Category: 5. Entertainment

Terence Stamp, the English actor who played the arch-villain General Zod in Superman films, has died at the age of 87.

In a career that spanned six decades, the Oscar-nominated actor starred in films including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Far From the Madding Crowd and Valkyrie.

Stamp died on Sunday morning, his family said in a statement to Reuters news agency.

“He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and a writer that will continue to touch people for years to come,” they said.

Born in Stepney, east London, to working-class parents on 22 July 1938, Stamp attended grammar school before pursuing a career in advertising.

After securing a scholarship to go to drama school, he shot to fame in the 1960s, making his debut playing the titular role in Billy Budd, a 1962 film about a naive young seaman in the 18th century.

His performance earnt him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and a Golden Globe for best newcomer.

He went on to make a name for himself as a villain, with stand-out performances in Superman and Superman II as General Zod, kidnapper Freddie Clegg in The Collector, and Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd.

During his heyday in the 1960s, Stamp was known for his good looks, fashion sense and high-profile girlfriends, including actress Julie Christie – who he later starred alongside in Far From the Madding Crowd – and supermodel Jean Shrimpton.

His relationship with Christie only lasted a year but was immortalised by the Kinks in the song Waterloo Sunset with the line “Terry meets Julie”, believed to reference the pair.

Stamp was approached to replace Sean Connery when he relinquished his role as James Bond, but said his radical ideas about how he could interpret the character put off producer Harry Saltzman.

“I think my ideas about it put the frighteners on Harry,” he said. “I didn’t get a second call from him.”

He spent some time in Italy, working with directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, but found his star had faded when he returned to London at the end of the 1960s.

“When the 1960s ended, I think because I’d been so identified with it, I kind of ended as well,” he later told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

“I thought if I could be good looking, and I could be successful and I could be famous, everything would be solved. And when it all kind of came to an end, I thought to myself there’s been a lot of fun but there hasn’t been any real, deep internal satisfaction.”

He moved away from acting for a while, buying a round-the-world ticket and ending up in India where he studied yoga and spent time living in a spiritual retreat – before being offered his most high-profile role, as General Zod in Superman, in 1976.

Returning to the silver screen, the following decades saw dozens of appearances in films including Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, A Song for Marion, The Adjustment Bureau and Last Night in Soho.

One of his most celebrated and notable performances came in 1994 when he played a transgender woman in the Australian film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Stamp was reportedly onboard to return for a sequel to Priscilla, director Stephan Elliott confirmed last year.

Elliott described the then 85-year-old Stamp as the “fittest man I’ve ever met in my life” who “has never drunk and basically eats grass”.

“It took him a long time to think about it until he got there,” he told The Guardian, “but eventually he said to me, ‘You know what? You’re right. We’re not finished yet. The story is untold.’”

The cast of Severance, Apple TV+’s acclaimed psychological drama, reunited this weekend as production questions continue to loom over season three.

Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, and Patricia Arquette appeared together on the red carpet at the Television Academy’s inaugural Televerse Festival, held Saturday (August 16) at JW Marriott LA Live in Los Angeles. Series director Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson also joined the event, sparking excitement among fans eager for any hint of progress on the show’s future.

Despite the high-profile reunion, Apple TV+ executives have confirmed that filming for season three has not yet begun. Head of programming Matt Cherniss told Variety last month that while development is moving forward, a production start date has not been set. The series previously faced a three-year gap between its first two seasons.

“No one wants another three-year wait,” Cherniss explained. “I don’t believe we have a start date yet, but we’re moving in that direction.”

Adam Scott also recently revealed on Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast that filming season two took nearly 186 days, highlighting the demanding production schedule. Some episodes stretched to six weeks of shooting, as the show films multiple installments simultaneously.

While fans celebrated the reunion, speculation remains about which cast members will return and how long the wait for new episodes will be. With its growing acclaim and intense fan interest, Severance season three is one of Apple TV+’s most anticipated projects.

Most shows take years to become part of the world’s consciousness, but Netflix show Adolescence did it within weeks of its debut in March of this year. One could try to be smart and say, well of course it did, since it’s a Plan B production, but even the collective wisdom of Brad Pitt’s company couldn’t have known that a gritty drama, set in a small town in the north of England, would reverberate in the way it did. But by being true to its core idea and rejecting all the stereotypical tropes of TV crime series, Adolescence made viewers think in a way that maybe they hadn’t thought before. Because it seemed real. Uncomfortably real.

Compared to most four-part series of its kind, not a lot actually happens in Adolescence. The main event happens for the most part off-screen: 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) is accused of murdering a girl in his class at school, and his guilt is established at the end of the very first episode. But this isn’t a whodunit. The power of Adolescence is the way the enormity of this crime plays out over time, starting with the arrest, then the investigation, then the psychological report, and, finally, the family’s attempts to deal with it all.

The show followed hard on the heels of the 2021 film Boiling Point, a collaboration between Adolescence star Stephen Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie, and director Philip Barantini. It was a one-take drama in which Graham plays a chef on the edge, and the format suited the tension of the situation. With Adolescence, though, Barantini and Graham went a step further, in no small part thanks to writer and co-creator Jack Thorne. By forensically focusing on four specific hours in the crime being covered, Adolescence took audiences quietly but firmly into their worst nightmares. In the ’60s, the question was, “Do you know where your children are?” Today, the question is, “Do you know who your children are?”

Adolescence made such a big impact that Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a summit at his home in Downing Street, and it quite likely had some bearing on the Online Safety Act, rolled out in increments. Now, in the UK, certain sites — some of them pornographic but not all —need “age assurance”, a measure that Thorne is wary of endorsing.

“I think the government needs to be doing something more radical,” he says. “I know that that will make me unpopular amongst certain free speech defenders, but why should kids be given unfettered access to such an addictive substance? [The internet] is addictive, and we know it’s addictive. We’re all addicted. Some people are saying, ‘Well, we need to deal with our addiction first.’ But can’t we prevent them from falling into our traps, at least while their brains are the most plastic they’re ever going to be? Can’t we protect them from what we’re dragging them into? Saying we’ll put age verification on certain sites [is not enough]. Kids will find a way around that, because kids are a lot cleverer than we are — and a lot more sophisticated with this technology than we are.”

Here, Thorne talks about the show and his upcoming projects, which include The Hack, about the very British News International phone-hacking scandal, an adaption of William Golding’s schoolboy survival story Lord of the Flies, and Sam Mendes’s Beatles project.

DEADLINE: When did you realize that Adolescence was starting to take off? And, more importantly, when did you realize that people were getting it?

JACK THORNE: There are two answers to that question. The first is, I am a ratings and TV nerd, so I check FlixPatrol, and I check all those weird websites that tell you all sorts of things about what’s number one and where in the world. I was checking that right from the start, which is really sad of me and I’m pathetic for doing so, but I was. [Laughs.] The second was when I started getting letters and emails. Not from people in the industry but mates from school, who were like, “I’ve just had a conversation with my 14-year-old that I never expected to have.” Those started rolling in, literally on day three. I was starting to get really emotional and personal messages from old friends. That was when it was like, “This is really doing something that I wasn’t expecting it to do.”

DEADLINE: It’s been well covered but do you mind going back to the beginning of the process and explaining what you wanted to do with this story?

THORNE: Yeah, it started with Stephen. Phil and Stephen had been talking. Phil had talked to Plan B, and Plan B had suggested this idea of doing a TV show. I don’t think they ever suggested doing a Boiling Point TV show, but a TV show that would use the one-shot in some way. Then Stephen phoned me up and said, “Phil and I have been talking. We think we can do a one-shot show, and I want to do it about knife crime. I think there’s a way of doing different angles on the same crime.”

And it all started from there. Stephen had pretty clear ideas in his head about how he wanted certain things to work. The biggest idea he had in his head was, “I don’t want to blame the parents. I don’t want to make this a show that says, “This happened because Jamie had an alcoholic mother or an abusive father.” As soon as you eliminate that, and as soon as you decide that, at the end of Episode One, Jamie is going to be guilty, then it becomes a case of, “OK, how do we make this story as chaotic as Jamie’s brain? How do we get inside that head and create spheres of blame for him?”

DEADLINE: How did that evolve?

THORNE: I talked to Stephen until we had an idea of how each episode would work. Then I’d go away and work with Mariella [Johnson], who researches and builds stuff with me. What we do is, we do all the research on procedure — on what would actually happen — so that we’ve got all that detail down. Then as soon as I had all that stuff down, I talked to Stephen again and just checked in with him about how everything would work, story-wise. As soon as we were totally secure, that’s when I’d start writing. [Laughs.] I’d always be the typist. I was always the typist. Stephen and I would talk, but I was always the typist.

DEADLINE: How long did it take to research? Were people willing to talk about this? It’s quite a dark subject.

THORNE: The amazing thing is, there’s always people that will talk about it, and there are always people that are interested in the process enough and want to tell stories about what they’ve been through, whether you’re talking to someone who understands police procedure or someone who understands the legal system. What you then try to do is create layers. So, you’re constantly saying, “OK, so this is what’s happening in the story at this point. What would the lawyer be doing in this situation?” The police might give you one answer, but the lawyer will say, “Actually, I’d be doing something else.” You’re creating a map, and you’re trying to understand how all the different players play a role within that map, because, with this show, the camera can’t travel anywhere without a story.

DEADLINE: A literal map?

THORNE: That’s what Phil and Stephen instilled into me. It literally was, “You can’t ever cheat. You can’t ever have the camera travel without a character.” If the camera is traveling with a character, then that character has to have a story. So, in the first episode, we were working out what that police officer’s story was. Later on, we were working out what the lawyer’s story was. We were building this mad spider diagram. Then it was the case of forgetting that entire spider diagram while we were trying to actually write the show.

DEADLINE: Do you have one of those corkboards covered with pictures and pieces of red string to link them all together?

THORNE: I don’t. [Laughs.] I try and keep it all in my head, and I rely on Mariella’s head to be more secure than my own. But that bit of research, where it’s straightforward, doesn’t take too long. The stuff that takes a lot longer is going into incel culture and trying to understand all that stuff and trying to talk to young people. Because whilst there are coppers who are very happy to talk to you, finding ways where it’s safe for kids to talk to you is a bit harder.

DEADLINE: How did you do that? Where did you get that information from?

THORNE: Just by finding different means by which to do it. Each time, it was slightly different.

DEADLINE: Can you be a bit more specific? Did you have focus groups with kids?

THORNE: No, nothing that organized. It was always about finding people that are happy to talk to you and then getting them to talk. And spending a lot of time online. I never catfished anybody. I never pretended to be someone I was not; I was just looking at videos and trying to understand. I wasn’t ever interested in what [content] Andrew Tate makes, but I was very interested in what people around Jamie’s age make. You watch a video that’s largely about, say, Dune, but in the end, they start talking about their relationships with women and chiming in on how they feel about the world. Once you’re involved in that chat, you get a very clear sense of young people very quickly.

DEADLINE: How did that affect the story you set out to tell? You say you set out to tell a story about knife crime, but, in a way, it isn’t really about knife crime. I think that’s the genius of the show — it doesn’t really explain anything. There are contributing factors, but there isn’t really a reason. There isn’t a motive. There isn’t a rationale.

THORNE: I’m pleased you think so. I’m really, really pleased you think so. Yes. That was the aim. What we were trying to do was tell a story of complication rather than simplicity. We weren’t trying to make a polemic. But I’d say that it is about knife crime, in that it was about the fact that we were noticing that there were more and more crimes involving knives, cases of boys hurting girls. That increase was the thing that interested us, so, trying to investigate what is going on for young boys right now — that was the starting point of it.

Incel culture came as a surprise to both of us. It wasn’t in our original conception of the show at all. It came when I was flailing around; I’d written a draft that we were working on, and I was flailing around, going, “Jamie just doesn’t feel full enough to me. There’s something that I’m not understanding.” I was going through various different iterations of what could be behind it, creating dark secrets, doing stuff that was quite conventional, really. It was Mariela who said, “I think you need to look at incel culture.”

As soon as I read a particular statistic — that, supposedly, 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men — I thought, “If I was 13 and I heard that, I’d believe it. I’d believe that no woman is ever going to find me attractive. I’d believe that I’m not in that group of 20% men. I’d be certain I’m not.” Then, suddenly, Jamie started to make sense, which isn’t to say that Jamie is solely a product of incel culture because — like you say — we don’t ascribe blame to anything. What we do is, we give degrees of blame to all sorts of different places.

DEADLINE: When I first heard it was four hour-long episodes, I immediately thought the four hours would simply follow on from each other, like 24.

THORNE: You know what? We never considered doing four consecutive hours. It’s weird. You said that, and I’m thinking, “Oh yeah, we should have talked about that. That could have worked.” [Laughs.]

DEADLINE: How did you come down to the four situations you chose?

THORNE: There were some ideas that Stephen came to me with from the beginning, and there was other stuff [that came up] where it was like, “OK, we need to go into schools. We’re not doing this properly unless we look inside the school system.” Stephen always had Jamie meeting a psychiatrist as one of the episodes, even — I think — when he talked to me for the first time, so that was always on the cards. Then the paint scene [in the last episode], I think came as a result of us talking together. Stephen had just turned 50, so it was like, “OK, how we can join all these dots together in order to create a portrait of this family?” The third episode, the psychiatrist episode, that was a real rugby pass of just him going, “Write a David Mamet play. OK, bye.” That was literally what he said to me, and, yeah, that was the one where I went into dark places on my own.

DEADLINE: This must be the only Stephen Graham project where his character says, “I’ve never set foot inside a police station” …

THORNE: That was really important for Eddie. That was really important to show who Eddie was, and the fact that — and we talked about that quite a lot — the police invade his home and he’s angry, but he’s also polite. That’s the way he’s been brought up. He has a fear of authority. He doesn’t have an understanding of how they work. I think that’s so beautiful in Stephen’s performance, how he finds that.

I would say that, because I love Stephen — not just as an actor, I love him as a person — in every part of this process, I was trying to write him. Not to say that he’s just like Eddie, but he has Eddie’s decency, and he has Eddie’s kindness and love, and he has Eddie’s ability to look at himself. There’s lots of stuff within Eddie that isn’t developed enough to be Stephen, but that decency is there. I always said about this show, it was like you had a general at the front who was like, “Come on guys, let’s go!” That general was a mixture of Phil and Stephen. They’re just so fearless, the pair of them, as they joined arms together. Stephen has that general in him. I’ve seen that general in Stephen in virtually every project I’ve done with him. It’s always remarkable how he uses that power, that power of persuasion that’s deep within him. He’s got so much charisma, and it comes out all the time.

DEADLINE: How did you approach the school scenes?

THORNE: I was a learning support worker in a school. I worked in a school. My parents were teachers at different times, not through most of their career, but I’d spent a fair amount of time with them. Hannah Walters, who’s Stephen’s wife, but also our exec producer on it, had been a drama teacher. Me and Hannah talked a lot about how we were going to paint this picture of Jamie’s school. Yeah, we went into schools, but really, we knew the sort of school we wanted to paint. It’s a school that’s failing, a school that’s not doing so well, and I’ve seen inside a few of those schools. The brief moment with Jamie’s form tutor is significant, where he basically just says, “I can’t control them.” He’s just such a coward in terms of how he teaches. I do think that tells a lot of the story of how Jamie had spiraled quite so severely through this process, because that duty of care just wasn’t there.

DEADLINE: Did you go into schools for things like this?

THORNE: Yeah, yeah, a bit, but really, that was from my memory.

DEADLINE: Bullying, nowadays, though, is very different to what it used to be, of course…

THORNE: Yes. It was weird, the response to the show. There were teachers that said, “No way would that happen in the school,” and yet there were other teachers that said, “You’ve got that spot on.” I think that speaks to what’s going on at the moment in our schools, which is just that some are allowed to rise, and others are allowed to sink. We’re not protecting the sinking schools enough.

But there is a problem. I’ve spoken to teachers, and I’ve spoken to teaching unions about this. There’s a problem with attention. Keeping kids involved in class has become very hard. There’s also a problem with female teachers, who are finding it very, very hard to teach. I have only anecdotal evidence for this, but female teachers are saying that they’re not only being verbally abused, they’re being also physically abused by boys. I was also talking to girls who said things like, “I don’t speak in class, because there’s a group of boys that aren’t very nice, that intimidate me.” That’s happening. That’s why there is a big movement about how we deal with smartphones. Different schools are doing different strategies and it’s distressing that the government isn’t really helping.

DEADLINE: The interesting thing is that, after all this, it ends with a very introspective episode, and it’s all on Stephen’s shoulders. Did you talk to the families of criminals?

THORNE: No. We knew how to tell that story. I think I’d read some stuff, but no, I didn’t talk to anyone that had children that had walked down anything like the same path as Jamie. I felt like we could create that. We knew where we wanted Eddie to go, and we knew who we wanted Eddie to be. I did read some stuff, but I didn’t have any one-to-one conversations. When I was doing Best Interests, a BBC show about parents having to decide whether to fight with hospitals about whether to keep their child alive, we sat down with a few parents then, and it was excruciating. We did learn some things, but the pain we were putting them through was unbearable. There wasn’t a need for us to put our hands in someone’s wounds with this one.

DEADLINE: How did you decide where to leave it, then? It begins with such a bang. How did you know where it was going to end?

THORNE: I think that happened quite organically. As soon as we worked out what that final phone call was going to be, it was a case of the parents looking themselves in the eye and trying to work out how to survive and trying to work out what they can take from it.

DEADLINE: As soon as it aired in the UK, we had Keir Starmer and his government discussing the show at the highest levels. Did that take you by surprise? Because that kind of thing hasn’t happened since the ‘60s, when Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home first aired.

THORNE: It took me hugely by surprise, and it was a huge responsibility, but I’ll tell you what happened on that day in 10 Downing Street. It wasn’t us walking in there. I think that became the story, but it wasn’t us walking in there to give our advice, because we don’t have any advice to give. We knew how to write this show, and we tried to come up with a good question. But we didn’t try and write any answers, like you say.

What Netflix lined up, brilliantly, was a group of people who did know what they were talking about — the Children’s Society, NSPCC, Movember — people who went in there and they talked to Keir Starmer about the crisis, and they talked to Keir Starmer about possible solutions to that crisis. We said very little around that table. We were the Trojan horse that brought other people to that table, and he did listen very sincerely. It didn’t feel like a publicity stunt. It felt like he was someone who was grappling with something. Thankfully, he wasn’t turning to us as to what to do. He was turning to people that actually know what they’re talking about, that have spent their lives working in this space.

DEADLINE: What are you working on at the moment?

THORNE: The Hack’s about to come out in September, and I’m really excited about that. It’s about the phone hacking scandal. We’re in the edit of Lord of the Flies, which is really fun.

DEADLINE: What can you reveal about either of those things, if possible?

THORNE: The Hack is a completely different side to David Tennant, an aspect of him that you’ve never seen before. It’s Bobby Carlyle doing something very different, too. It’s about the phone-hacking scandal, but it’s the phone-hacking scandal from the inside of it; it’s two sides of the same coin that then reveal the truth of what was going on during that time. You see them working out how to fight and it’s really, really difficult. It was a very, very difficult show to write. We were working with the Mr. Bates vs The Post Office lot, who are incredible researchers. Getting every detail right, and walking the legal minefield of the hacking scandal, was very complicated.

DEADLINE: And what can you say about Lord of the Flies?

THORNE: It’s astonishingly beautiful. The cast are incredible, and Marc Munden wields a camera like a brush — he’s really done something that I’ve not seen happen on TV before, in terms of just his rhythm and the way he tells stories. I feel like I’m a very small part of the authorship of that show. I think it’s Marc’s show, and I think he’s one of the great TV directors. Great directors, not just TV directors. It’s just wonderful to see him use every color in his box.

DEADLINE: What attracted you to that show, that idea of retelling that story?

THORNE: It’s a book that I loved. Joe Wilson, who’s the exec on it, is a mate of mine. I was round his house, and he said, “Go on, then. What’s the book? What’s the book you’d walk over glass to do?” I said, “Lord of the Flies, but I’ve tried and it’s not possible.” He went to work and said, “I think it might be possible.” It took a long time talking to the estate to convince them that we had a take that would be respectful of the story, but the estate went with us. I think it’s just a brilliant, brilliant book. I tell you — really, as a kid, it’s one experience. But reading it as an adult, it’s completely different. It’s completely different.

DEADLINE: Do you think that Golding’s influence seeped into Adolescence?

THORNE: I think I fell into Adolescence in terms of my awkward teenage years, and I think the reason why I loved Lord of the Flies is because I was an awkward teenager. I’d say that I’m equal parts Adrian Mole and Simon from Lord of the Flies. So, yeah, I think that fed in a bit.

DEADLINE: You probably can’t speak about this, but are you still involved in Sam Mendes’s Beatles project?

THORNE: I am, but I cannot speak about it. Genuinely, I’m so frightened of saying the wrong thing that I really can’t talk about it.

DEADLINE: Can we take it you’re a Beatles fan?

THORNE: I’m a Beatles fan, yes. And I’m a Sam Mendes fan. So, there we go.

The Television Academy inducted six new members into its Hall of Fame on Saturday night, as Conan O’Brien, Ryan Murphy, Viola Davis, Henry Winkler, music composer Mike Post and late director Don Mischer joined the collection of TV greats.

The 27th annual ceremony took place at the J.W. Marriott L.A. Live as O’Brien — presented his honor by longtime friend Lisa Kudrow — joked, “You know, people say that television is dying, but I want to ask you — if our industry really was in trouble, would we be gathered right now for our greatest night in a downtown Los Angeles Marriott? On a weekend? In August? No!”

The longtime TV host used some of his speech to muse about the current state of late night, acknowledging, “Things are changing fast. I don’t claim to know the future of our beloved medium but I know this, getting the privilege to play around with an hour of television has been the great joy of my professional career.”

He continued, “We’re having this event now in a time when there’s a lot of fear about the future of television, and rightfully so. The life we’ve all known for almost 80 years is undergoing seismic change. But — this might just my nature — I choose not to mourn what is lost, because I think in the most essential way what we have is not changing at all. Streaming changes the pipeline, but the connection, the talent, the ideas that come into our homes, I think it’s as potent as ever, and we have proof here tonight.”

And in the wake of CBS announcing it will end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert next year, O’Brien said, “Yes, late night television as we have known it since around 1950 is going to disappear, but those voices are not going anywhere. People like Stephen Colbert are too talented and too essential to go away. It’s not going to happen, he’s not going anywhere. Stephen is going to evolve and shine brighter than ever in a new format that he controls completely.” He added the belief that he thinks TV will always prevail “if the stories are good, if the performances are honest and inspire; if the people making it are brave and of good will.”

Earlier in the night, TV Academy Chair Cris Abrego and WME’s Rick Rosen, chair of the Television Academy Hall of Fame Committee, kicked things off, followed by Sally Field presenting Davis with the first honor of the evening. During her emotional speech, the EGOT winner noted how TV “saved me, it was an elixir. And it has been equally fulfilling being that person in that small screen, that is leaping out to anybody who has allowed me in to shake up their lives in any way I can see fit. My purpose is not what I do, it’s what happens to people when I’m doing it.”

Journalist Jon Burlingame presented to Post and Disney’s Dana Walden was on hand to celebrate Murphy, as the creator teased at the podium, “I feel that at a certain age in Hollywood, if you’re really lucky and you really do the work, and you are true and you don’t give up and you fight like hell, you can get two things: a Hall of Fame award and a really good facelift. But first things first.”

Looking back on his nearly three-decade career, Murphy noted how he has “created and written over 250 gay characters, 300 or so women-over-40 characters, over 1,000 trans characters — and I’ve been told I’ve written 10 straight male characters named Brad. I don’t remember a single one of those Brads.” On a more serious note, he commented how he thought after blazing a trail with LGBTQ storytelling, it would “never be overgrown and hidden again. And now oddly in this year of my Hall of Fame award, I find that I am wrong, and all the things that I dedicated my career to — all the fights, all the groundbreaking things — are in danger, shockingly, of going away.”

Joking that at this stage of his career he thought he could coast and focus on money, Murphy said now “a new darker age that I think none of us suspected has dawned. And so I am pivoting to continue the good fight, which is to create more work featuring the disenfranchised and the ignored, and the marginalized groups,” adding, “my next career move is exact and true, and that is to be bolder.”

For the remaining honorees, Bob Costas presented Mischer’s award — accepted by his wife and kids — and Adam Sandler sent a video message in support of Winkler; the Barry actor told the crowd, “I am living my dream and what I am the most proud of is to be in a Hall of Fame of television that has been so good to me; that I am still at the table.”

British actor Terence Stamp – who famously played General Zod in Superman and Superman II – has died at the age of 87.

The Oscar-nominated actor, who was born in London’s East End, also starred in hits such as Theorem, A Season in Hell, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

He formed one of Britain’s most glamorous couples with Julie Christie, with whom he starred in Far From the Madding Crowd in 1967.

In a statement his family said he died on Sunday morning, adding: “He leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, both as an actor and as a writer that will continue to touch and inspire people for years to come.”

Stamp received various accolades during his career, including a Golden Globe in 1962 for most promising newcomer for Billy Budd and a Cannes Film Festival best actor award in 1965 for The Collector.

He also received Academy Award and BAFTA nominations for his performance in Billy Budd, as well as a second BAFTA nod in 1994 for his role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – which co-starred Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce.

Most recently, Stamp starred in director Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. The 2021 psychological horror film also featured Diana Rigg, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith.

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Ali Zafar is a remarkable Pakistani musician, singer, and actor known worldwide for his multiple hit songs and acclaimed acting projects. The artist has a strong social media following of over 6.1 million fans and his popularity is growing day by day. Recently, he has been winning hearts with his regional song covers such as Laila O Laila, Balu Batiyaan, and Allay. Fans also loved his soulful cover of the beautiful Naat Balaghalu La Be Kamaleyihi. Ali Zafar is married to Ayesha Fazli, and together they share a beautiful family with adorable and talented children.

The singer has now shared stunning pictures from his vacation in Europe. He has visited beautiful locations in Spain, France, Amsterdam, and Switzerland. The singer spent a serene and romantic time with his wife Ayesha. The couple’s vacation photos capture breathtaking landscapes and cozy moments from Europe. Both Ali Zafar and Ayesha Fazli kept their vacations simple with their casual and comfortable wear. Ali Zafar looked dapper in his flawless looks while Ayesha looked radiant in beautiful tops and skirts. Here are the gorgeous pictures of Ali Zafar and Ayesha Fazli from their scenic European getaway.

Elaine Paige
(Photo: Christie Goodwin)

Olivier-winning actress Elaine Paige is giving Broadway.com listeners a chance to hear her BBC Radio 2 show Elaine Paige on Sunday. This week, Paige has a selection of your requests, the latest stage and screen news and a chat about the new London revival of Brigadoon. Catch the full episode by clicking the link below!

J
ohn Fogerty rerecorded some of the best-known songs by his long-gone band for his new album, Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, a Taylor Swiftian move that’s best understood as the culmination of his decades-long journey toward reclaiming those hits. Fogerty spent years in a series of ugly legal battles with the late executive Saul Zaentz, who owned Creedence’s catalog; most infamously, Zaentz once unsuccessfully sued him for purportedly plagiarizing his own composition, “Run Through the Jungle,” with 1984’s “Old Man Down the Road.”

Two years ago, Fogerty got the publishing rights back to his Creedence songs, a triumph he saw as a liberation after decades as a “prisoner of war.” In an interview for Rolling Stone’s Last Word column — which also appears as a new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast — Fogerty looks back at his time in Creedence, discusses his early influences, shares thoughts on mortality and legacy, and much more. (To hear Fogerty’s entire interview on Rolling Stone Music Now, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)

In the midst of those conflicts, Fogerty felt so alienated from his past that he refused to even play the songs onstage. (It was Bob Dylan who got him past his recalcitrance, pointing that people would think “Proud Mary” was a Tina Turner song if Fogerty didn’t sing it.)

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You got the publishing rights back to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s songs two years ago. It’s been a long journey.
I wrote the songs and I have been fiercely proud of my accomplishment all my life, even though so many things in a legal sense or financial sense were turned against me. And even in the awareness sense in the public, you might say. I read a review about myself somewhere in Europe and the guy said … that I’m not a household name. And in many aspects that’s true. Which has been a bit frustrating to not have that awareness, because I named myself Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I knew the songs were good. I’m very proud of that. When all this stuff went bad after Creedence breaking up and all that, I still knew. And also I felt really crummy. One of the things I talk about now is getting my Rickenbacker back. It’s very symbolic. I now understand. I didn’t know then — I gave that guitar away. Why would you do such a thing? I played this guitar at Woodstock! And I wrote songs on that guitar. I played it on so many of the records — “Up Around the Bend,” for instance. I gave the guitar to a 12-year-old boy that asked me if I had any guitars he could have. And I was so forlorn and down in the dumps, thinking I could give away all my problems and just start over. It wasn’t that easy.

What did you learn about those songs all these years later when you rerecorded them?
I was really unprepared for how deep I was gonna have to go. It wasn’t just a guy that sings “Proud Mary” every night. It was a guy trying to be 23 years old, to remember the way the radio was, remember what was going on in the world, and get to that particular space of why and how he had written “Proud Mary.” I learned to make my mind or soul go back to that time. [My wife] Julie told me later she could see me literally doing it by the look on my face. Several months into it, I had a much deeper respect and awareness for what had gone on in 1968 or ’69 — in a sense, I did what the Beatles did, but I did it all by myself. I didn’t have two other guys to write songs with me.

How did you pull off your incredible creative burst in 1969, when you had three classic albums in one year?
Near the end of 1968, I looked at “Suzie Q” and basically said, “Now I’m a one-hit wonder.” I became maniacally obsessed. I was staying up every night, writing songs all day, constantly thinking about what’s good for my band. I managed to come up with those three albums by working harder than anybody else I knew — like working two or three jobs, two or three shifts.

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You famously have many disputes with your former Creedence bandmates. But was there something special about that group of people, or do you truly think you could have done it with any other three musicians?
 To think that you could just get any old person and then have them play something — I’ve learned through the process of just being a bandleader that that’s hit-and-miss. When my two boys joined the band, it just was there immediately. And that’s biology. I really have to acknowledge that [sons] Shane and Tyler just have the feel I’m looking for, right? So obviously, I think that’s certainly true with [late Creedence rhythm guitarist] Tom [Fogerty]. Even though Tom was limited as a guitar player — he wasn’t full of technique and years of lessons and all that — he certainly had great rhythm and could play great rhythm parts. And the same with Doug [Clifford] and Stu [Cook] eventually.

I think a lot of the process of getting there was that I constantly let them know what I was looking for.… Those are the four people that made those records. And that didn’t particularly happen again in history. So obviously, those four human beings are unique. That might sound like my reserved or side-ass way of giving credit, and I don’t mean it to sound that way. I think the stamp that was put on those records by those four people was arrived at naturally because all of our hearts were in the right place — everybody wanted to arrive at this mysterious place up in the sky. And we got there.

As a kid in 1953, you fantasized about being in a band someday — and in your fantasy, your adult self was a Black man. That’s pretty amazing when you think about how racist that time was.
It’s the same way if you’re nine years old, you can envision yourself being a baseball player, being Willie Mays. The music I loved in the early Fifties was R&B because that was the really most soulful, purest, deepest place I wanted to be. The idea of racism was pretty foreign to me. All my athletic heroes and my musical heroes tended to be Black. I suspended that reality a bit with Elvis, but it did not continue on to Pat Boone. When Pat Boone covered “Ain’t That a Shame,” I thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

Later on, did you ever question your right to sing the blues, or to sing a song like Leadbelly’s “Cotton Fields,” which Creedence covered?
I’m very aware of being a middle-class white boy. That question is still looming, by the way, even now. When I wrote “Proud Mary,” I immediately was going “boinin’” and “toinin’” and I don’t even know why. It was many years later, listening to Howlin’ Wolf, I heard him say something similar and went, “Maybe that’s how that got in there.” That all seemed OK if there was the right sincerity to it. If it’s pandering or dumb, I’m gonna slap that guy myself, even if it’s me.

I don’t think there’s any doubt at this point that your songs are gonna live forever. So how does that, if at all, affect the way you look at death?
[Laughs hard.] When you’re watching TV these days, all these medical commercials — they say the side effects may include … and the very last statement is “diarrhea and death.” There’s a song in there for me — “Diarrhea and Death.” I must admit, I really did not notice the clock or the end of the playing field. You hit 80 on the clock and it’s like, “Boy, that’s a scary-looking number!” But I’ve always known my songs would live for a long time. Actually at the moment I created “Proud Mary” — and this was the first time it happened — when I wrote “Proud Mary,” I looked at the page and I went, “Oh, my God, I’ve written a classic.”

Few musicians have ever had such an amazing year as you had in 1969. You released Bayou Country, Green River, and Willy and the Poor Boys. Afterward, things got really tough. I wonder whether it’s possible that you had so much amazing creativity in that one 12-month span that you burned yourself out.
Of course, there was a reason that I produced and manifested those three albums in that year. Right near the end of 1968, in no way was anything assured for my band that I had named Creedence Clearwater Revival. At that moment in time, I told myself that the name was far better than the band was. It was a world-class name, and the band was not world-class. We were still basically a Top 40 jukebox band playing in little clubs in Northern California. I looked at “Suzie Q” and said, “I’m now a one-hit wonder. It took us so long to get here. Now you only get five minutes to do the next step because the spotlight will move on to Led Zeppelin or somebody. It’ll be over for you if you don’t come up with it now.” I literally said to myself, “John, you are just gonna have to do this with music.” I looked around and there was no one in my radar. I’m out in the middle of the ocean in a canoe, and I’m looking all over, and I don’t see anything that’s gonna help me other than whatever I can do with my own two hands.

You haven’t damaged your voice. You can somehow still sing in the same key. What is it that you found vocally that allows it to have that sort of screaming grit, but not tear your voice to shreds?
If you do your screaming in a musical, controlled, effortless way, you won’t ruin it. But if you’re just so passionate that you’re putting all of your mental problems right into your vocals, it can very quickly get ravaged, which has happened to me a zillion times. Another thing that happens to human beings, especially if they’re nervous and tend to internalize their worry like I do — it goes to your tummy. A lot of people get ulcers. On the way to that, you get reflux. Without a doctor’s care and information, you won’t realize that while you’re sleeping, that comes up and hits your vocal cords. Next day you wake up and you sound like Wolfman Jack or somebody. I had a lot of that back in the Nineties and slowly learned to govern my diet, you might say, and just stay calmer.

How do you want to be remembered?
I used to think that I should try to hide all the bad music I made, the things that I did when I didn’t feel very good. I was ashamed of myself living that way. I was a drunk. Alcohol was ruling my existence. And I was miserable and I really didn’t have a lot of sunshine in my life. I was ashamed of the things I was doing and ashamed of myself. And meeting Julie is really the key for me. I eventually overcame that with the help of a wonderful person. During that time, I was trying to stay alive, basically. My existence meant I always felt I was a prisoner of war. The war was against Saul Zaentz. I was in solitary confinement with bright lights, not letting me ever sleep. 

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And my way of trying to stay sane and fighting back was to stay busy…. But under that situation, the tracks I made were kinda lifeless and stuck in time and rigid and not very joyful at all. I don’t like them when I hear them because of that. I remember how I felt. 

I am the luckiest man in the world. I truly feel I lived long enough and met the right person that made me feel lucky for all the right reasons. ‘Cause the real life, the real situation is more important than any career. And the blessed thing that happened was Julie became part of my career. So we do this together. I guess I am a musician that loved music, and I tried to respect that my whole life.