Names and faces
Sean Bean is as famous for his rugged looks and thick northern British accent as the many creative ways in which he dies onscreen. He’s been stabbed, shot, chased off a cliff, tossed off a satellite dish, beheaded, exploded, killed by arrows, and drawn and quartered in everything from the Bond movie Goldeneye to Game of Thrones and The Lord of the
Rings. Says the 58-year-old actor: “It’s a surprise when I survive. A quite nice surprise for me and, hopefully, for the audience.” For his new series, the Yorkshire-bred actor shockingly makes it to the end of the season. In The Oath, on Crackle, Bean plays the imprisoned patriarch of a gang of rogue cops. It’s a brooding, dark and violent look at how corrosive corruption can be. While his Game of Thrones character, Eddard Stark, the lord of Winterfell, died in the first season, Bean said the ability of the character to maintain a dominant storyline as the series enters its seventh season demonstrates the legacy of “one of a very few good men” who had principles, morals and a good heart in a show filled with “backstabbers, poisonous people.” “That’s probably one of the reasons he didn’t survive,” Bean said. “He wasn’t devilish enough.”
To mark its 60th anniversary, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo will return to theaters this Sunday. As part of the TCM Big Screen Classic series, Vertigo will play in some 650 locations, including several in Arkansas. Though initial reviews for the 1958 film were tepid and the box office was disappointing, Vertigo has steadily grown in reputation over the years. In 2012, it even displaced Citizen Kane, after a 50-year reign, as the top film on the Sight & Sound critics’ poll. In an interview, the now 85-year-old Vertigo star Kim Novak says that while Hitchcock never mistreated her, her era of 1950s-1960s Hollywood had the same kind of sexual harassment stories that have recently emerged. “I identify so very completely with the role because it was exactly what Harry Cohn and what Hollywood was trying to do to me, which was to make me over into something I was not,” says Novak, referring to the iron-fisted Columbia Pictures founder who contracted her. “In the beginning, they hire you because of the way you look, obviously, and yet they try to change your lips, your mouth, your hair, every aspect of the way you look and the way you talk and the way you dress. So it was constantly fighting to keep some aspect of yourself, trying to keep some of you. You feel: There must have been something in you that they liked, and yet they wanted to change you.” Novak says that last fall, she channeled her experiences into her “own Me Too painting.” She titled the result — a swirling, vibrantly colored abstraction of a menacing face looming above a woman — A Time of Reckoning.