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Billy Liar and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, films that launched the career of Tom Courtenay, the British film star who never really succumbed to the lure of Hollywood and has balanced stage with screen for much of the five and a half decades since he left drama school. And this summer, he'll be seen in the role that brought him the Silver Bear in Berlin for the film 45 Years as Geoff, longtime husband of Kate played by Charlotte Rampling. As they prepare to celebrate that wedding anniversary, a letter arrives at their Norfolk cottage with news of an old loss: a woman's body has been found in an Alpine crevice, preserved in the glacier for decades after an accident that happened even before Geoff and Kate met. So utterly right are Courtenay and Rampling in these roles, so subtle and devastating is the development of the drama that it seems as you watch it that these roles must have been crafted for them. Tom Courtenay explained how he got the script.
"It came on my iPhone. There was a script on PDF and two photographs, one of the Alps and the other was the flat Norfolk Broads. And I read it right through straight off. And I found it astonishing." |