Sir Ian Murray McKellen is an English actor. With a career spanning more than sixty years, he is noted for his roles on the screen and stage in genres ranging from Shakespearean dramas and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is regarded as a British cultural icon and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. He has received numerous accolades, including a Tony Award, six Olivier Awards, and a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards and five Emmy Awards.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Soviet politician, revolutionary, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and establishment of the Soviet Union. In the early years of Soviet Russia, Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered its two most prominent figures, and Trotsky was Lenin's de facto second-in-command in the government from 1917 to 1923. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, Trotsky's thought inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
In Greek mythology, Antigone is a Theban princess and a character in several ancient Greek tragedies. She is the daughter of Oedipus, king of Thebes; her mother/grandmother is either Jocasta or, in another variation of the myth, Euryganeia. She is a sister of Polynices, Eteocles, and Ismene. The meaning of the name is, as in the case of the masculine equivalent Antigonus, "in place of one's parents" or "worthy of one's parents". Antigone appears in the three 5th century BC tragic plays written by Sophocles, known collectively as the three Theban plays, being the protagonist of the eponymous tragedy Antigone. She makes a brief appearance at the end of Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, while her story was also the subject of Euripides' now lost play with the same name.
Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment is a 1966 British comedy film directed by Karel Reisz and starring David Warner, Vanessa Redgrave, and Robert Stephens, with Irene Handl and Bernard Bresslaw. It was made by British Lion and produced by Leon Clore from a screenplay by David Mercer, adapted from his BBC television play A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962), in which the leading role was played by Ian Hendry. A film poster for the film is prominently shown in High-Rise (2015).
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río was a Spanish communist and NKVD secret agent who assassinated the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940. Mercader was imprisoned for 19 years and 8 months in Mexico for murdering Trotsky with an ice axe.
Lev Lvovich Sedov was the first son of Soviet communist leader Leon Trotsky and his second wife, Natalia Sedova. He was born when his father was in prison facing life imprisonment for participating in the Revolution of 1905.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was a Russian revolutionary and the wife of Vladimir Lenin.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the first novel by British author Alan Sillitoe and won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.
Prick Up Your Ears is a 1987 British film, directed by Stephen Frears, about the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell. The screenplay was written by Alan Bennett, based on the 1978 biography by John Lahr. The film stars Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell, Wallace Shawn as Lahr, and Vanessa Redgrave as Peggy Ramsay.
Edward Petherbridge is an English actor, writer and artist. Among his many roles, he portrayed Lord Peter Wimsey in the 1987 BBC television adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers' novels, and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. At the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980, he was a memorable Newman Noggs in the company's adaptation of Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
Louis Fischer was an American journalist. Among his works were a contribution to the ex-communist treatise The God that Failed (1949), The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950), basis for the Academy Award-winning film Gandhi (1982), as well as a Life of Lenin, which won the 1965 National Book Award in History and Biography.
Zinaida Lvovna Volkova was a Russian Marxist. She was Leon Trotsky's first daughter by his first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, a Marxist from Nikolaev (Ukraine). She was raised by her aunt Yelizaveta, sister of Trotsky, after their parents divorced. Her younger sister, Nina, stayed with her mother.
Priest of Love is a 1981 British biographical film about D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda played by Ian McKellen and Janet Suzman. It was a Stanley J. Seeger presentation, produced and directed by Christopher Miles and co-produced by Andrew Donally. The screenplay was by Alan Plater from the biography The Priest of Love by Harry T. Moore. The music score was by Francis James Brown and Stanley J. Seeger, credited jointly as "Joseph James".
Domiziana Giordano is an Italian artist, actress, photographer, and video artist. Giordano has played roles in work directed by Mauro Bolognini, Jean-Luc Godard, Neil Jordan, Ken McMullen, Nicolas Roeg, and Andrei Tarkovsky, amongst others.
Ken McMullen is a film director, artist and since 2012 Anniversary Professor of Film Studies at Kingston University, London. McMullen's films are grounded in philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and literature. McMullen's exhibition Signatures of the Invisible brought together artists and scientists working at CERN, the European particle physics facility near Geneva. His other work includes filming conversations with physicists at Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre, which he describes as "making a diary of the transition in human culture" because he believes physics is arriving at another shifting point. His latest work Arrows of Time is a radical new form of cinema consisting of 40 interchangeable elements that deal with literature, philosophy, and contemporary physics, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in April 2007.
Sean Gerard Mathias is a Welsh actor, director, and writer. He is known for directing the film Bent and for directing highly acclaimed theatre productions in London, New York City, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Sydney.
Mr. Holmes is a 2015 mystery film directed by Bill Condon, based on Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, and featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. The film stars Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes, Laura Linney as his housekeeper Mrs. Munro and Milo Parker as her son Roger. Set primarily during his retirement in Sussex, the film follows a 93-year-old Holmes who struggles to recall the details of his final case because his mind is slowly deteriorating.
The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against "Trotskyists" and members of the "Right Opposition" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
- The "Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center" ;
- The "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" ; and
- The "Case of the Anti-Soviet 'Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites'".
The anti-Stalinist left is a term that refers to various kinds of Marxist political movements that oppose Joseph Stalin, Stalinism, Neo-Stalinism and the system of governance that Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1924 and 1953. This term also refers to the high ranking political figures and governmental programs that opposed Joseph Stalin and his form of communism, such as Leon Trotsky and other traditional Marxists within the Left Opposition. In Western historiography, Stalin is considered one of the worst and most notorious figures in modern history.
Countdown to War is a television film made in 1989 as a co-production by Granada Television and PBS. It recounts the events that occurred between 15 March 1939, when the German army commanded by Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and 3 September 1939, the date when France and United Kingdom declared war on Germany. The film is divided into 5 different stages: Mussolini's study, Hitler's Chancellery, Stalin's Kremlin, Beck’s bedroom, and Chamberlain's Cabinet. The script is based on private letters, diaries and records of meetings between the different leaders. The film starred Ian McKellen, Michael Aldridge, Alex Norton and Barrie Rutter.
