Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Gormenghast is a fantasy series by British author Mervyn Peake, about the inhabitants of Castle Gormenghast, a sprawling, decaying, Gothic structure. Originally conceived as a single on-going novel, the series was ended by Peake's death and comprises three novels: Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959); and a novella, Boy in Darkness (1956). Peake was writing a fourth novel, Titus Awakes, at the time of his death in 1968. The book was completed by Peake's widow Maeve Gilmore in the 1970s, but was not published until 2011 after it was discovered by their family.
Brian David Sibley is an English writer. He is author of over 100 hours of radio drama and has written and presented hundreds of radio documentaries, features and weekly programmes. Among his adaptations is the 1981 version of The Lord of the Rings for radio. A columnist and author, he is widely known as the author of many film "making of" books, including those for the Harry Potter series, and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.
Steerpike is a fictional character in Mervyn Peake's novels Titus Groan and Gormenghast.
June Muriel Brown was an English actress and author. She was best known for her role as Dot Cotton on the BBC soap opera EastEnders. In 2005, she won Best Actress at the Inside Soap Awards and received the Lifetime Achievement award at the 2005 British Soap Awards. Brown was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours for services to drama and to charity, and promoted to an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours. In 2009, she was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress, making her the second performer to receive a BAFTA nomination for their work in a soap opera, after Jean Alexander. In February 2020, at the age of 93, she announced that she had left EastEnders permanently.
Boy in Darkness is a novella by English writer Mervyn Peake. It was first published in 1956 by Eyre & Spottiswoode as part of the anthology Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination. A "corrupt" version of Boy in Darkness was published both in an anthology, The Inner Landscape, and separately in 1976 with an introduction by Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore. Referring to the corrupt text, she wrote that "although the Boy in Boy in Darkness is assuredly Titus Groan, [Peake] did not call him so by name"; however, adding the name Titus was one of the specific changes that Peake made between writing and publishing his novella. The correct text has recently become available again in an anthology entitled Boy in Darkness and Other Stories, with a foreword by Joanne Harris and a preface by Peake's son Sebastian, as well as Maeve Gilmore's uncorrected introduction from 1976.
Gormenghast is a fantasy novel by British writer Mervyn Peake, the second in his Gormenghast series. It is the story of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Groan and Lord of Gormenghast Castle, from age 7 to 17. As the story opens, Titus dreads the pre-ordained life of ritual that stretches before him. To Titus, Master of Ritual Barquentine and his apprentice Steerpike are the embodiment of all he wants to rebel against. An important sub-plot involves Titus at school, where he encounters the professors, especially Bellgrove, who becomes Headmaster of Gormenghast school.
Titus Alone is a novel written by Mervyn Peake and first published in 1959. It is the third work in the Gormenghast trilogy. The other works are Titus Groan and Gormenghast. With the trilogy, a fourth work, the novella Boy in Darkness, and a fifth, the fragment Titus Awakes, are often considered part of a larger "Gormenghast series". It was re-edited by Langdon Jones in 1970 using the original manuscript.
Neve McIntosh is a Scottish actress.
Lady Fuchsia Groan is a fictional character in the Gormenghast series of fantasy novels by English writer Mervyn Peake. The daughter of Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Groan, she appears in the first two volumes in the series, Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950). In the BBC film adaptation (2000), Fuchsia is portrayed by Scottish actress Neve McIntosh.
Titus Groan is a novel by Mervyn Peake, first published in 1946. It is the first novel in the Gormenghast series. The other books in the series are the novels Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) and the novella Boy in Darkness (1956).
James Edward Fleet is an English actor of theatre, radio and screen. He is most famous for his roles as the bumbling and well-meaning Tom in the 1994 British romantic comedy film Four Weddings and a Funeral and the dim-witted but kind-hearted Hugo Horton in the BBC sitcom television series The Vicar of Dibley. Since 2020, he has played King George III in the Netflix Bridgerton.
Peter Dougan Capaldi is a Scottish actor and director. He portrayed the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in the science fiction series Doctor Who and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, for which he received four British Academy Television Award nominations, winning Best Male Comedy Performance in 2010.
Tobias Simpson Menzies is an English actor. He is known for playing Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in the third and fourth seasons of the series The Crown, for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and received Golden Globe and British Academy Television Award nominations. Menzies also played Frank and Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall in Starz's Outlander, for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination, in addition to his roles as Brutus in Rome and Edmure Tully in Game of Thrones.
Antonia Jane Bird, FRSA was an English producer and director of television drama and feature films.
Claire Elizabeth Foy is a British actress. She is best known for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix drama series The Crown (2016–2023), for which she received various accolades such as a Golden Globe and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Susanna White is a British television and film director.
Monica Margaret Dolan is an English actress. She won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult (2011).
Gormenghast is an opera in three acts composed by Irmin Schmidt to an English-language libretto by Duncan Fallowell, based on Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy. It premiered at the Opernhaus Wuppertal on 15 November 1998.
Odile Dicks-Mireaux is a British costume designer. Her work include productions for both cinema like the Academy Award-nominated films An Education (2009) and Brooklyn (2015) and television like the BBC One drama The Lost Prince and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019), receiving an Emmy Award for the former and a BAFTA Craft Award for the latter.
