Max Adrian

The first BBC television adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, Constance Cox’s adaptation of Oliver Twist (1962) is now available for the first time to own on DVD. Starring Bruce Prochnik and BAFTA nominees Max Adrian and Peter Vaughan. Constance Cox s uncompromising 1962 adaptation of Dickens tale of a gang of orphan boys turned to crime changed the face of British Sunday teatime viewing. Her unvarnished depiction of despair and depravity in the back alleys of 19th-century London, and the cruel divide between rich and poor, shattered expectations of cosy family drama.Read More »

Guided throughout by the swells and dips of Tchaikovsky’s music, Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers examines the tragedies of Tchaikovsky’s life through opulent and fantastic musical sequences running alongside a narrative of the composer’s life between 1875 and 1881. Touching on his disastrous marriage with Antonina Miliukova, his relationship with his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, and his repressed homosexuality, The Music Lovers is anchored by magnetic central performances from Glenda Jackson following her Academy Award for Women in Love, coupled with Richard Chamberlain as a neurotic Tchaikovsky.Read More »

“Vulgar, excessive, melodramatic and self-indulgent: Tchaikovsky’s music is indeed all of these things, yet gloriously so, and the same goes for Ken Russell at his freewheeling best. The director’s first composer biopic for the cinema approaches Tchaikovsky’s scores as the expression of extreme emotional turmoil.”

The Music Lovers is about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, feverishly wrapping his music around his childhood, his career, his sexuality, and his marriage into a tangle.Read More »