February 12, 2006|If people know Natasha Richardson at all it seems it’s as the titular gun-toting, Stockholm-struck heiress in Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst–a film that came closer to making her a star than the one that was supposed to two years later, The Handmaid’s Tale. I myself was vaguely aware that she hailed from a long and storied English industry family, what with her father being director Tony Richardson and mother and aunt being acclaimed actresses Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, respectively; and I knew that she’d married Liam Neeson somewhere along the line, with whom she has two children. But it wasn’t until very recently that I started becoming aware of Ms. Richardson more as an actress than as something like a faint suggestion of foreign royalty. The act of freeing herself from her past began with a move from the UK to Manhattan, a few celebrated turns on the Great White Way (most notably her Tony-winning stint as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes’s revival of Cabaret), and now a couple of films (Asylum and The White Countess) that find Richardson’s screen work maturing along with her actualization. Yeah, I’m smitten.

January 29, 2006|My first glimpse of lanky British director Stephen Frears was in passing as he took shelter from a frigid early-December wind in a doorway in front of Denver’s historic Brown Palace Hotel. Iconoclastic at the least, Frears turned his back on a career in law and began his tutelage in the arts at the Royal Court Theatre under Karel Reisz and, eventually, Lindsay Anderson, on whose fantastic If… he worked before making his feature debut with Gumshoe in 1971. A two-film partnership with playwright Hanif Kureishi later yielded My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and they, along with the magnificent Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, brought Frears to the attention of Hollywood, where he’s since had his share of ups (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and High Fidelity) and downs (Hero and Mary Reilly, high-profile flops made back-to-back for the same studio).