Betty White’s stellar final act
[IN MEMORIAM] How the late Golden Girls star became the pop-culture icon everyone wanted to work with
BETTY WHITE APPEARED to be all sweetness on the outside, but inside ticked one of the sharpest comedy minds of the 20th century. She could lull you into a false sense of security with that adorable smile, wide eyes and, later in life, the-internet’s-grandma appearance, and then hit you over the head with a cast-iron skillet — figuratively and, in the case of one Boston Legal episode in which she wallops a killer before chucking him in a freezer, literally. She enjoyed a remarkable final act of a remarkable career that saw her become everyone’s favourite movie nonagenarian.
White never quite retired despite living to nearly 100, but credit 2009’s The Proposal for bringing her back to prominence. The most lasting effect of the Sandra Bullock-ryan Reynolds hit was to remind moviegoers how much they adored White as an eccentric ‘gammy’. Behind-the-scenes gags showed her ‘bullying’ Reynolds, who later claimed she dumped him.
White later locked lips with Bradley Cooper on SNL,
and admitted a crush on Robert Redford, who said it was mutual.
But of course he had a crush on her; who wouldn’t? Betty White was a TV fixture for life. She was the first female producer of a sitcom in the 1950s, the queen of game shows in the 1960s, and a mainstay on classics such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show
during the 1970s and The Golden Girls
in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her Rose Lylund on the latter is one of the great comic creations — check out the famous “herring war” scene for proof. But she was also the host of no fewer than four
different programmes titled The Betty White Show, played a blackmailing, armed robber murderess on Boston Legal, and, at 88, became a regular on Hot In Cleveland. She matched wits with Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock, rapped on Community, played a telethon-pledge-enforcer version of herself on The Simpsons and made a big impact as a tiger toy named ‘Bitey White’ in Toy Story 4. Some CV. She was one of our last links to TV’S first golden age, and lived to brighten its current boom. She will be missed.
IT USED TO bother Jack Lowden that he’s often cast to play real people. Of the 12 films he’s appeared in, half of them have him playing people who lived, including Tony Benn, Morrissey and the ill-fated Lord Darnley in Mary Queen Of Scots. “I thought it was because I’m not very interesting,” Lowden says. He worried people didn’t trust he had enough in himself to enrich a character. “I thought it meant they want me to play other people because they don’t want me.”
We’d suggest it’s a compliment, that he’s able to embody myriad people — most of whom, as he says himself, “I look nothing like.” He’s also excellent with fictitious roles, such as his pilot in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Lowden sinks gently into real people, so they become a person of his creation, not an impression. He has Michael Fassbender to thank, in part, for this. “I was playing Tony Benn [in A United Kingdom]
and I got obsessed with [getting Benn’s voice right],” Lowden says. “Then I went to watch Steve Jobs. Fassbender’s not making any attempt to sound or, apart from a polo neck and glasses, look like him, but I found his performance so engaging. He was first and foremost an engaging human being, not trying to play the guy. I went, ‘Oh fuck,’ and stopped trying to sound like Tony Benn.”
Lowden’s latest role sees him take on another real person — war poet Siegfried Sassoon — in Benediction, the latest from quietly brilliant British director Terence Davies. Sassoon was a decorated captain in World War I but found the jingoism of war appalling. He led a life of roiling sadness, having several doomed relationships with men before settling into an unhappy marriage with a woman. “The thing I kept focusing on was his regret,” Lowden says.
“I always find regret more moving when it comes from a place of not having done anything… rather than from doing stupid things.” Lowden draws a parallel with his performance as Morrissey in England Is Mine, another man who is “sort of frozen all the time and lives in his head.”
In March, Lowden will be seen opposite Gary Oldman in Slow Horses, an Apple TV+ series. It’s a role in which he doesn’t play a real person — “The first fictitious character in a while… I didn’t know what to do! Where’s the blueprint? I need a blueprint!” he jokes — but one of a group of spies, from the novels by Mick Herron, who have been demoted “because they’re either useless or have royally fucked up.” Oldman plays the boss and Lowden is “River Cartwright, the young one that’s actually very good but made an unfortunate mistake.”
Next, Lowden wanted to play a part in which he gets to use his own voice. You’d be forgiven for having no idea he’s Scottish. After a string of English-accented roles, he swore for his next part: “I’m not doing it unless it’s in my own accent.” However… “In March, I’m playing another real-life person. And it’s another person I’m nothing like.” He can’t say who it is, but it’s “just too cool”. And the accent? “Cockney”. His own fault for being so good at his job.
FRESH OFF THE success of Dune (and with Dune: Part Two en route in 2023), director Denis Villeneuve is set to bring us yet another aweinspiring sci-fi adaptation that many have tried and failed to port over to the big screen over the years: Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo Award-winning Rendezvous With Rama.
Clarke’s novel is a typically thrilling and thoughtful sci-fi adventure involving mankind’s first interactions with a largely unknowable alien spacecraft (and the things that lurk inside). It’s a trip into the cosmos we should all be excited to take, and for those unfamiliar with the material, here’s what you need to know before packing your bags.
EXPECT THE LOVE CHILD OF ARRIVAL AND DUNE
Rendezvous With Rama is likely to feel a lot like the midway point between Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and Dune (2021). Like the former, Clark’s story centres around human beings encountering and gaining entrance to a gigantic spaceship, which they explore in an effort to better understand the civilisation that constructed it. Like the latter, Rama is all but guaranteed to be embued with epic scope and spectacle. In fact…
EXPECT THE SHIP TO BE THE STAR
It’s very likely that Rama — the titular 50 x 20 km spaceship that serves as the story’s primary location — will be the real star of this particular show. The ship’s sprawling cylindrical interior is jam-packed with strange structures, alien cities, an entire ocean, and a great many mysteries besides. With Villeneuve at the helm, there’s every reason to believe the visuals here will be utterly jaw-dropping.
DON’T EXPECT AN ALIENS RIFF
While the characters in Rendezvous With Rama do eventually encounter alien life, this is still a story from the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey — not a feature-length, James Cameronstyle firefight. There are thrills to be had, make no mistake, but audiences should anticipate something more along the lines of Arrival’s inquisitive alien heptapods, less so swarms of bloodthirsty Xenomorphs.