News

Stage and screen actor best known for his roles in Only Fools and Horses, The Vicar of Dibley and Harry Potter

The talented and idiosyncratic character actor Roger Lloyd Pack, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 69, achieved national recognition, and huge popularity, as Colin "Trigger" Ball, the lugubrious Peckham road sweeper in John Sullivan's brilliantly acted comedy series Only Fools and Horses. He appeared alongside David Jason's Del Boy and Nicholas Lyndhurst's "plonker" Rodney from 1981 for 10 years, with many a seasonal "special" for another decade.

This success cemented a career in which, up to that point, he had played important roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the Almeida theatre in north London – he was a notably anguished Rosmer in Ibsen's Rosmersholm at the National in 1987, opposite Suzanne Bertish – without recognition any wider than usually appreciative reviews.

His enhanced status led to another...

There’s Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon (1920), whose indirect narrative approach influenced Lubitsch, and then there’s Gustav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929), about which I thought I knew nothing. It turns out I’d read, in Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, which when I was a kid was just about the only film book I knew of, in the section labelled Sex, that Machatý films the lovers embracing and then cuts to two raindrops intermingling on a window pane.

Machatý, of course, is Mr. Erotic: a few years later he would bring to the screen Hedy Lamar’s famous nude scene in Ecstasy (1933), which also featured what’s been described as the first sex scene, Machatý focusing on Lamar’s face as she register’s the title emotion–an effect achieved in fact by the director pricking the soles of his star’s feet with a pin. One wonders what his sexual technique was like,...

Kim Cattrall has been nominated for a coveted theater award. The "Sex and the City" star's turn as Amanda in "Private Lives" sees her considered for the Best Actress in a Play prize at the 11th Whatsonstage.com Awards.

She will face competition from "End of the Rainbow" star Tracie Bennett, Helen McCrory for her role in "The Late Middle Classes", "Ruined" star Jenny Jules, Nancy Carroll from "After the Dance" and "All My Sons" actress Zoe Wanamaker.

The Best Actor in a Play award will be contested by Benedict Cumberbatch from "After the Dance", Kim's "Private Lives" co-star Matthew Mcfadyen, "Hamlet" and "Measure For Measure" star Rory Kinnear, "Deathtrap" and "London Assurance" actor Simon Russell Beale, "The Real Thing"'s Toby Stephens and "All My Sons" star David Suchet.

"All My Sons" received more nominations than any other production, being considered for accolades in six different categories. The most...

Mauritz Stiller's silent movie masterpiece Erotikon – one of David Thomson's "10 lost works of genius" (The films that time forgot, Film & Music, 20 August) – has been beautifully restored by the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm as part of a handsome box set of recently restored films from Sweden's "golden years" of cinema (1917-24). These include two more Stiller masterworks, Gösta Berlings Saga and Herr Arnes Pengar, and two directed by Ingmar Bergman's mentor, Victor Sjöström – Terje Vigen and The Phantom Carriage – who, like Stiller (says Thomson), "needs to be recovered". In fact, Sjöström enjoyed a two-month retrospective of his work at the National Film Theatre (BFI Southbank) in 2004. Another "lost" Stiller film, the Gunnar Hedes Saga, will play at the BFI London Film Festival in October. The recovery of these two geniuses of cinema is well under way – indeed, they never really vanished.

Clyde Jeavons

Archive consultant, London Film Festival

World cinemaSweden

guardian.

The new wave 40 years early. The soft side of Jean-Pierre Melville. Nicole Kidman makes the unmakeable. Somewhere out there is an alternative history of film – David Thomson unearths 10 lost works of genius

Erotikon (1920)

Forget 1920, this is an absolutely modern comedy about romance and sex, directed in Sweden by Mauritz Stiller. We should remember that when MGM brought Greta Garbo from Sweden in the mid-20s, she was almost baggage in the deal that hired Stiller, one of the sharpest and most sophisticated of silent directors, but a man who would be crushed by Hollywood. Stiller needs to be recovered (like his contemporary, Victor Sjöström), and Erotikon has an instinct for attraction and infidelity that simply couldn't be permitted in American films of the same period. It's also marvellous to see that, nearly 100 years ago, Swedish cinema was in love with its country's cool light and with actresses as warm but ambiguous as Tora Teje,...