![]() Yes, and I was genuinely interested in it, and I think if I had my life again I might do the same thing. Hulot’s Holiday,” and I played it over and over again over a weekend on the wall of a study on an image about 6 inches by 4, just enjoying it so much. And I enjoyed that.īefore the days of even videocassettes, when the only way of showing a film to a school was to get four spools of 16-mm celluloid and mount them onto a projector and shine them on to a big screen and I was in charge of the so-called film society, and then there was I think what was called the sixth form film society, the senior version for the more sophisticated tastes, and we got “Mr. He opened a window to a world that I’d never looked out on before, and I thought, “God, that’s interesting,” how a comic situation can be developed as purely visual and yet it’s not under-cranked, it’s not speeded-up, Benny Hill comedy - it’s more deliberate it takes its time. Hulot’s Holiday” I remember seeing when I was 17 - that was a major inspiration. And I think it was particularly a French comedian called Jacques Tati. A British comedian you might not have known called Norman Wisdom - I can’t say I was a big fan of his, but at least there was a tradition. ![]() And then in terms of visual stuff, Chaplin and Keaton and Harold Lloyd and all those. I loved that character - again, it’s the veneer of respectability disguising suburban prejudice of a really quite vicious and dismissive nature. And then Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna Everege. And then latterly more of what John Cleese did - a major, major inspiration I think that he and I are quite different in our style and our approach, but certainly it was comedy I liked to watch. Rowan Atkinson: My early comedy influences I suppose would have been Beyond the Fringe, a comedy revue sketch troupe with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, and then Monty Python - I remember watching them avidly as students at university. I like to focus on one thing, get it done, take a break and then work on another thing.” “I’m not someone who juggles a lot of balls in the air. “I’m someone who tends to concentrate on only one thing at a time,” Atkinson told me. Upcoming are a brace of television films (for ITV) in which Atkinson will play George Simenon’s “Inspector Maigret.” That is exciting news from both ends of the equation. “Bean” was, in turn, followed by the very verbal “Thin Blue Line,” a sitcom by Ben Elton (also a “Bean” writer), in which Atkinson played a suburban policeman.Īmong many other stage and screen appearances, including the role of Fagin in a 2009 revival of “Oliver!,” there would be two movies featuring the Bond-like “Johnny English,” which received mix reviews but earned a lot of money. Like “Bean,” which began in work for the stage, it was co-created with his friend since Oxford, Richard Curtis, who with “Four Weddings and a Funeral” would later invent the modern British rom-com. He was 28 when “Blackadder” debuted, with Atkinson, in different historical eras, as the worst man in Britain.
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