Welcome

Hello all,

Welcome to my fan site dedicated to Sir Ian Holm and Brian Cox, two of the worlds greatest actors. Here I hope to bring you pictures of the actors from films, stage and social events. Also I'll deliver some of the latest news on the two. Later on in the year I'll have Wallpapers and Avatars. Stay tuned for all these and more.

~Alan

News:

WEBSITE NEWS

The site has only been open for a short period of time but is soon closing and moving. I will be making a seperate website for each actor, starting with Sir Ian Holm. any news I have on Brian Cox will go on the Ian site till brian's site is open. Sorry for any trouble but I promise the new sites will be far better!

Thanks for your help so far

New Troy Wallpapers!!!!!!!!!

Hey guys. I was bored, yes bored in Ireland hard to believe but it's true:P

Fell free to use these, click on them for a bigger version!

All done 800 x 600

If you would like me to do a bigger size for you contact me at sirbilboholm@yahoo.co.uk

New Troy Pictures Of Brian Cox as Agamemnon

Yes I have the first pictures of Brian Cox as Agamemnon in this years epic Troy!

 More Interviews (8/2/2004)

A massive thanks to Sir William Gull, a good old friend!

 

Bonaparte's Holm from Holm

Mike Davies


At 72 you tend to expect any conversations about the body's failing mechanisms to centre around things like loss of hearing, poor eyesight, or rheumatism.

You don't usually anticipate discussing a diminished sex drive. However, it is to these medical shores that we have managed unexpectedly to stray in chatting to Sir Ian Holm about The Emperor's New Clothes, in which he plays both Napoleon and a man who impersonates him.

Prior to the interview it was suggested that questions regarding his cancer diagnosis a couple of years back be given a wide berth. Fair enough, personal is personal. However, when Holm says that he'd not worked for 18 months following the Johnny Depp film From Hell, a casual enquiry whether that had been because of health reasons prompts a perhaps rather more detailed and candid response than necessary.

'No, health was just a hiccup,' he offers casually. 'I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I started out with an enlargement of the prostate, which happens to most men, then I woke up one morning and I couldn't pee -which I don't advocate at all, it's horrid. I phoned my neurologist who said 'come in now, you're lucky you're not in Guatemala!' 'So I rushed in and they found cancer. They dug out a lot and my doctor advised me to go to America where the treatment is more aggressive. I had radiotherapy and they give you these pills which completely destroy your testosterone. It's a very strange experience and it doesn't do a lot for your sex drive!'

Mercifully the publicist is nowhere within hearing as he leans forwards and confides, 'you grow breasts too and have hot flushes. My own doctor suggested having testosterone injections but the Americans said that while that might be good for my sex drive it would be no good for the prostate. Basically it came down to whether I wanted to have sex or stay alive.'

By this time any no-go areas have been patently demolished, so I can't help asking how this all affects his sense of masculinity.

'It takes away the performance,' says the three time divorcee bluntly. 'You can still look at beautiful women and get the desire, but you're impotent! I've tried Viagra and it does have a sort of effect (he makes a half mast gesture), but not much. It's just very frustrating, though in a way at my age I suppose it's rather good.'

Given Holm's film it's hard not to think of Napoleon's legendary 'not tonight Josephine', which vaguely brings things back to the real purpose of the chat.

Directed by Palookaville's Alan Taylor and based on Simon Ley's novel The Death of Napoleon, the film is an improbable romantic fiction about what might have happened had Napoleon had escaped from St Helena leaving a double in his place only to find himself stranded in Paris unable to convince anyone of his identity.

It is, as Holm enthusiastically puts it, 'a stonking great role' in 'a sweet gentle film about ordinary things happening to great men.'

It's also the third time Holm -who on his own admission is physically well suited ('I'm a small stumpy guy') to the part -has played Napoleon, firstly in the TV series Napoleon In Love and then in Time Bandits. But this is his biggest chunk of Bonaparte and, aside from a rare chance to carry a film it also, in the character of Eugene, had the added incentive of allowing him to play for laughs.

'I wish there had been more scenes with Eugene,' he admits. 'I tend to cast in the grumpy roles -my grandchildren actually call me Grump -and here was an opportunity to do comedy and I really had a ball.'

That was three years ago and, despite his self-styled 'fallow stretch' and off-screen performance issues, Holm owns up to have been having even more fun with his recent roles.

He's just completed work on Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator in which he plays Professor Fitz (he does a quick 've haff vays'style mockGerman accent to give a flavour of the role), a meteorologist he based on Karel Stepanek, a 40s Hollywood character actor 'that only Scorsese and I have ever heard of', while prior to that he worked on Garden State, the directorial debut of Scrubs star Zach Braff who stars as Andrew Largeman.

'I really enjoyed doing that. Zach approached me to play his dad in the film and although I haven't seen it yet it has a good smell about it. It's not a big part, but more than cameo. I'm a psychiatrist who's had his kid on lithium since he was ten and it starts with the son's answering machine and the father's voice saying 'you never return my calls. I don't know how to do this' and then going on to tell him that his mother has died in what turns out to be strange circumstances. It's about the confrontation between the father and son and the latter trying to find out who he is.'

Variously surprised and horrified at some of the roles he's offered ('I'm not in it, I've read it!' he says of rumours he was appearing in Snatch producer Matthew Vaughan's gangster comedy thriller Layer Cake), Holm also owns up to having being caught completely off guard by the response to his fleeting appearances in The Lord of the Rings.

'I'm astonished by the Bilbo Baggins cult following. This is all new to me but after 50 years in the business it's very nice to be presented to a new generation who now see me as Bilbo. He only has three scenes and I was only in New Zealand for a total of five weeks but being involved in all of that was a hell of an experience!'

Even though he's almost unrecognisable

in The Return of the King 'Actually, Peter Jackson didn't want to use the prosthetics because he thought it might lose the character. He was going to do it direct to tape, but I turned up at the trailer and the poor make-up guy was almost in tears, saying it was the best he'd ever done.

'So I tried it on and seven hours later Jackson walked in, saw me and said 'you were right'. I staggered on to the set and Ian McKellen took one look at me and said 'oh . . . now we know what you'll look like when you're 98!'

* The Emperor's New Clothes (U) is on limited release from 30 January 2004

 The Borrowers Series 1 on DVD (8/2/2004)

Yes finally they have decided to release The Borrowers Series 1 on Region 2 DVD. I had no idea this was going to happen and haven't read anything on it but after going on a DVD spending spree on the net last night I found that we will be seeing the borrowers on dvd on the 5th of april!

Follow the link to pre book your copy.

The Borrowers Series 1 on dvd  Ian Holm Biography news

Well at first we thought we would be seeing the biography in the shops by October 2004 but now its been pushed up to September.  Thanks to Summoner we have this email which contains the release date and name!

We are publishing Sir Ian Holm's autobiography in September this hear and it
will be called ACTING MY LIFE. It is a marvelous and fascinating book and
is extremely candid and honest about his life. It will be worth waiting for,
believe me.

Great news for fans everywhere. To discuss this news plus follow this link!

http://pub15.ezboard.com/fsirianholmforumfrm10.showMessage?topicID=55.topic

 

 Interviews, interviews and more interviews!

Due to the European release of The Emperors New Clothes, Ian is getting a lot more attention in the media. Mostly from newspaper Sir Ian has been appearing in my interviews which seem to be revealing more more about the man everyday. Here are some on offer....

 

Ian Holm: Napoleon complex
Ian Holm, soon to star as Bonaparte,
tells Matthew Sweet about the demons
that almost ended his career
16 January 2004

The drop-your-popcorn moment in Ian Holm's new film occurs when the Emperor Napoleon stumbles, dethroned and demoralised, into the grounds of a lunatic asylum on the outskirts of Paris. This modest green space is dotted with fruit trees and rose bushes - and between them, a dozen men in cockaded hats, each groping inside his jacket as though he were wishing he'd not had the crevettes. Although Holm's Napoleon is the genuine article - escaped from St Helena, living incognito in France and nursing an ambition to regain the Emperorship - he will never be able to resume his old identity. The world believes that he is dead. The moment he announces himself, he'll be just another five-foot-nothing madman with delusions of grandeur.

The Emperor's New Clothes offers Holm a rare starring role in a medium that has customarily been content to use him for the purposes of support: sometimes as a kite-mark of quality, sometimes as a fig-leaf for a moribund production. It's the price, I suppose, of versatility and a vicious dislike of sitting around doing nothing. "The older I get," he tells me, when we meet - on his birthday - in the library of a well-upholstered London hotel, "the more I realise that work is the most important thing. Even more important than love."

Holm has been married three times - his decade-long match with the actress Penelope Wilton was dissolved in 2001 - and has three children by two of these former wives and two by the photographer Bee Gilbert, with whom he lived between 1965 and 1976. But the fifty-odd films on his CV make the point for him. He was chilling as the android undercover agent in Alien (1979) - nobody forgets the scene in which his decapitated head issues its last words through a stream of milky effluvium. He brought moving delicacy to the role of the cuckold displaced by Rupert Everett's pretty-boy toff in Dance with a Stranger (1985). He buzzed with quiet power as the pioneering mental specialist in The Madness of King George (1994), though the plot set him up for a fall. He was triumphantly ludicrous as Napoleon (again) in Time Bandits (1981) and Polonius in Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990), more convincing than he had any right to be as Andy Garcia's dad in Night Falls on Manhattan (1997), and impressively Middle Earth-weary in two out of three of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

His ambulance-chasing lawyer in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) is, however, the real jewel of his career: a shabby legal evangelist desperate to persuade the parents of children killed in a bus crash to sue for compensation. If you've seen the film, you'll almost certainly remember the scene in which he pleads his case to a bereaved couple by scuttering across their living-room floorboards in an attitude of supplication.

Holm's story begins within the walls of a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum in Ilford, Essex. He was born in 1931, the son of Dr James Harvey Cuthbert, superintendent of the West Ham Corporation Mental Hospital and a pioneer of electric shock therapy. His mother, Jean Holm, was 43 when she became unexpectedly pregnant with a second son. "I was just an afterthought," he reflects. "They were funny old people. Removed and elderly. I never really knew them." He suspects that his mother - whose family was connected with the White Horse whisky company - believed that she had married beneath her, and he knows only the vaguest details about his father's background - though he did have an Uncle Sidney, "who went out to British Honduras and was blown away by a hurricane."

Holm had no more intimate a relationship with his elder brother, Eric, who died of cancer in 1944 while serving with the Scots Guards in Egypt. "He was 22, which is a ridiculous age to die of cancer. Before it became fashionable. My parents never got over his death."

Despite the Gothic trappings, this wasn't, he insists, a miserable childhood. "Most sane people would have got out very early," he concedes, "but I was actually very happy in my little cocoon." That the family home adjoined the hospital seems to have had little impact upon Holm's domestic life. "The only patient I really remember was Mr Anderson, utterly harmless, but fascinating nevertheless. He used to wheel this barrow of soil from point A to point B, and then spend the rest of the day picking up each grain and putting it back again."

Dr Cuthbert's work as a member of the board of Broadmoor, however, made a much more forceful impression on his young son. Holm recalls his father's meetings with Ronald True, a well-to-do killer of the early 1920s who murdered a prostitute named Olive Young by stuffing a towel down her throat and strangling her with a dressing gown cord.

"True was an incredibly charming, erudite sort of gentleman," Holm recalls. "When my father appeared at the door of his cell, he would say: 'Would you care for a game of chess?'" Another name nudges his memory. "Around the same time there was also a young boy called Jacoby who must have been completely insane. He clubbed a woman over the head with a hammer." (Henry Julius Jacoby, I later discover, was a pantry boy at the Spencer Hotel who supplemented his income by robbing the guests - one of whom had the misfortune to wake up as he was rifling through her valuables.) "Jacoby was hanged, but True wasn't," says Holm, "and Jacoby became a kind of cause cιlθbre: why should one hang and the other not?" Unlike True, Jacoby was unable to use insanity to save him from execution. Perhaps their cases taught him something about the nature of insanity - or acting.

A place at Rada provided Ian Holm's passport from the asylum. Other institutions claimed him once his three years of study were over: a year of national service, and 13 at the Royal Shakespeare Company under the tutelage of John Barton and Peter Hall. His RSC years concluded with a trio of dramatic events - divorce from his first wife, the inauguration of his ten-year relationship with Bee Gilbert, and a triumphant run on Broadway in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. It was also in this period that he secured his first significant film roles. "John Frankenheimer," he notes, "was one of the first directors who decided to actually come to Stratford and see a play." For The Fixer (1968), Frankenheimer sent Holm to Budapest to appear opposite Dirk Bogarde and Alan Bates.

For Holm, it was the meeting with Bogarde that was important. "We became pretty good friends for a while. He was deeply in love with my inamorata of the time." For several years, Bogarde and his partner Tony Forwood made favourites of Holm and Gilbert. "They tended to do that sort of thing. We joined the entourage for a year or two. Dirk was extremely bitter about England. I could see why he felt that not enough credit was given to him for proper acting, but he could often be very unkind. Very acid." You suspect a few drops of Bogarde's vitriol may have been hurled his way.

Holm is not a reticent interviewee. During our time together, he makes only one comment that he asks me not to commit to print. He tells me that he dreams about having the ability to fly, that he lost his virginity at the age of 24 and that he recently went to see his Lord of the Rings co-star Ian McKellen in Strindberg's Dance of Death, and was quietly appalled. ("I thought he was dreadful - far too tricksy, rather weak.") He tells me about his friendship with a rich American woman who loans him her apartment in Venice from time to time, supplying him with a guide in the form of her spookily precocious nine-year-old son. ("He travels everywhere by taxi and even knows which hotels serve the best prawn cocktail," Holm muses. "I hope that he doesn't end up a heroin addict.")

At the same time, he is no green-room raconteur. His speaking voice is as soft as a flurry of snowflakes; sometimes I have to lean forward to catch his words. He drifts towards the ends of sentences and smacks his lips to mark their progress. "What shall we talk about now?" he asks, gently. "Stagefright?" I suggest.

Although the theatre has, historically, been more willing than film to bill Ian Holm above the title, an anxiety attack during a performance of The Iceman Cometh in 1976 scared him from the stage for the space of 17 years. Down came the curtain, on went the understudy, and Holm did not venture back on the boards until the 1993 revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming. "Low self-esteem," he notes, "rides high in my system."

The Iceman incident produced a diagnosis. "They told me that I had a chemical imbalance that was only curable with drugs," he explains. "And because of my father and all that, I thought, okay, I'll take them." He was prescribed the anti-depressant Triptizol, and devoted his energies to film work. In the last decade, he's dared to return to the theatre - tackling King Lear and Pinter - but still suffers the occasional relapse. He pulled out of the National Theatre's production of Shelagh Stephenson's play Mappa Mundi at an advanced stage of rehearsal. "I suddenly clammed up," he confesses, "and thought: 'I can't do this,' and walked out. At least it didn't happen on stage. It happened to me during The Homecoming as well. I felt I couldn't even walk down the street."

What triggers these moments of insecurity? "It used to be linked to my domestic life," he muses. "I always remember Bee saying to me: 'Don't blame your bloody nervous breakdown on me!' Sometimes I just feel incredibly vulnerable, for no particular reason. But fortunately it has never happened in front of a camera. That's always been my great dread, because I can't really do anything else. I don't really have any other strings to my bow." How does he feel during a close-up, when the camera might move as near to his face as an optician using an ophthalmoscope? "I love close-ups. Odd, isn't it? I've never thought about that before. I love the fact that during a take, everyone - the sparks, the chippies, everyone on set - is silent and concentrating on that moment. As you rightly say, if anything it ought to be more alarming, thinking of all those millions of people who will see the film. But it doesn't have that effect on me."

Let's hope he keeps his nerve, and remains in the gaze of the movie camera, under observation - and nothing like Napoleon

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/interviews/story.jsp?story=481551

THANKS TO ETH FOR THE LINK!

 

Here is one I, yet again more revealing and also contains the newest picture of Sir Ian!

Holm sweet Holm
(Filed: 23/01/2004)

The role of Bilbo Baggins has brought Ian Holm a new generation of fans. As he tackles Napoleon, he talks to Marianne Macdonald


Ian Holm is one of the most familiar of great British actors. He's 72, and has been in almost everything – Danny Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary, Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, Woody Allen's Another Woman, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, David Cronenberg's The Naked Lunch, Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter.

Masterly actor: Sir Ian Holm

In Chariots of Fire he was the inspirational athletics coach, and in Alien the glacial android. But he is best known as the fanatical psychiatrist in The Madness of King George and the worldly-wise Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, for which he got vast amounts of fan mail from small children.

Holm is really famous, though, for two things in particular: his King Lear at the National seven years ago, for which he got breathtaking reviews – he was hailed as probably the best Lear of the century – and his stage fright, which was horrendous.

He trained at Rada after the war and was part of the wave of talented young actors who followed the young Peter Hall to Stratford, but he dried up, mid-monologue, halfway though an RSC performance of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. It was 1974 and he was 43.

"It was horrible," Holm says now, "something over which I had no control. It was like withdrawal symptoms: 'This has nothing to do with me.' I walked away and curled up in my dressing room." It was a sort of breakdown, and he says without elaboration that, "It's fair to say there was probably a hiccup in my domestic life at the time."

The stage fright does indeed seem to be connected to troubles in his personal life, because it came back two years ago in a play called Mappa Mundi at the National, after he left his wife.

"Fortunately that was before the play opened, so it opened with somebody else."

The first bout, however, was so bad that Holm avoided the stage for 20 years. Instead he did radio and films. And this is why he is talking to me in the library of the Charlotte Street hotel in Fitzrovia: he has just played Napoleon in a film called The Emperor's New Clothes. He perches in an armchair, his grey hair elegantly swept back over wary eyes, and you notice his small, upright body (he is five foot six) and expensive blue suit.

"It's a sweet film," Holm says mildly of the small-budget movie directed and co-written by Alan Taylor, who made Palookaville. "A fantasy, really: what would have happened if Napoleon had escaped from St Helena."

What would have happened, according to the movie, is that Napoleon goes to Paris and falls in love with a melon-seller, and his place is taken on the island by a working-class lookalike called Eugene Lenormand who gets rather uppity. Holm doubled as emperor and impersonator, which he enjoyed. But he found the film hard work.

"It was a 47-day shoot," he sighs, "and I was in 46 of the days."

I ask how it compared with playing Lear.

"Lear was tremendously hard work. But it was joyous. Napoleon – it wasn't the two hours' traffic of the stage, it was 46 days, and you have to stop and do another scene and do the last scene first, and so on, and so if you're playing a huge role you have to take on responsibility."

This year he will have done 50 years in the business, and you feel that when you talk to him: this is, for example, the third time he has played Napoleon. He says he sees himself now as a film actor.

"There probably was a time when I considered myself as a classical stage actor. I'd had 13 years of Stratford. Now I'm more at ease in front of a camera than on the stage. But I'm a jobbing actor. I need to work."

Work has carried him through a difficult time in the past two years. In 2001 he left his wife, the actress Penelope Wilton and then got sick at once with prostate cancer. This has been dealt with ("touch wood") after an operation and radiotherapy; he says, too, he is over the divorce.

"Well, I am, because I left," he explains. That didn't mean he was over it, I say. "No," he concedes.

"It was extremely painful. It was 16 years. But I think I am, now."

After the break-up – Wilton was his fourth wife – Holm bought a flat in Gloucester Road. For a year he shared it with a friend called Patrick, who was once married to Francesca Annis. This wasn't a romantic partnership.

"I don't like living on my own," Holm says. "And he's a good cook. So I was always fed and looked after."

Though Holm is distant at first, his sweetness and warmth gradually become evident. It turns out that he is very shy: "I like to hide."

This is probably because of his difficult childhood. His mother had him in her forties after four miscarriages – "I was very much an afterthought" – and his father, George Cuthbert, a psychiatrist who oversaw a lunatic asylum in West Ham, was distant. When Holm was five they sent him off to board at Chigwell Grammar School in Essex. He hated it.

I think this period is the origin of his panic attacks: he says that his "whole school time was ruled by fear, of everything, fear of teachers, fear of being alive – it was terrible, terrible."

To add to his misery, his older brother died of prostate cancer at 22, when Holm was 12. He claims, though, not to have been personally so upset by it.

"It was during the war and he'd been billeted in the Middle East," he says. "It was really upsetting for my parents. I always felt he was the loved one, the bright one. Academically I was a complete dud: I failed everything. My father said, 'What are you going to do?' I said, 'I'll try acting.' 'Prove it,' he said." Holm's face falls in heavy folds. "The best two words he ever said to me."

Holm wants to work till he drops. Directly after finishing The Emperor's New Clothes he made The Lord of the Rings, and the memory cheers his rather sombre countenance.

"It was incredible," he says. "I'm astonished by the cult following that Bilbo Baggins has achieved, because it's only basically three or four short scenes. It's had an extraordinary effect on youngsters. I've had more fan mail and adoration from tiny tots than I've had for anything else. It's rather nice, after being at it all these years, to suddenly mean something to an absolutely new generation."

More recently he filmed From Hell for the Hughes brothers, about Jack the Ripper, which starred Johnny Depp – "He's a good actor. Makes odd choices sometimes."

At the end of last year he also did a cameo in Scorsese's The Aviator alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.

"Scorsese is wonderful. Such passion!" His face dims again. "But I have to view myself as a character actor at this age, because the cameos are getting smaller and smaller. I know perfectly well my earning potential is not going to go up. I've had quite a long period out of work."

The esteem in which he is held – for which he was knighted five years ago – seems not to register. He is touched when I tell him my friends exclaimed how lucky I was to meet him.

"Really? I'm not aware of it," he says, looking moved. "I appreciate that enormously. I vanish into a crowd and no one knows who I am, so it's nice to have that effect. It makes you feel it's all been worth it."

He says with old-fashioned dignity that he hopes that I will be happy and rises to kiss me goodbye.

For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk


'The Emperor's New Clothes' is released on Jan 30.

www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/01/23/b

fholm23.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/01/23/ixartleft.htm

 

 

Powered by Bravenet.com