Locked in a pub with Robert Powell
John Buchan’s adventure story, The 39 Steps. This remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie was so convincingly led by Powell’s performance that a television series followed. Simply called Hannay it
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was based on a number of Buchan’s short stories. Powell also, of course, starred in the television sitcom The Detectives with Jasper Carrott and was a regular in the Holby City TV series cast until January this year. This summer, however, he has gone from the heroic
to the humorous by taking the title role in Keith Waterhouse’s award-winning play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell - which I was fortunate enough to see at the Oxford Playhouse recently. In a life devoted to alcohol, gambling and women, the
ever-charming Jeffrey Bernard distinguished himself by spectacular excess in all of those areas. He recounted his mishaps in colourful contributions to the Spectator magazine’s Low Life column, from which fellow Fleet Street legend Keith Waterhouse created this always humorous and occasionally poignant play. Waterhouse’s own prolific output encompassed the book, play and film Billy Liar, the screenplays for Whistle Down the Wind and A Kind of Loving and the television adaptation of Worzel Gummidge. As an award-winning
journalist he wrote regularly for Punch, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror and in 2004 he was voted Britain’s most admired contemporary columnist by the British Journalism Review. On its release, Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell won the London
Evening Standard’s Best Comedy Award in 1990 and was soon turned into a film with the equally prodigal Peter O’Toole almost perfectly typecast in the title
• Jeffrey Bernard (Robert Powell) is unwell
obert Powell is perhaps best-known for playing Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli’s film, Jesus of Nazareth - or perhaps as the hero Richard Hannay in the film of
• Robert Powell is Jeffrey Bernard personified
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August 2011
Four Shires THEATRE
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