outlier II” involves an A.I.-generated melody that generalizes over time, gradually losing nuance before being disrupted by a series of chance-based improvisations.Steinberg considered accessibility from the start of the creative process, and produced scores that were tailored to each performer’s needs.“That’s so rare in arts environments,” said Chante, a vocalist with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a condition affecting her joints. “Normally, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this thing, and we want it to be accessible.’ Here, it’s, ‘We want to be accessible, and here’s this piece we’re trying to create.’ And that made a giant difference.”A graphic score created for Megan Steinberg’s “Outlier II.”via Megan SteinbergProjects like these also produce music that is more representative of the breadth of human experience, according to Cat McGill, the head of program development at Drake Music, an arts charity focused on music, disability and technology. These projects “force us to challenge our thinking around disability and neurodiversity,” she wrote in an email interview.“If we approach a situation with the assumption that each individual has a unique contribution to make, rather than feeling like we need to fix them,” McGill added, “we embrace the differences as a natural part of humanity.” More

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      in Movies

      Robbie Coltrane, the Beloved Hagrid in ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 72

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      The veteran Scottish actor and comedian also played a gambling-addicted psychologist in the 1990s crime series “Cracker.”Robbie Coltrane, the veteran Scottish actor who played the beloved half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” films and starred in the cult British crime series “Cracker,” died on Friday in Larbert, Scotland. He was 72.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Belinda Wright, his British agent. Ms. Wright said that Mr. Coltrane’s family had not disclosed a cause, but that he had been “unwell for some time.”Mr. Coltrane veered from the comic to the gritty in a 40-year career in film and television, with turns as an antihero detective in “Cracker” (1993-96), a K.G.B. agent turned ally to James Bond and a gangster who disguises himself as a nun after betraying his fellow criminals in “Nuns on the Run” (1990).But those roles did little to prepare Mr. Coltrane to play Hagrid, a fan favorite from the “Harry Potter” books whose transition to the big screen would face the sky-high expectations of millions of young readers.Mr. Coltrane successfully embodied the 8-foot-6 half-giant. He appeared in all eight “Harry Potter” films, infusing the franchise with warmth even as he towered over the young witches and wizards at the center of the series who were embroiled in a fight against evil.The first film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” opened in November 2001 and went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, building on the already fervent global fan base of J.K. Rowling’s book series.Ms. Wright, Mr. Coltrane’s agent of 40 years, said the role was the reason he received a “stream of fan letters every week for over 20 years.”Fiercely protective of his privacy, Mr. Coltrane gave few interviews and could be hard-edged with reporters. But he said he had to cast that gruffness aside when he was embraced by a legion of young “Harry Potter” fans.“Kids come up to you and they go, ‘Would you like to sign my book?’ with those big doe-eyes,” he told The Guardian in 2012. “And it’s a serious responsibility.”Mr. Coltrane was born Anthony Robert McMillan on March 30, 1950, in Rutherglen, Scotland, outside Glasgow. His father, Ian Baxter McMillan, was a doctor; his mother, Jean Ross Howie, was a teacher.He grew up on the outskirts of Glasgow and enrolled in Glasgow School of Art, where he studied drawing and painting but struggled to capture his ideas on canvas.“I wanted to paint like the painters who really moved me, who made me want to weep about humanity,” he told The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, in 2014. “Titian. Rembrandt. But I looked at my diploma show and felt a terrible disappointment when I realized all the things that were in my head were not on the canvas.”As the prospect of a future as a painter dimmed, he was encouraged by a drama teacher who told him that he had acting talent after he appeared in a staging of Harold Pinter’s one-act play “The Dumb Waiter,” The Herald reported.After adopting his stage name as a tribute to the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, Mr. Coltrane found steadier footing when he moved to London. He worked as a stand-up comedian and actor, picking up theater roles and small parts in television and film productions.He attracted critical acclaim as Dr. Edward Fitzgerald, known as Fitz, the chain-smoking criminal psychologist in the hit series “Cracker,” whose alcohol addiction echoed Mr. Coltrane’s own issues with drinking. The role earned him the BAFTA award for best TV actor in 1994, 1995 and 1996.A turn as Valentin Zukovsky, a former K.G.B. agent turned Russian mafia kingpin, in the James Bond films “GoldenEye” (1995) and “The World is Not Enough” (1999) exposed Mr. Coltrane to a broader audience, particularly in the United States.There was nothing, however, that could compete with the global fame he found after he was cast as Rubeus Hagrid in the “Harry Potter” series. With his bushy beard and growling voice, Mr. Coltrane brought the beloved character to life. Mr. Coltrane, center, as Rubeus Hagrid in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (2009), with Jim Broadbent, left, as Professor Horace Slughorn, and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter.Alex Bailey/Warner Brothers PicturesThe young actors who grew up on the sets of the “Harry Potter” films fondly remembered Mr. Coltrane as someone they could count on to lift their spirits with a joke or a word of encouragement.Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, said on Friday that Mr. Coltrane “used to keep us laughing constantly as kids.”“I’ve especially fond memories of him keeping our spirits up on ‘Prisoner of Azkaban,’” Mr. Radcliffe said in a statement, “when we were all hiding from the torrential rain for hours in Hagrid’s hut and he was telling stories and cracking jokes to keep morale up.” James Phelps, who played Fred Weasley in the series, wrote on Twitter that when he was 14 years old and nervous on his first day on the set, Mr. Coltrane came over and said, “Enjoy it, you’ll be great.”Mr. Coltrane is survived by his children, Spencer and Alice, and a sister, Annie Rae. In the HBO Max retrospective “Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts,” which premiered on Jan. 1, Mr. Coltrane reflected on the role that introduced him to a new generation of fans.“The legacy of the movies is that my children’s generation will show them to their children,” he said. “So you could be watching it in 50 years’ time, easy. I’ll not be here, sadly, but Hagrid will, yes.” More

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      in Music

      Liverpool Will Host 2023 Eurovision Song Contest

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      The popular competition would have been held in Ukraine, which won this year’s event, but safety concerns sent it to Britain instead.Liverpool will host the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023, organizers of the musical competition announced on Friday, choosing the birthplace of the Beatles for one of Europe’s premier cultural events.The M&S Bank Arena, an 11,000-capacity arena, will stage the competition on May 13, 2023, organizers said.The announcement capped an unusual selection process, in which Ukraine, which earned the right to host next year’s event after winning this year’s contest, was ruled out by Eurovision organizers, who said the war-torn country could not provide the necessary “security and operational guarantees.”Instead, Britain, the runner-up in 2022, was named host. Liverpool was selected from a shortlist of seven cities that also included Glasgow, the runner-up, along with Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.Hosting Eurovision “means everything” for Liverpool, the city’s director of culture, Claire McColgan, told the BBC on Friday.“We’re doing it for Ukraine first of all, for our brilliant city and for the people who come here,” Ms. McColgan said. “It’s going to be incredible.”Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region, which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.But the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the competition, announced in July that Britain would host instead. At the time, Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, pledged that Ukraine would be “celebrated and represented throughout the event,” with representatives from a Ukrainian broadcaster working with the BBC.Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, also said the network was “committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Eurovision began in 1956, gathering musical artists from countries across Europe, as well as some farther afield, including Australia and Israel.Britain has hosted the event eight times, most recently in 1998 in Birmingham.The selection will bring a major international spotlight to Liverpool. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner in Turin, Italy.Sixty-two years after the Beatles formed, Liverpool remains closely tied to the enormously influential rock band. The band is central to the city’s tourism, with Beatles-themed museums, tours and a statue along the waterfront.Though Liverpool has produced fewer star international acts recently, the local music scene is small-scale and “healthy,” said Karl Whitney, the author of “Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop.” There are “lots of great bands from Liverpool,” he said, “but the Beatles, obviously, sort of overshadow everything.”The city plans collaborations with Ukrainian street artists, designers and musicians to bring the country’s culture to the city, The Liverpool Echo reported this week. Claire McColgan, the director of Culture Liverpool, told the newspaper that “this is their party, it just happens to be in our house,” referring to the Ukrainians.“If we are chosen as host city there’s no question Eurovision will take over Liverpool in a way no single event has ever done before,” she said this week. More

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      in Television

      Britain Wonders, Is It Too Soon to Dramatize the Pandemic?

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      A new Sky Atlantic mini-series, “This England,” depicts the early days of Covid-19 in the country, with Kenneth Branagh playing Boris Johnson.LONDON — In the final moments of the new mini-series “This England,” Boris Johnson, the exhausted and embattled British prime minister, stares bleakly out of a window at 10 Downing Street and falls back, as he often does, on Shakespeare.“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,” says Johnson, who is played by Kenneth Branagh in the series, a six-part drama about Britain’s ordeal with the coronavirus pandemic.“We usually leave it there, you know,” he says, turning to his anxious wife, Carrie (Ophelia Lovibond), who is cradling their newborn child. “Forget the rest.”But Johnson goes on to recite the end of John of Gaunt’s deathbed soliloquy from “Richard II,” with its damning reproach of the king. “That England, that was wont to conquer others,” he says, “hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”It is a fitting coda to a much-talked-about show in Britain, a series that captures the everyday heroism of Britons during the pandemic, but also the failings of their leaders and how those failings contributed to a dilatory response that arguably deepened the nation’s suffering and led to needless additional deaths.“This England,” which debuted with solid ratings on Wednesday on Sky Atlantic in Britain, chronicles, almost day-by-day, how the first wave of the pandemic swept across the country. To many, the timing is curious, given that the latest wave of the virus hasn’t even ebbed yet.Work on “This England” began in June 2020, not long after the first Covid-19 wave had rampaged across the country.Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticMichael Winterbottom, the British documentary filmmaker who wrote the script with Kieron Quirke, said that he viewed the show as a “mosaic of many people’s experiences,” from those of Johnson and his advisers to those of doctors and nurses — and, above all, of the dying — in the overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes.“The goal was to be human and, I think, humane,” Winterbottom said in a joint interview with Branagh. “To honor and acknowledge this incredible, painful loss.” For all the government’s confusion and missteps, he added, “There was a sense that everybody was doing their best.”Yet inevitably, “This England” shows people falling short. Caught in the fog of a mysterious illness, some in government, like Johnson, initially underestimated the risk. Others were compelled to make bad personal choices, like the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who drove 260 miles, in breach of lockdown, to visit his family as the virus struck.Work on “This England” began in June 2020, not long after the first wave had rampaged across the country, and the desperate scenes in ambulances and hospital intensive care units have an anguished immediacy. Much of the commentary about the show in Britain has focused on whether it’s too soon to dramatize all of this.Nearly 300 people died of Covid-19 in England in the seven days ending on Sept. 17; more than 4,000 were admitted to hospitals. The government is still pleading with people to get their booster shots. Johnson was drummed out of office only two months ago after a scandal over parties at Downing Street that violated lockdown rules.The outcry over the parties does not figure in the film, which ends instead with the misbegotten road trip Cummings made to his parents’ house in the north of England after his wife contracted Covid. This abridged timeline led The Financial Times to declare that the show “pulls off the unusual feat of feeling simultaneously premature and dated.”When the series opens, Johnson’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond), is pregnant.Phil Fisk/Sky Atlantic“This England” has also had to contend with a torrent of other news. Sky pushed back the series by a week after the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, which plunged the country into 10 days of mourning. It premiered at a time when the government of Johnson’s replacement, Liz Truss, caused a run on the pound by announcing a plan to cut taxes despite double-digit inflation.Winterbottom acknowledged that the show was a first cut and that some might prefer the cooler perspective that comes with distance, which might be found in future books or films about the pandemic. But his goal was to make a kind of diary of a national trauma, he said. “By being close,” he noted, “you’re able to get a fresher view.”The other big debate is over Branagh’s performance as Johnson. The actor, a 61-year-old Oscar-winner, wore a blonde wig, prosthetics and padding to assume the 58-year-old politician’s shambling appearance.Some critics praised Branagh for nailing Johnson’s propulsive gait and peculiar diction. Another dismissed it as an impersonation that recalled the puppets on “Spitting Image,” a British TV show that satirized public figures of the 1980s and ’90s.Branagh, who has played real-life figures including Franklin D. Roosevelt and the German SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, said that he and the writers had debated how closely he should try to mimic Johnson. They concluded that the former prime minister was too vivid in people’s minds to stray far from the O.G.“With somebody so prominently in the public eye,” Branagh said, “I think it’s harder to serve to an audience something that is very, very different — that is stylized and abstract.”The series shows Johnson initially underestimating the risk posed by the coronavirus.Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticTo plumb Johnson’s interior life, Branagh said that he had read all the former prime minister’s books, including his biography of Winston Churchill, as well as his newspaper columns for The Daily Telegraph. He came to see Johnson as a kind of “poet-politician,” ambitious and combative, but also emotionally separated from those around him by the crushing weight of his job.That translated to the production. “I didn’t really have small talk with other actors,” Branagh recalled. “It was as if there was already a sense that you must be burdened, and if you are burdened, you must be left alone.”Branagh watched footage of Johnson hustling through the House of Commons to capture his distinctive forward-leaning posture. He said that he had been especially struck by a video in which Johnson, then the mayor of London, runs down a 10-year-old boy while playing rugby during a visit to Japan. “This barreling-forward intensity, almost unstoppable, is just part of the propulsion,” Branagh said.But “This England” also offers a sympathetic portrayal of a harried man with a tangled personal life. Between crisis meetings and late-night awakenings to soothe his crying baby, Johnson is depicted as plaintively leaving voice mail messages for his adult children. It suggests a painful rift after Johnson divorced his second wife, Marina, and moved in with Carrie, who worked as a Tory Party communications aide.“This England” also captures the cramped, claustrophobic work environment in Downing Street, which doubles as the prime minister’s home and the headquarters of the British government. There are tracking shots of aides walking and talking about urgent matters of state, which recall the Aaron Sorkin series “West Wing.” The close quarters nearly became deadly after Johnson himself contracted Covid and wound up in an intensive care unit for three days.Dominic Cummings (Simon Paisley Day) is depicted as arrogant, entitled and contemptuous of his colleagues. Phil Fisk/Sky AtlanticTo the extent that there are heroes and villains, the show clearly puts Cummings in the black hat category. Played by Simon Paisley Day, he is depicted as arrogant, entitled and contemptuous of his colleagues. Winterbottom said that the producers had reached out to all the principals to gather their accounts.When the show takes the camera out of Downing Street, “This England” abruptly shifts from a political procedural to a tragedy. There are many scenes in hospitals and nursing homes, some of which were filmed in a real nursing home with actual residents and nursing staff, who were essentially re-enacting their experiences.“Our starting point was to make everything as accurate as possible, as authentic as possible,” Winterbottom said.It adds up to a heartbreaking depiction of the pressure on health workers, and the fear, pain and often lonely deaths of those hooked up to ventilators. By the final episode, it is easy to understand why a tormented Johnson would stand at a window, peer into a cold dawn and mourn how a disease had conquered his “sceptered isle.” More

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      in Theater

      Eldjarn and Das Are Stars at Home, but Not at Edinburgh Fringe

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      Over 1,000 stand-ups play the Edinburgh Festival Fringe each year, hoping for a big break. Some are already huge names elsewhere.EDINBURGH — When Ari Eldjarn, one of Iceland’s most popular comedians, takes the stage in his native country, it’s usually to sold-out crowds. In the spring, he played 15 dates in a 1,000-capacity auditorium in Reykjavik. The total audience for the run was equivalent to over 10 percent of the city’s population.Yet at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Eldjarn, 40, has found himself in less celebrated surroundings: the fourth room of the Monkey Barrel Comedy Club. On a recent evening, there were about 50 people in that space for Eldjarn’s daily show, “Saga Class,” with three rows of empty seats at the back. The air conditioning whirred loudly, and the thud of dance music occasionally intruded from another show upstairs.“Can you hear me all right?” Eldjarn asked as he came onstage. “I hear myself really well,” he said, pointing to the venue’s main speaker, which was just feet from his head. “But I have no idea if the people at the back hear anything.” Eldjarn then introduced himself as an Icelandic comedian, getting one of his first laughs of the act. “I love being in Edinburgh,” he added, “because there are actually other comedians here.”Vir Das’s Edinburgh show, “Wanted,” is focused on a stir he caused in India with a monologue that examined the country’s paradoxes and divisions.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesThe Edinburgh Fringe has for decades been an event that stand-up comedians flock to, hoping to make it big. Hannah Gadsby, an Australian comedian, won the festival’s main comedy award in 2017 with “Nanette,” a show that went on to become a Netflix phenomenon the next year; previous nominees for that prize include Eddie Izzard, Bo Burnham and James Acaster. At this year’s Fringe, which runs through Aug. 29, more than 1,300 comedians are performing. Most are little known in Britain, and some have to drum up their own audiences by handing out fliers on the street. Yet among them are a handful of comedians, like Eldjarn, who are actually big stars in their homes countries.Also appearing at this year’s Fringe is Stian Blipp, a Norwegian TV star, and Vir Das, an Indian comedian who has 7.7 million Twitter followers and multiple Netflix specials to his name. In Edinburgh, Das is playing to just over 100 people a day, if his show sells out.After his recent show, Eldjarn discovered that audience members had left him just over £20, or about $24, in a tip bucket by the door. He then walked across the street to spend the money on burgers for himself and one of his daughters.“This is definitely like starting over again,” Eldjarn said. In Iceland, he could “just go confidently onstage, make stuff up and people will laugh,” he added. But in Edinburgh, he said, “you really need a lot of good material.”To make his show — which includes jokes about turning 40 and disliking vaping — Eldjarn said he had taken one of his Icelandic sets, deleted anything that would not translate to a British audience, then tried to “salvage as much as possible” as he translated it into English. He was tweaking the routine daily in Edinburgh to try to get bigger laughs, he added.Blipp, the Norwegian comic, said in a telephone interview that he was also nervous about performing in Edinburgh. “I feel like a little boy again,” he said, “like I’m doing a second debut.”Inside the Teviot Row House Student Union, a small Fringe venue for stand-up acts.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesThe Monkey Barrel Comedy Club, where Eldjarn is performing.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesYet not all of the international stars at this year’s fringe were anxious. Das, the Indian comedian, said being in Edinburgh was “very much a holiday, if I’m honest.” He said he was usually on the road so much that it was a luxury to spend a month in Scotland working on his next special and soaking up experiences that might inform future comedy routines.Das, 43, is an old hand at the festival. He first performed in 2011, he said, in a venue “at the back of a pool hall at the back of a video game arcade.” For most of that run, he got only three or four audience members a night, he recalled. Another year, he said he built an audience with the help of a unique take on handing out fliers: He printed the show details on fake bank notes and dropped them around the city.This year, Das was not using any gimmicks to promote his hourlong show, “Wanted,” which was mostly sold out. (It is playing in a 102-capacity basement venue — a far cry from his last tour dates in Mumbai, where he said he played 10 shows at the 1,109-seater Jamshed Bhabha Theater over five days.)“Wanted” is focused on a furor Das caused in India last year, after he posted a monologue online called “Two Indias” in which he examined the country’s paradoxes and divisions. Das said the monologue, which had been performed at a show in Washington, was a way of showing his love for India and calling for social unity, but some accused him of defaming the nation. A spokesman for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party filed an official complaint (Das said in his show that the police had decided not to take it forward, and had dismissed other complaints) and a prominent Bollywood actress accused Das on social media of engaging in “soft terrorism,” a comment widely picked up on Indian news media. In his Edinburgh show, Das said, “I remember thinking, ‘This is so insulting to actual terrorists.’”Das said he used to adjust his material for Edinburgh audiences, but does not do that anymore. Many in the audience were British Indians, who came to his show to hear what India was like today, Das said, whereas Western audiences wanted to learn something new about Indian life. “Strangely, it’s become more important to tell an authentically Indian story for both the Indian and Western audiences,” Das said.In India, Das plays theaters that hold more than 1,000 spectators. In Edinburgh, he’s performing at a 102-capacity venue.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesAt a recent show, Das walked into the sweaty basement to booming music, as if he were entering an arena. He drew immediate laughs by remarking on the racial mix of the crowd. “I see Indian people,” he said. “I see people sleeping with Indian people,” he added. “I see random locals who thought Vir Das was a German comedian and are now thinking, ‘This isn’t what we thought it’d be.’”Then, he told a few preliminary jokes to give latecomers a chance to arrive before he started his routine. “It takes a while to get British crowds warm, and Indian crowds in,” he explained. (In India, a warm-up act does this before he comes on.)When the show ended, Das posed for a group selfie with audience members outside the venue — a requisite of the star comic the world over. After a gig in India, Das said, he would typically jump in a car to his hotel like any other celebrity. But here, he simply walked off, carrying a backpack. Barely anyone gave him a second glance. More

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      Bernard Cribbins, British Actor Known for ‘Doctor Who,’ Is Dead at 93

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      Mr. Cribbins’s long career included roles on stage, film and television.Bernard Cribbins, a British actor who had roles on “Doctor Who” and “Fawlty Towers,” and whose contributions to children’s programs delighted young audiences over a career that spanned seven decades, has died, his agent said on Thursday. He was 93.In a statement, the management and talent agency, Gavin Barker Associates, did not say when or where Mr. Cribbins died.Mr. Cribbins worked well into his 90s, the agency said, in a career that influenced some of the best-known comedy, drama and children’s programs in Britain. He started acting at the age of 14 in the Oldham repertory company. This period of onstage work broadened into other media, including television and film, for which he became widely known, according to IMDB.He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2011 for his contributions to the arts. In addition to dozens of roles in film and television, he recorded the 1960s novelty song “Right Said Fred.”For three decades, Mr. Cribbins was regularly featured on “Jackanory,” a BBC children’s program in which an actor read books to young audiences. The program, which ran between 1965 and 1996, was meant to arouse an interest in reading.In one of his more than 100 readings, of “The Wizard of Oz” in 1970, Mr. Cribbins infused the voices of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard and other characters with a full dramatic repertoire of whispers, tremors and shrieks.When he was awarded a BAFTA Special Award in 2009, he grew serious in an interview when asked about the hugely popular “Jackanory” and how it had influenced young audiences.“All you have to do,” he said, “is look down the lens, find one child, and just talk to that child. And you pull them in.”“It really works, and you think all over the country there will be little kids saying, ‘Just a minute, Mum,’ and they will be looking. And the stories, as I said before, were wonderful,” he said.Mr. Cribbins was born in Oldham, England, just outside Manchester, on Dec. 29, 1928, according to IMDB. After his early stage career, he narrated “The Wombles,” a 1970s animated television program created from a series of books about underground creatures, and joined the cast of the science-fiction TV series “Doctor Who” from 2007 to 2010. He had also appeared in a Doctor Who movie, “Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.,” in 1966.Mr. Cribbins, left, and his co-star David Tennant collected an award for “Doctor Who,” which was named most popular drama at Britain’s National Television Awards in 2010.Photo by Ian West/PA Images via Getty ImagesIn the TV series, which the producer Russell T Davies revived in 2005, Mr. Cribbins played a recurring role as the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, Donna Noble, played by Catherine Tate. In an Instagram post on Thursday, Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins “loved being in Doctor Who. He said, ‘Children are calling me grandad in the street!’”Mr. Davies wrote that Mr. Cribbins had once “turned up with a suitcase full of props, just in case, including a rubber chicken.” He added, “He’d phone up and say, ‘I’ve got an idea! What if I attack a Dalek with a paintball gun?!’ Okay, Bernard, in it went!”Mr. Cribbins also starred in the 1970 film “The Railway Children,” based on the children’s book by Edith Nesbit. A review in The New York Times called it “a perfectly lovely little British movie” and said Mr. Cribbins was “excellent” as the stationmaster Albert Perks in a “simple tale about three children who putter around a Yorkshire village, sharing a loving kindness learned at home.”In 1975, Mr. Cribbins appeared in an episode of the comedy series “Fawlty Towers,” starring John Cleese as the hapless manager of a seaside hotel. Mr. Cribbins played a guest mistaken by Mr. Cleese’s character for a hotel inspector, who is trying to order a cheese salad for lunch and instead is served an omelet.A list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Cribbins’s wife, the actor Gillian McBarnet, died in October last year.In the interview after receiving the BAFTA award in 2009, Mr. Cribbins and his “Doctor Who” co-star Ms. Tate spoke about how quickly time had gone by during his long career.“I can remember a lot of things with total clarity, total recall,” he said, before adding jokingly, “I’ve got stories I haven’t even thought of yet.” More