Category: History

No. 2 & White Boar & heraldry

On By EstherIn History, Richard Armitage, TV & media9 Comments

I just now opened Netflix and I see that Stay Close is number 2 in The Netherlands today!

Although this is not my favourite Richard Armitage project (see my previous post), I am pleased that it is proving to be successful for him, a nice little boost for his career.

Another boost in the news is Richard’s ‘White Boar Films’ production company going live online. See the website HERE. It sports a nice picture of Richard too…

I’ve heard rumours of the Annie Thorne and the D.I. Jackman projects before, looks like he’s serious about getting those made. Good for him! And maybe they could also produce something Richard III related in the future, as Armitage has been wishing to do for ages?

Yesterday, while Mr Esther and I were out alone for the afternoon, I told him that Richard had started a production company called White Boar Films. I said no more and didn’t need to as Mr Esther, who is an expert on heraldry, instantly grinned and said, “Hey, that’s from the coat of arms of Richard III! It makes sense as Armitage is from Leicester as well.” He remembered that little fact from our summer holiday a few years ago. So, yes, White Boar Films making a Richard III movie would be really cool as well and in a way connects my favourite man with my favourite actor. Let me tell you how I envision that.

Should Richard Armitage ever make a Richard III movie with his production company, they just need to make sure the heraldry for that is right because, according to Mr Esther, heraldry is rarely used properly in movies. For instance, the De Merville coat of arms that Richard had in Pilgrimage had all sorts of things wrong with it. Don’t ask me exactly what, as Mr E is the expert, but from what I understand it was not correct for the time, had all the wrong embellishments and would never have been worn on clothing like that.

Mr Esther is a board member of a heraldic organization, so I hope White Boar Films will consult him, or someone like him, if they ever do make a Richard III film. It’s especially important as the production company is named for a coat of arms, so if they ever use heraldry in a movie, they need to do so correctly. But all of this is just speculation and wishful thinking where I’m imagining sitting in on numerous production meetings between Mr Esther and Richard on heraldry… Not a bad vision, right?

Wishful thinking aside, I wish Richard all the very best with his new production company!

The fun stuff

On By EstherIn Actors, History, Real life, Richard Armitage15 Comments

Fun item number one: I see Richard has updated his Twitter header…

I have written before about being very partial to nice priests in cassocks and that I’m looking forward to Richard playing one in The Man From Rome. I’ve not read the book yet (don’t know if I ever will) and I understand Father Quart does not wear a cassock but maybe he will at least wear a clerical collar just as in the image above? I’ll be happy with that too. By the way, I don’t think that’s Richard in that picture, do you? In any case, I’m glad the project really seems to be happening now.

Fun item number two: Julie Delpy shared this on her Instagram and I’m totally with her on that!

I’ve been volunteering at a Dutch centre for refugees, doing walk-in consultations where I help refuguees with paperwork and admin stuff (soooo much paperwork! Even confusing to me sometimes and I’m not a refugee, new to this country!). So far, the ones I’ve helped have been lovely. I can only do it for one afternoon a week and only recently have I been given my ”own” client from Eritrea who is a young adult, very independent and speaks Dutch well as he has been here for a few years. He doesn’t need much help, just occasional assistance, and he’s such a doll! I’m in awe of how well he is doing for one so young and how determined he is to make something of himself. I’d take 10.000 of him over any closed-minded, hard-hearted racist.

Fun item number three: I follow Mary Beard on Twitter. I quite like her, she’s a historian specializing on the Romans and makes programmes for the BBC. She shared this…

I love this idea! I know little about Boudica and I’m thinking of getting tickets to this online trial of Boudica event. It looks like a great way of making history more tangible.

Fun item number four: the final season of Lucifer is available on Netflix. Quite beautifully done, even had to wipe away a tear here or there, although I’m not sure I buy the Lucifer and Chloe plot thing that happens. I do love what happens with Amenadiel, though, and Ella is great in episodes 7 and 8 (episode 8 is nicely directed by D.B, Woodside, aka Amenadiel himself). Anyway, my absolute favourite on the show is the aforementioned D.B. Woodside as Amenadiel and he has been calling for fan art that he has been sharing on his Instagram stories and some on Twitter. And boy, are there some great talented artists out there! The ones I share here are some of my faves and all have Amenadiel in them…

Source

And also some screenshots I took off Instagram stories…

It’s a pity Lucifer is over now but it’s good that they ended it where they did. I just wonder what D.B. will be doing next, I want to see more of him!

Been writing this inbetween work today and have now decided that both work for the week and this post are done. Time for the weekend to begin, hope you all will have a good one!

Today felt like a holiday

On By EstherIn History, Real life11 Comments

It’s going well with the Corona virus trends here in The Netherlands. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rapidly declining while vaccination levels are rising.

So, as of last week, lockdown has eased somewhat, meaning that museums have opened again, under strict regulations of course. Mini me has been wanting to go to the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam for a while now. Both of our kids know Anne Frank’s story well, we just never actually went to the museum with them because, frankly, it’s always too packed. Now, with Corona restrictions in place, not many people are allowed in so we figured now would be the perfect time to go. We booked tickets in advance and this afternoon the four of us finally visited the famous annex behind the offices of Otto Frank’s company where the Frank family had been in hiding. Over the years I have been there 4 or 5 times but it was really good to visit this place with our kids.

After our visit we stopped for a bite to eat right outside the building, right beside the canal.

Junior then left to go and see his girlfriend while mini me, Mr Esther and I stayed in Amsterdam and walked around there for a bit. We also saw soccer fans dressed in orange walk around there as this evening The Netherlands plays its first soccer game in the European Championship against Ukraine. It’s an at home game, in Amsterdam.

We avoided the busiest shopping streets and at the end of the afternoon headed home again (first stopping for dinner in a small town not far from our home). Had some tea in our front garden…

… before this evening we too succumb to a little bit of orange fever. The shops and supermarkets have already started to go orange in honour of Dutch soccer these past two or so weeks….

… and now we are watching the Netherlands versus Ukraine soccer match. The score as I type this is 3-2, we’re nearing the end of the match.

It’s been lovely going to a museum, doing some sightseeing, eating nice food and having great summer weather to boot. It really feels like a holiday.

Strong historical women

On By EstherIn Actresses, At the movies, History16 Comments

I’ve been catching up on strong women in history movies of late, women I had heard of or only had rudimentary knowledge of but now I feel I know a little better. Of course I don’t see these movies as documentaries but they did give a nice little deepdive into who they were.

I started with On the Basis of Sex about supreme court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played by Felicity Jones) before she became a judge. It followed her early career and her groundbreaking win in a case where she argued to not discriminate against a man as a carer for his ailing mother on the basis of his sex. That laid the goundwork for later equal women’s rights laws. I also love how Ruth’s marriage is portrayed here, a real partnership between two equals, the way (for me) that a marriage should be, a give and take in equality.

I love how this is not about a superhero female lawyer but that it’s about a woman who quietly fights for justice in her own unique way. I know Felicity Jones is not for everyone but I have really liked her since I first saw her in Northanger Abbey quite a few years ago and she doesn’t disappoint here either.

Hannah Arendt focuses on (not surprisingly) Hannah Arendt as she follows the trial of Adolf Eichman, leading her to coin the famous term ‘the banality of evil’. It was a good and thought provoking film with a great performance by German actress Barbara Sukowa but it was also a very slow moving and sometimes tedious to get through story. Either that or I watched it too late at night when I was too tired to follow all of the thoughts laid out in the film, which meant I felt my eyes drooping on occasion. Even though it was slow, the movie did stick with me for a little while so I think I need to watch this one again, when I am feeling more alert.

I like that this is not about a woman battling and fighting for a place in a man’s world, it’s a movie about a strong and already respected woman in her own right who lives life on her own terms, a political theorist (I understand she didn’t see herself as a philosopher) trying to make sense of the evils of the Holocaust. It’s well worth a watch (even if a tad slow).

Harriet is about the life of Harriet Tubman, who in the mid 1800s escaped slavery in Maryland and went on to free 70 more slaves from the southern plantations after that. I know very little about Tubman and I really liked this movie which gave me more of an insight into who she had been. Cynthia Erivo was truly remarkable as Minty aka Harriet, I was surprised when afterwards I found out that Erivo is actually a British actress, she was so good!

The story was dramatically well told, Harriet was a strong and very determined character who wouldn’t let anyone sway her from her path. The music was good too, especially the spirituals in it made me want to listen to the soundtrack. I don’t get that urge often when I watch a movie.

Cynthia Erivo sings herself, what a gorgeous voice she has. The song “Stand up” that she co-wrote was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Elton John…

I then saw Big Eyes, about painter Margaret Keane (played by Amy Adams, I watched the movie because of her), another woman I knew nothing about. She painted the famous big eyes paintings in the 1960s that were also turned into countless posters and postcards. Her husband (played by Christoph Waltz) marketed and took credit for all her work for many years and she let him out of fear.

It is depressing to see her become isolated from others, caught in a restricted world alone with her husband and lying to her daughter (from her first marriage). It is then a relief to see her subsequently emerge and come into her own at the end. I had no idea about any of this, so it was an interesting watch for me.

As usual, Amy Adams is brilliant in this, can someone please finally give her that Oscar?

Last but not least, I watched Misbehaviour, a movie about the 1970 Miss World competition, held in London, hosted by a quite sexist Bob Hope. Claiming that beauty competitions demeaned women, the newly formed Women’s Liberation Movement achieved overnight fame by invading the stage of the Miss World show. At the same time, that show also became the first time a black woman from South Africa was allowed to compete and the first time a black woman (from Grenada) won.

Keira Knightley, Jessie Buckley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw starred in this movie (I especially love the latter two although Keira is really good in this one too), alongside a few other good names (Rhys Ifans, Keeley Hawes, Leslie Manville, Greg Kinnear). I like how this movie shows the point of view of the protesters as well as of the contestants, especially the two black women who use the competition to try and find emancipation. There is a conversation after the contest between the winner Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and protester Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) in the bathroom, both discussing their points of view and I just wish that scene had lasted longer. I enjoyed this movie too.

All of these movies are well worth seeing but my fave of these have been Harriet and On the Basis of Sex, the latter even leading me to watch the 2018 documentary RBG, which gave a fascinating insight into Ruth Bader Ginsburg. These are ‘just’ movies, so by nature dramatized and maybe not 100% accurate in the stories they tell, but I do love them and how they bring these stories to the awareness of people today. We’ve come a long way in many things but these movies also remind me that we have a way to go yet as we still fight many battles today against racism and sexism.

April 3rd

On By EstherIn History, Real life17 Comments

On this day in the year…

33: Christ was crucified (according to astronomer Humphreys & Waddington)

1043: Edward the Confessor crowned King of England

1312: 2nd council of Vienna, Knights Templars suppressed

1367: Henry IV of England, King of England and Lord of Ireland (1399-1413), born in Bolingbroke Castle, Lincolnshire, England (d. 1413)

1657: English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell refuses crown

1783: Washington Irving, American writer (Legend of Sleepy Hollow), born in NYC, New York (d. 1859)

1860: The Pony Express mail delivery system, which used continuous horse-and-rider relays along a 1,800-mile (2,900-km) route between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, was launched in the United States.

1882: American outlaw Jesse James is killed by Robert Ford at home in St Joseph

1886: Dooley Wilson [Arthur Wilson], American musician and actor (Beulah, Casablanca), born in Tyler, Texas (d. 1953)

1893: Leslie Howard [Stainer], British actor (Gone With the Wind, Of Human Bondage), born in London, (d. 1943)

1897: Johannes Brahms, German composer and conductor (Hungarian Dances; A German Requiem), dies at 63

1913: British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst sentenced to 3 years in jail

1919: Austria expels all Habsburgers and according to Mr Esther the use of coats of arms by families is banned

1920: Novelist and short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (23) weds novelist Zelda Sayre (19) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York

1922: Doris Day [Kappelhoff] , American singer, animal welfare activist and actress (Pillow Talk, The Man Who Knew Too Much), born in Cincinnati, Ohio (d. 2019)

1924: Marlon Brando, American actor (The Godfather, A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront), born in Omaha, Nebraska (d. 2004)

1930: Helmut Kohl, German chancellor (West Germany, 1982-90, unified Germany, 1990-98), born in Ludwigshafen, Weimar Republic (d. 2017)

1930: 2nd Academy Awards: “The Broadway Melody”, Warner Baxter & Mary Pickford win. First time Academy Awards are broadcast on the radio.

1933: 1st airplane flight over Mt Everest

1934: Jane Goodall, British ethologist (studied African chimps), born in London, England

1948: US President Harry Truman signs Marshall Plan ($5B aid to 16 European countries)

1952: Dutch Queen Juliana speaks to US Congress

1958: Fidel Castro’s rebels attacked Havana

1958: Alec Baldwin, American actor (Joshua-Knots Landing, Beetlejuice), born in Amityville, New York

1961: Eddie Murphy, American actor (SNL, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, Raw), born in Brooklyn, New York

1968: Martin Luther King gave his last speech (“I’ve been to the mountaintop”) at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. The next day, King was assassinated.

1973: The first handheld mobile telephone call was made by an employee of Motorola, who called AT&T’s Bell Laboratories

1976: 21st Eurovision Song Contest: Brotherhood of Man for United Kingdom wins singing “Save Your Kisses for Me” in The Hague, The Netherlands

1977: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1st meeting with US President Jimmy Carter. I still remember the excitement at home (we lived just outside Jerusalem) when the Camp David Accords were signed two years later.

1978: Matthew Goode, English actor (Leap Year, A Single Man, A Discovery of Witches), born in Exeter, Devon, England

1982: Cobie Smulders, Canadian actress (How I Met Your Mother), born in Vancouver, British Columbia

1991: UN Security Council adopts Gulf War truce resolution

1996: Federal agents in Montana apprehend Ted Kaczynski, an American terrorist known as the “Unabomber,” who had killed 3 persons and injured more than 20 with explosives sent through the U.S. postal system.

2012: US President Barack Obama officially secures Democratic presidential nomination

2016: Panama Papers published – 11.5 million confidential documents from offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca expose widespread illegal activities including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and the violation of international sanctions by the world’s elite in the world’s largest ever data leak

2021: Esther turns 51, celebrating her second birthday in Covid 19 quarantine…

The text on the cake translates to “It’s Esther’s birthday. Happy birthday old cake (i.e. meaning ‘old bat’)!” and yes, there is a spelling mistake on the photo gift my son got me which I love (it is so him!). Unlike last year, this year my already vaccinated mother and aunt were able to visit. It’s been a nice, low-key day.

(MTA: most of the info above is sourced from https://www.onthisday.com/day/april/3)