|
|
|
|
Articles
|
|
|
Articles |
Frustrations of a Website HunterDateline: 17th December, 2000 I spend much of my online time hunting for Websites for British actors. It's so frustrating! Until very recently you could hunt the Web all over looking for a site devoted to one of our leading Shakespearean actors, Alan Howard, and you would have found nothing. However this week a very cursory glance around the Net landed me four Anna Friel sites and three for Amanda Holden. Who? Anna Friel shot to fame in the UK with the first ever lesbian kiss in a soap, Channel 4's Brookside. Apart from that she's best known for taking her clothes off fairly frequently - I almost said "at the drop of a hat", but that would have been a very confused metaphor! She's done a little theatre, true, most recently in Patrick Marber's Closer on Broadway, but her main attraction would seem, reading between the lines of the numerous sites, to be her naughty bits! Then there's Amanda Holden who has, according to one site, "the face of an angel: the body of a goddess". She's done a bit of tele - a sitcom and a couple of other things - but that's it. And then I came across a site for that celebrated British actress Emily Booth. Eh? Who she? Well, she presented a TV programme on computer games, usually wearing very tight tops which showed off her... assets? Surely that entitles her to be regarded as an actress? You and I may think not, but for the Webmaster it was qualification enough! When we did our Greatest Actor and Actress poll a little while back, there were many nominations for actors I'd never heard of. It turns out they'd appeared as the brother-in-law of the purser's assistant's assistant in Titanic or had been seen on the screen for a nanosecond with Ioan Gryffudd in Hornblower. Obviously that entitles them to be considered for the UK's greatest living actor title. How could I not have recognised so obvious a fact? Do I sound bitter and twisted? cynical? fed up? Perhaps I am. To see enormous talent going totally unrecognised outside of a small group of cognoscenti and then to see sites by the score springing up all over the Web for people who are, in terms of experience and achievement, still in nappies (diapers, for our American friends) (Should that be double p?) (I don't think so) (But I could be wrong), is galling. What a sad world it is when season after season with the RSC or the National counts for less than getting your kit off on the box, or appearing in a sitcom (no matter how unfunny) or soap, when serving your apprenticeship in fringe theatre or rep means less than a few minutes exposure on the screen, small or large. Okay, I know it's inevitable, but I just felt like sounding off about it! Articles Indices:
|
|
|