September 28, 2024

Saturday, September 28, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

Kamala is always busy.

She went to the Border.

Another compelling headline in the New York Times.

Who are they pushing? Mr. Bone Spurs?

Do they know we are a nation of immigrants?

But even the Times had admits this - “On Friday, in the border community of Douglas, Ariz., Ms. Harris is expected to give a speech accusing Mr. Trump of playing politics with immigration and reaffirming her commitment to signing the border legislation. She is also likely to note that crossings have dropped significantly since President Biden signed an executive order in June that prevented migrants from seeking asylum at the border when crossings surge.”

Here is part of the Vice President’s speech in Arizona last night.

Touch to watch these three segments of her speech. 👇

Here is the Vice President’s full speech in Douglas, Arizona. 24 minutes. 👇

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To avoid appearing partisan, Ukraine President Zelenskyy met with Trump.

He didn’t know he would be treated as a Trump prop. again.

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Tuesday, October 1 is the Vice Presidential debate.

Here’s how to watch the debate:

What time is the debate?

The 90-minute debate will start at 9 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1. It’s being moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

What channel is the debate on?

CBS News is airing on its broadcast network live and will livestream it on all platforms where CBS News 24/7 and Paramount+ are available. It’s also being made available for simulcast, and other networks will likely air it. (AP).

In the meanwhile, J.D. Vance is doing a town hall on Saturday with this guy.

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Your daily reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th and September 18th. He will now be sentenced on November 26.

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Another Democratic candidate for Senate that you should consider supporting.

Angela Alsobrooks, running in Maryland.

Her opponent, Larry Hogan, was a popular Maryland Republican Governor, seen as more moderate than he is.

Hand-chosen by Mitch McConnell to run for the Senate, Hogan would vote with his party, stand against reproductive rights and for a national abortion ban, and by his very presence create the possibility that the Senate could turn red.

Alsobrooks won the Democratic primary against all odds, beating a man who outspent her 10-1, using $60 million of his own money to support his campaign.

The Washington Post sees the Senate race in Maryland this way.👇

Democratic turnout is the key to victory.
Alsobrooks can win this. We can win this.

Help if you can.

Angela Alsobrooks, running in Maryland.

https://app.oath.vote/donate?p=niemtzow-alsobrooks&ref=PPIAM0N1

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Hurricane Helene is on many minds.

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Guerilla Warfare is open to all.

Go for it!

Pro-Harris sticky notes pop up in women's restrooms and gyms and on tampon boxes

In the weeks before Election Day, a loose-knit group of women are organizing online to blanket their communities with pro-Kamala Harris messages — not on yard signs or fliers, but on sticky notes.

The idea is simple: Take a pad of sticky notes, write messages and post them wherever women may see them — bathroom stalls, the backs of tampon boxes, bathroom mirrors, the gym.

The messages vary slightly, but a typical one reads something like: "Woman to woman: No one sees your vote at the polls. Vote Harris/Walz." (NBC News).

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The world has been dealing with the saddest news. Maggie Smith has died.

There aren’t words, but here are some tributes.

Maggie Smith, scene-stealing actress, famed for Harry Potter and ‘Downton Abbey,’ dies at 89

LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “ Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She made her film debut in the 1950s, won Oscars for work in the 60s and 70s and had memorable roles in each subsequent decade, including an older Wendy in Peter Pan story “Hook” (1991) and a mother superior of a convent in Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy “Sister Act” (1992).

A commanding stage actor, she played Shakespearean tragedy — 1965 adaptation “Othello” — and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & Juliet” (2011).

She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith drily summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well.

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for lead actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986 and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

From 2010, she was the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in hit TV period drama “ Downton Abbey,” a role that won her legions of fans, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a host of other awards nominations.

But she chafed at television fame. When the show’s run ended in 2016, Smith said she was relieved. “It’s freedom,” she told The Associated Press.

“Not until ‘Downton Abbey’ was I well-known or stopped in the street and asked for one of those terrible photographs,” she said.

She continued acting well into her 80s, in films including the big-screen spinoff to “Downton Abbey” in 2019, its 2022 sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes upstaging others.

>Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t just take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.”

However, the director Peter Hall found that Smith wasn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people, too.”

Smith conceded that she could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Smith famously drew laughs from a prosaic line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

She repeated the gift for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet witheringly asked, “What is a weekend?”

King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla paid tribute to Smith, who was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

“As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage,” they said in a statement.

Fellow actors paid tribute to her on Friday. Hugh Bonneville, who played the son of Smith’s character in “Downton Abbey,” said “anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent.”

“She was a true legend of her generation and thankfully will live on in so many magnificent screen performances,” he said in a statement.

Rob Lowe, who co-starred with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said the experience was “unforgettable ... sharing a two-shot was like being paired with a lion.”

“She could eat anyone alive, and often did. But funny, and great company. And suffered no fools. We will never see another. God speed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote on X.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Smith “a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. ... If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theatre company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theatre productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a redoubtable woman who lived for years in her vehicle on Bennett’s London driveway.

However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.

“She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear,” said Simon Callow, who performed with her in “A Room with a View.”

Smith married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby — who both grew up to be actors — and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998. (Associated Press).

Theater Talkback: Missing Maggie Smith

BY CHARLES ISHERWOOD FEBRUARY 17, 2011.

I am surely not the only theater fan suffering serious “Downton Abbey” withdrawal symptoms. “Masterpiece” may have surgically removed the word “theater” from its official title, as if the word were somehow a vestigial appendage of the pre-modern era. (Its presentations are now classified as “Masterpiece Classic” or “Mystery” or “Contemporary.”) But the pleasures afforded by this long-running television series overlap considerably with the satisfactions for which many of us look to the theater: a heightened literacy, refined wit, rich characterizations, absorbing narrative, plummy British accents.

And, when God is feeling most benevolent, Dame Maggie Smith.

“Downton Abbey,” an original series created by Julian Fellowes about an upper-class British family and those who serve it in the years just before World War I, concluded its cruelly short four-episode run on PBS a couple of weeks ago. The 90 dizzying, incident-packed minutes of the last show came to a startling conclusion just as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand rocked the whole of Europe. But the knife-sharp, witheringly funny line readings of Ms. Smith, playing the matriarch of the family, Violet, dowager Countess of Grantham, continue to replay themselves in my head, as do images of Ms. Smith’s icy blue eyes glinting with amusement and mild malice underneath imposing hats as Violet savors her own antics.

“What is a ‘week-end’?” Violet asked in acidic bewilderment at one point, coming upon this curious term for the first time when it escaped the lips of a less high-born and not-as-comfortably off relative. It is impossible to describe the amount of magnificent disdain Ms. Smith managed to cram into the question. She is without peer — or should I say peeress? — in representing a savory stereotype of English drama and fiction: the imperious gentlewoman so secure in her sense of her place in the social sphere (cozily near the apex, of course) that she regards the passing scene with bemused distance, as if through a lorgnette from the private opera box she carries around with her. (Violet is a virtual clone of the similarly grand and snooty character Ms. Smith played in “Gosford Park,” also written by Mr. Fellowes.)

Ms. Smith’s performance was particularly worth cherishing because she has been absent from the stage and seen only infrequently on film since undergoing treatment for breast cancer in 2008. She has made a few movies, notably the final film in the seemingly interminable “Harry Potter” series, and will appear opposite another grand Dame, Judi Dench, in a movie called “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” to be released this year. But her last theater performance came in the West End in a revival of Edward Albee’s “Lady From Dubuque” in 2007.

Anyone who has had the good fortune of seeing Ms. Smith at the theater can only hope that she will find the stamina — or maybe it’s just the desire — to return to the medium in which she began her career back in the 1950s. After breast cancer treatment, Ms. Smith gave a much-discussed interview to the Times of London in 2009 in which she admitted to being “frightened” of returning to the stage.

For me it’s a little frightening to consider the book permanently closed on Ms. Smith’s theatrical career. There are certain performers around whom one’s love for the theater seems to coalesce, certain performances that can transform an intermittent pleasure into an addictive passion. Ms. Smith’s incandescent, Tony-winning turn in Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and Lovage” on Broadway in 1990 marked just such a pivot point in my theatergoing experience.

Judi Dench, left, and Maggie Smith in the 2002 London production of David Hare’s “The Breath of Life.”Reuters Judi Dench, left, and Maggie Smith in the 2002 London production of David Hare’s “The Breath of Life.”

I’d been seeing plays and musicals in New York for several years, on visits from California, although I had not yet started writing about it. Ms. Smith’s wonderfully florid turn as Lettice Douffet, the custodian of a second-tier English historical site who adds flourish upon flourish to her tours of the house in order to nudge it closer to importance, was perhaps the funniest stage performance I had ever seen. It was a virtuosic turn that drew on all her trademark mannerisms – the flapping wrists, witheringly dry turns of phrase, conspicuously genteel accent – to ripe comic effect. It epitomized for me the particular, gooseflesh-giving magic of seeing a great actor and a great role seamlessly matched onstage.

Sadly, it was also Ms. Smith’s last Broadway performance. A woman known for her strong opinions, Ms. Smith has never really taken to the bustle of Broadway. Prior to “Lettice and Lovage,” she last appeared on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” way back in 1980. Her only other visits came in “Private Lives,” in 1975, and, staggeringly, a “New Faces” revue from 1956.

So it became necessary for me to make pilgrimages to London, where her appearances have been far more frequent, to pay homage. Her Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” I considered a must, although in the end what seemed a perfect pairing of actress and role somehow failed to live up to one’s perhaps overstimulated hopes. (She groused in that 2009 interview, using an expletive, that her character’s “handbag is stuck in everyone’s head.”) I also managed to catch her in a wonderful revival of Edward Albee’s “Delicate Balance,” where she played the soused, acerbic Claire opposite Eileen Atkins’s grave Agnes, and in David Hare’s “Breath of Life,” a serviceable vehicle that Ms. Smith and Ms. Dench handily turned into a glittering West End occasion.

The performance I probably cherish most was Ms. Smith’s funny but also subtly wrenching turn as an eccentric woman who settled down in Alan Bennett’s front yard in “The Lady in the Van,” in 2000. For an actress known for the crisp, commanding surfaces of her performances, Ms. Smith can cut deep with an equally authoritative precision.

Alas I can just as easily recite the litany of performances I was unable to catch: the stage version of Mr. Bennett’s “Talking Heads” (although I had of course seen her delicately moving turn on television); the West End premiere of Mr. Albee’s “Three Tall Women”; and that last appearance in the enigmatic “Lady From Dubuque.”

Ms. Smith’s return to her singularly sharp form in “Downton Abbey” inspires the hope that she may consider braving the boards once again. In a recent interview in the New York Times to promote her new autobiography, Ms. Smith’s friend and colleague Ms. Dench underscored the necessity of continuing to work to keep the actorly juices flowing. “It’s like putting a car in a garage,” she said. “It’s hard to get it started after that.”

Ms. Smith has expressed similar sentiments. Well, the car is well clear of the garage, and on the evidence of “Downton Abbey,” in trim shape. I can only hope Ms. Smith musters the will to get it back onstage.

Would anyone care to share their memories of Ms. Smith onstage? And what other performers and performances have incited or inspired a casual theatergoer to become a lifelong devotee? (New York Times)

Deadline.com

King Charles has paid tribute to iconic UK actress Maggie Smith who has died in London at the age of 89-years-old.

“My wife and I were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Dame Maggie Smith,” the UK monarch said in a statement.

“As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage.”

The king shared a picture of himself talking to Smith at the Pride Of Britain awards at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel on October 31, 2016, when he was still Prince Charles.

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10 Great Maggie Smith Performances to Stream.

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37 Days until November 5. Do something!

Have a good weekend. “What is a weekend?”

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