Page 29 - 18_Bafta ACADEMY_Pierce Brosnan & Halle Berry_ok

Calling for “distribution-led companies to carve out a British share of the $60bn world market”, Film Council chair- man, Sir Alan Parker has outlined plans to build a sustainable and growing UK film industry.
Requiring action by both Government and industry, they involve promoting the UK as an international film centre by using incentives to encourage the distri- bution of more UK films at home and abroad, distributing Lottery money to grow UK creative and technical talent and skills and sup- port cultural production, and encouraging investment via world- class infrastructure of studios and production facilities and services.
During his speech at BAFTA in November Parker praised the talent
Richard Harris
ichard Harris died aged 72 on the same day his latest film, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, was given its international press launch at the Guildhall in London.
Five days later, Harris, who’d been suffering from Hodgkins’ Disease, was given a posthumous award for Outstanding Contribution By An Actor at the annual British Independent Film Awards. It was accepted by his three sons, Jared, Jamie and Damian, who were accompa- nied by various grandchildren.
Like his role as the wise, beard- ed Professor Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, this was a gentle, dignified finale to what had often been a tempes- tuous, so-called ‘hell-raising’, career on-and-off stage and screen across five decades.
Born in Limerick, Harris first came to world attention as Frank
within the UK film industry before outlining a strategy which aims to:
•improve distribution of UK films at home and abroad using a review of the current 100% tax write-off for a film’s first year pro- duction expenditure, which is due to expire in July 2005 to create a fiscal policy to give film distribu- tors (both independents and Americans) an incentive to invest in and acquire UK films;
•provide the UK with the best- equipped, most highly-skilled and flexible film workforce in the world in areas ranging from script devel- opment, through to production, post-production, distribution and exhibition. This would be funded by Lottery money from the Film Council, the industry itself (with the possibility of tying a contribution to
obits
industry training to the availability of any future tax break) and by Government funding;
•ensure the UK offers infra- structure including state-of-the-art studios and post-production com- panies, complemented by out- standing service companies serv- icing the global film business.
Parker concluded: “We are at a crossroads. The tide is turning and we can’t sit here like cultural Canutes. We can retreat back to ‘Little England’. Or we can mount a sustained assault on wider horizons. The choice is there for all of us.”
thinking global
Machin in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life, a portrayal that would earn him Best Actor at Cannes as well as Oscar and BAFTA nominations.
Over the next 40 years, for the occasional gem such as Major Dundee, A Man Called Horse, The Field (another Oscar nomination) and Unforgiven, there were, sadly. rather more like Caprice, The Cassandra Crossing, Golden Rendezvous and Tarzan – The Ape Man.
Early on in his screen career he had been asked to play Commodus in The Fall Of The Roman Empire, the blueprint for Gladiator, but after rows over billing followed by threats and counter threats of suing he bowed acrimo- niously out of the epic project.
Thirty-five years later, one of his best, albeit more abbreviated, roles was, ironically, in the block- buster Gladiator in which Harris, by now venerable and white- haired, played the dying Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
CAhristopher Parsons
founding member of BBC’s Natural History Unit and, later, one of the producers behind its acclaimed 1979 Life On Earth series, Christopher Parsons has died of cancer aged 70.
Awarded the OBE for services to broadcasting, he also worked on programmes like Look, The Major and The World About Us. From 1995 to 2000, he was direc- tor of Wildscreen-at-Bristol.
GCerald Thompson
reated an OBE in 1981 for services to the film industry, Gerald Thompson, who has died at 80, was a founding member of Oxford Scientific Films which helped pioneer micropho- tography on both the big and small screens.
Beginning with an award-win- ning 1961 BBC programme on insects, Thompson, who started as a lecturer in forest zoology, helped create the company which gained an international reputation for documentaries and special effects photography.
to a consummate skill perhaps befitting the erudite author of the definitive ‘Techniques Of Film Editing’.
A Czech émigré at 12, Reisz founded the influential Sequence film magazine while at Cambridge and, with fellow advocate Lindsay Anderson, espoused the Free Cinema movement before cutting his own directing teeth with the BAFTA nominated 1958 documentary We Are The Lambeth Boys.
His 1960 feature debut, the raw and still rewarding Saturday Night And Sunday Morning earned him a British Academy Award and launched the career of Albert Finney. Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966) and Isadora (1968) followed.
Either side of Reisz’s successful version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), were a handful of fascinating forays on to the American scene – including the Vietnam-themed Who’ll Stop The Rain (1978), a country-and-west- ern biopic, Sweet Dreams (1985), and the Arthur Miller-scripted thriller, Everybody Wins (1990), an ambitious flop.
The last ten years saw him work successfully in the theatre before returning briefly to filmmaking with Act Without Words, a short in the Beckett On Film series.
WL
creator, writer, script editor and
producer, responsible for some of British television’s most popular drama series across more than three decades.
In the Sixties, with Rex Firkin, he created The Plane Makers (later The Power Game); in the 70s came Hine, the futuristic 1990 and the World War Two-set Secret Army; and in early 80s, with Gerard Glaister, he was responsi- ble for Airline.
KWarel Reisz
ith just nine features in a directing career span- ning six decades, Karel Reisz, who has died aged 76, combined rarity value with unpredictability of subject allied
ilfred Greatorex
iverpool-born Wilfred Greatorex, who has died aged 80, was, as variously,
27