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! There May Be SPOILERS in the movie reviews !
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! There May Be SPOILERS in the movie reviews !
Another book on Rochester
So Idle A Rogue
The Life & Death of Lord Rochester
'Read this book' - Literary Review
'Lamb tells us the story with swashbuckling relish.' - TLS
'Lamb takes us through Rochester's life at a handsome gallop' Independent on
Sunday
Written with sympathy and verve, this biography of Rochester was well
received when it was first published.
The name of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, is synonymous with excess. One of the brightest and most outrageous luminaries at the court of Charles II, he was to drink himself to death by the age of 33. Notorious libertine, certainly; he was also a genius.Rochester was a man of immense contradictions. His satirical works, notably 'A Satire against Reason and Mankind', shows as much weary disgust with himself as with the society he moved in. Famous for the obscenity of his amorous poems, he also penned some of the most moving, witty and lyrical love poetry of all time.
He was infamous for his atheism, yet in his final year of life he stunned his friends and turned to God. In this biography, Jeremy Lamb examines for the first time the nature of Rochester's alcoholism and its implications for the man and his poetry. In doing so, it is the man behind the illness whom Lamb brings to life: a man riven by contradictions, by doubt and disgust. Lamb links the illness directly to his ultimate conversion, seeing it not as a fear of dying but rather the discovery of 'certainty'.
What emerges from this brilliantly perceptive portrait is a profoundly unhappy genius who came to want no part of this world, or of himself. Lamb also rescues the man who blazed through his short life in glory and tragedy, genius and despair, and who is so little known today. Rochester is a truly forgotten figure in English history.
You will find this title on amazon.
News Pascalle found today is that the UK will get LIBERTINE this May! I may need to renew my passport.
Sent in by Janet Feb 20, 2005
Finally a glimmer of good news regarding the release of Libertine
From Box Office Mojo on LIBERTINE
Distributor: Miramax Release Date: Fall 2005
Running Time: N/A Production Budget: N/A
MPAA Rating: Unknown Est. Marketing Costs: N/A
So it looks like Miramax is getting it released in time for the Oscar races. Wouldn't it be amazing if Johnny was nominated for 2 roles in 1 year?
From Karen at Johnny Depp Reads
January 10, 2005
Test Screenings for Libertine
There will be several test screenings of The Libertine in NY and LA during the month of January and February.The first two will be Tuesday, Jan 9 at the Landmark Sunshine in New York and Tuesday, Jan 18 at the Landmark in Los Angeles..
These screenings are held by MovieView.
If you live in those areas, be on the look out for recruiters passing out flyers to see the movie. They are normally outside movie theaters and malls.
From icStaines
Johnny Vegas on Johnny Depp
Jan 5 2005
By Wil Marlow
Johnny Vegas is in full flow. He's telling the slightly bizarre story of how he got his part in the forthcoming Johnny Depp film The Libertine.
It's a typical Vegas-style stream of consciousness but it's rudely interrupted by his phone ringing.
"Ooh sorry," he says in that distinctive Lancashire rasp, taking out his phone. He presses a button and starts bawling.
"Look Mr Depp I have a life too," he says and hangs up.
"He's a borderline pest," he tuts.
"'Can you pick some milk up on your way home?'. No I can't. 'Full fat, no semi-skimmed. It's for me skin'."
Johnny's joking, of course, but the truth is the famously drunken comic - who's drinking a pint of lemonade today, but only because he's fending off the remnants of a hangover - does have his Hollywood namesake on speed-dial after they became good mates on the set of costume drama The Libertine.
"Mr Depp is very sociable," says Johnny.
"But it's virtually impossible to go out with him. Obviously we had the wrap party and we had a few parties at people's flats that we all went to. But if you went into town he would just get mobbed.
"Do you know the Father Ted episode where all the old women go mad? Like that. It's funny because when people do see him they just come up to him, stand about two yards away and stare.You're thinking, 'You must be able to think of something to say'. But they just stare, it's really weird.
"But he's fine with it. I keep wanting to tell people he's a bastard - he might be good looking, but he's a bastard. But he's not, he's a really down-to-earth bloke."
The Libertine could be the 33-year-old's big break in Hollywood. The lavish costume drama tells the story of the debauched 17th century poet John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, played by Depp. Johnny plays Rochester's friend Charles Sackville, among a stellar cast that also includes John Malkovich and Samantha Morton. Johnny got the part in a typically surreal manner.
"I was in the car coming from Heathrow," says Johnny, "and we stopped at the lights and in the car next to us there was a young child in the back and I'm waving at him. But I saw the dad looking at me and I thought, I don't want him to think I'm a weirdo, so I started showing pictures of me son through the window.
"But it turned out to be the director Laurence Dunmore driving the car. And he was just talking to his wife at that point about who to cast as Sackville. He told me after that she'd said, 'What about Johnny Vegas?' and he'd turned around and I was in the car with a photo of me kid going, 'He needs shoes, clothes. Give us a job!'.
"I have no problems whatsoever using my son to get me work - he'll be the one to suffer, not me!"
The release of The Libertine should herald a better year for Johnny after an up and down 18 months. In September of 2003 he split from his wife of less than a year, Kitty Donnelly, apparently because of his constant boozing and the pressures of looking after their baby son Michael.
The couple reportedly got back together recently - though it's not something the notoriously private comic is willing to talk about. Johnny, real name Michael Pennington, is said to have moved back into the north London home they once shared.
He's also getting over the fierce drubbing that his first major film release Sex Lives Of The Potato Men took, when critics almost universally panned it on its release.
"I went out and bought it," he says of the flop comedy.
"I'd only seen it twice and I saw it in a supermarket and bought it. And I like it. Sometimes I've been made to feel like I should be really apologetic for it but it was a film that we made about people that I know."
Up and under!
Jan 1 2005
Daniel Davies, Western Mail
From rugby league to talking posh, Johnny Vegas is back. Rob Driscoll meets the funnyman
THERE were more than a few moments last year when Johnny Vegas couldn't stop pinching himself. Like the time, for example, when he was in deepest rural Wales with Johnny Depp, in full 17th-century garb, filming a major period-costume movie.
It's just not the kind of project you'd normally link with the motor mouth, heavyweight comic, more associated for disrupting award shows with his no-nonsense, North-Western-tinged put-downs.
"It was probably the most challenging thing I've ever done," says 34-year-old Vegas, referring to The Libertine, the lavish, historically-based film shot partially at Tretower Court in Crickhowell, Powys, and due for release later this year.
"I play the third richest man in the country, Charles Sackville, the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, who's basically an extremely arrogant, pompous fop. He's so rich that he has no manners or concerns for anyone else, apart from his very close friend the Earl of Rochester, played by Johnny Depp.
"They're like the 'It boys' of the time, constantly out drinking and whoring - though Sackville, my character, was secretly quite in love with Rochester. There were a lot of love letters and poems that he sent him. And trust me, it's really odd playing a guy that's forever looking at the gorgeous Mr Depp, secretly in love with him!"
The film follows the life of the Earl of Rochester, a 17th-century poet who famously drank and debauched his way to an early grave. The cast also features John Malkovich (as King Charles II), Samantha Morton, Tom Hollander, Richard Coyle (Coupling's "Welsh" Jeff) and The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan.
Vegas recalls that his initial script read-through for the film was one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of his life.
"It was such a stellar cast, and I was just a bit gobsmacked," he says. "I had to speak posh in it, and I worked with a brilliant voice coach. I look like a little page-boy, and I have a snuff box with me all the time. It was a pretty weird experience. We were lost somewhere in the middle of Wales, and often we'd consider going down to the local post office dressed in our costumes, and start demanding things they obviously didn't stock - 'I want some turtles!' - just to freak them out!"
Johnny Vegas can tell a tale, and once he's in full raconteur mode, you can't stop him. It's a stream-of-consciousness trait that's frequently got the St Helens-born stand-up comic into trouble; try shutting him up when he's mouthing off live on TV, in mock-bitter mode, as with the recent British Comedy Awards, which reduced host Jonathan Ross to a quivering wreck.
Most notorious was his appearance a few weeks earlier on Channel 4's Music Hall of Fame final, for which he was invited to present the award for the 1950s to Cliff Richard. His typically meandering and cynical rant, riddled with barbs against the event itself, was heavily edited before the show aired a few days later. Yet today, he has no regrets about his actions.
"I wasn't being derogatory to Cliff Richard," he says. "The actual speech I was given to read was the most derogatory thing, and I was taking the mickey out of that. They started removing bits of the auto-cue in front of me, because they realised how dreadful the script was. Then I was left with nothing, so that's when I started ad-libbing.
"So I'm not apologising, and I'd love Cliff to see the whole thing uncensored. The trouble is, the organisers get hold of me, because they kind of know my knack for being quite erratic at award shows. If they didn't want that, they should have had me give the award to Robbie Williams, rather than Cliff. Like I said on the night, giving me the '50s award to hand over was an odd combination. I'm going to have fun on the night, but what I don't want to do is attack the bloke who's getting an achievement award."
Then again, Vegas is getting used to the controversy. His private life is a no-go area with journalists right now - he is currently separated from his wife Kitty Donnelly, by whom he has an 18-month-old son, Michael. All of which makes it somewhat ironic that his latest TV role is that of a journalist, in ITV1's new comedy series Dead Man Weds, co-starring and written by Dave Spikey (of Phoenix Nights fame).
The series has proved another "pinch-me" moment for Vegas - it's his first starring role in a mainstream TV sitcom (after playing support parts, as in BBC2's Happiness, with Paul Whitehouse). In Dead Man Weds, he plays Lewis Donat, a gone-to-seed deputy editor who clearly has the talent, but does as little as possible on a fast-fading weekly small-town Peak District rag called the Fogburrow Advertiser and News. However, he gets a firm kick up the backside when disgraced Fleet Street hack Gordon Garden (played by Spikey) takes over as the newspaper's new editor.
The show is a mixture of old-fashioned gags and more ribald, contemporary humour which suits Vegas's laid-back style. He insists that he didn't find working with a script restrictive to his usual stand-up methods of comedy.
"It's obviously different for me, but Dave's scripts are just genius, and he was also very open to improvisation," says Vegas. "I'm not a massive fan of 'gag, gag, gag' you get in a lot of British sitcoms; his comedy is more observational."
It's acting for the big screen that is clearly the big new thing in Vegas' life, though he hasn't escaped unscathed. The Libertine is not his first film, but he's hopeful it will be received more generously than previous big-screen outings like Blackball and more recently, Sex Lives of the Potato Men, which was described by some reviewers as the worst film ever made.
"It was made in the tradition of the British sex comedy, and we made it for that audience, but I think the film became this huge stick, to beat the Lottery commission with.
"Talking to people in the street, more people seemed determined to go and watch it as a result of the negativity thrown at it. But I don't think it was given enough opportunity. Financially, it would have done much better business and justified itself, it had been left in the cinemas."
Meanwhile, still the work goes on for Vegas. As well as Dead Man Weds, he'll also be seen on BBC3 this month in another new comedy series, Ideal, playing a small-time dope dealer called Moz. And he's currently recording a new late-night Channel 4 entertainment show with Chris Evans.
Away from the showbusiness world, the biggest love in Vegas' life - apart from his baby son Michael - is rugby league, and his almost-obsessive support for his beloved St Helens.
"I've already bought my season ticket and I can't wait for the next season to kick off in February," he says. "The best thing about 2004 was definitely beating our rivals Wigan Warriors in the Challenge Cup Final in Cardiff - that's what I call a good night."
UR prof's book shares Earl of Rochester's secretsMatthew Daneman
Staff writer(December 31, 2004) — John Wilmot had the kind of reputation that would make Marilyn Manson blush.
The earl in the court of King Charles II shocked his contemporaries with his poetry and plays filled with obscenity, his notorious drunkenness, his womanizing, his atheism, and his disregard of most moral and religious obligations of the day.
Wilmot died in 1680 at the age of 33 from syphilis and gonorrhea, but he's not been forgotten.
Johnny Depp portrayed Wilmot in a movie earlier this year, The Libertine, based on a 1994 play about the Earl of Rochester's life. Earlier this month, Sodom, a prurient play by Wilmot billed as the rarest known piece of English pornography, was sold at auction in London for more than $100,000.
And University of Rochester English Professor Emeritus James William Johnson has written a new biography of Wilmot that taps previously unknown sources of information to paint what could be called the definitive portrait of the English nobleman.
A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (UR Press, 443 pages) took nearly as many years to complete as Wilmot lived.
The book was rewritten two or three times over the 30 years Johnson said he'd been studying and researching the earl, reflecting changes in the availability of materials about Wilmot. "For a while, I thought this was never going to see print," said Johnson from his home in Kitty Hawk, N.C. He taught at UR from 1955 through 1997, and is the author or editor of nine books.
In the 1800s, Wilmot's story was used as a cautionary tale and featured in Bible tracts. But even through the 1960s, there was little hard information available about Wilmot, Johnson said. "So I got interested; what did he do that was so terrible?"
But in the last 30 years or so, since the end of the British government office in charge of censorship, the British Museum has opened up material it used to deny it had, Johnson said. "I found a lot of material nobody else ever found," he said.
The end result is a portrait of Wilmot as a notorious libertine on one hand and a family man, learned scholar, military veteran and traditional country squire on the other.
It was Wilmot's deathbed repentance that garnered him much attention, Johnson said.
"He was raised in the Puritan tradition and I think he tried to get away from it" while alive, Johnson said. "His education caught up with him when he was dying."
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