John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.
Marlon Brando Jr. was an American actor and activist. Widely considered one of the greatest actors of the 20th century, he received numerous accolades throughout his career, which spanned six decades, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, one Cannes Film Festival Award, and three British Academy Film Awards. Brando is credited with being one of the first actors to bring the Stanislavski system of acting and method acting to mainstream audiences.
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
"A Day in the Life" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the final track of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, the opening and closing sections of the song were mainly written by John Lennon, with Paul McCartney primarily contributing the song's middle section. All four Beatles played a role in shaping the final arrangement of the song.
Bernard Bresslaw was a British actor and comedian. He was best known as a member of the Carry On film franchise. Bresslaw also worked on television and stage, did recordings and wrote a series of poetry.
William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet is a 1996 romantic crime film directed, produced, and co-written by Baz Luhrmann. It is a modernized adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name, albeit still utilizing Shakespearean English. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the title roles of two teenagers who fall in love, despite their being members of feuding families. Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo, Miriam Margolyes, Harold Perrineau, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Sorvino and Diane Venora also star in supporting roles. It is the third major film version of the play, following adaptations by George Cukor in 1936 and by Franco Zeffirelli in 1968.
Alan Yentob is a retired British television executive and presenter. He has held senior roles at the BBC including head of music and arts, controller of BBC1 and controller of BBC2. He stepped down as the BBC's creative director in December 2015, and was chairman of the board of trustees of the charity Kids Company from 2003 until its collapse in 2015.
Dame Sheila Cameron Hancock is an English actress, singer, and author. She has performed in theatre - plays and musicals in London, and her Broadway debut in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1966) earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Lead Actress in Play. She won a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical for her role in Cabaret (2007) and was nominated at the Laurence Olivier Awards five other times for her work in Annie (1978), Sweeney Todd (1980), The Winter's Tale (1982), Prin (1989) and Sister Act (2010).
Miriam Margolyes is an English-Australian actress. She has gained prominence as a character actor on stage and screen. She received a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role as Mrs Mingott in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993), and portrayed Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series (2002–2011). Margolyes was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2002 New Year Honours for Services to Drama.
Marian Keyes is an Irish author and radio presenter. She is principally known for her popular fiction.
Claudius Afolabi Siffre, better known as Labi Siffre, is a British singer-songwriter and poet. Siffre released six albums between 1970 and 1975, and four between 1988 and 1998. His best known compositions include "It Must Be Love", which reached number 14 on the UK Singles Chart in 1971, "Crying Laughing Loving Lying", and "(Something Inside) So Strong"—an anti-apartheid song inspired by a television documentary in which white soldiers in South Africa were filmed shooting at black civilians in the street—which hit number 4 on the UK chart. The latter song won Siffre the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, and it has been used in Amnesty International campaigns.
Stephanie Beacham is an English actress, businesswoman and former model. In a career spanning almost six decades, she has a wide number of credits to her name on film, television, stage and radio in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
Cracked Actor is a 1975 television documentary film about the musician David Bowie, made by Alan Yentob for the BBC's Omnibus strand. It was first shown on BBC1 on 26 January 1975.
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
BBC Film is the feature film-making arm of the BBC. It was founded on 18 June 1990, and has produced or co-produced some of the most successful British films of recent years, including Truly, Madly, Deeply, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, Quartet, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Saving Mr. Banks, My Week with Marilyn, Eastern Promises, Match Point, Jane Eyre, In the Loop, An Education, StreetDance 3D, Fish Tank, The History Boys, Nativity!, Iris, Notes on a Scandal, Philomena, Stan & Ollie, Man Up, Billy Elliot and Brooklyn.
Dickens in America is a 2005 television documentary following Charles Dickens's travels across the United States in 1842, during which the young journalist penned a travel book, American Notes. It is hosted by British actress Miriam Margolyes, a lifelong fan of Dickens, and intersperses history with travelogue and interviews. It was produced by Lion Television Scotland for BBC Four. Nathaniel Parker provided the voice of Dickens, quoting from his texts throughout the journey.
Bucket is a four-part British sitcom about a mother and daughter on a road trip with the aim of fulfilling items on the mother's bucket list. The series was written by and starred actress and comedian Frog Stone as Fran, and co-starred Miriam Margolyes as Fran's mother, Mim.
And Now for Something Rather Similar is a documentary about the Monty Python team as they prepare for their first live performances in 34 years. Airing on BBC 1 on 29 June 2014 as part of the Imagine series, the programme is presented by Alan Yentob, who tracks down the five surviving Pythons in the months leading up to their Monty Python Live (Mostly) shows at the O2 arena in July 2014.
Got Back was a concert tour by English musician Paul McCartney, that started on 28 April 2022 and ended on 16 December 2023. The tour is McCartney's first following the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in the cancellation of a planned European leg of his Freshen Up tour in 2020, which included a planned performance at Glastonbury Festival. McCartney performed at Glastonbury on 25 June 2022, as a conclusion to the first leg of the Got Back tour.
