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THE VALUE OF TEAMWORK
The 12th Century Norman church in the leafy South Bucks hamlet hadn’t seen so many stars since it was the unlikely setting for then mistress-of-the-manor Scary (Mel B) Spice’s tacky nuptials a few years back. Now, as Colonel Derek Jacobi read the lesson and vicar Tim McInnerny presided, the pews were positive- ly bursting with pin-ups from Spotlight. Mark Gatiss, Rachael Stirling, Miriam Margolyes, Angela Pleasence, Janet McTeer, Jane Asher, Robert Powell and Ruth Sheen, to name but eight in a huge ensemble cast.
Tiny and deceptively demure among this Fifties-clad dramatis personae was twinkly-eyed Geraldine McEwan in her lat- est screen incarnation, for ITV1, as Agatha Christie’s enduring Home Counties’ spinster sleuth, Miss Marple.
It may be difficult for some to think beyond Margaret Rutherford and, more recently, Joan Hickson, who both brought very different if equally memorable charac- terisations to the indomitable gumshoe of St Mary Mead. But McEwan, after more than 40 years of great stage and screen roles, was certainly looking the part.
Said the actress, 73: “With Miss Marple I feel that I have been entrusted with a National Treasure of whom I already feel both protective and extremely fond.”
Helping to recreate her bygone world for Murder In The Vicarage, one of four two-hour TV dramas, featuring McEwan and a bevy of household names, were young director – and one-time focus puller - Charles Palmer and veteran cameraman, Nigel Walters BSC.
Welsh-born Walters is no stranger to adding his considerable expertise and experi- ence during the first-runs of small screen series drama such as Kavanagh QC, Spender,
Midsomer Murders, Queer As Folk and now, of course, Miss Marple. “I especially enjoy it because it’s as if one’s helping to set the style,” he noted, enthusiastically.
But the Walters ‘touch’ has gone way beyond primetime series’ television, taking in
acclaimed drama (Mother Love, My Fragile Heart, Alive And Kicking, Streetlife), popular documentary (Michael Palin’s Around The World In 80 Days) and even, more recently, his first, and to date only, feature.
This is One Of The Hollywood Ten, like Streetlife, written and directed by fellow Welshman, Karl Francis. It stars Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi, as real-life Hollywood couple, writer-director Herbert Biberman and actress Gale Sondergaard, whose creative lives were shamefully blight- ed by rabid Red-baiting in the 40s and 50s.
Sadly, the timing of its release coincided with 9/11 and its anti-Fascist stance didn’t chime too well with the inward-looking climate of the time and so this extremely stylish and still timely film disappeared without trace. Hopefully, it will still find a suitable slot in the cinema or on TV sooner rather than later.
For Walters, there was another fascinat- ing connection with the subject matter because he’d once shot a BBC TV documen- tary, The RKO Story, featuring interviews with Edward Dmytryk and Paul Jarrico, both of whom were key figures in One Of The Hollywood Ten. “Little did I dream that 20 years later I would be shooting part of their life story in this film,” he said.
Behind the camera for more than 40 years, of which he served just under thirty for the BBC, Walters’ career might actually have taken a very different turn. He grew up in the Neath Valley where his journalist father became editor of the local paper. Walters Jr. did have some aspirations to become a foreign correspondent, but, on his own admission, found the rather mun-
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AN INTERVIEW WITH NIGEL WALTERS BSC
Photo main: Nigel Walters BSC on location in South Buckinghamshire (Photo Quentin Falk); Above: Geraldine McEwan as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in Murder In The Vicarage
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