Author Topic: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....  (Read 18742 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« on: December 10, 2011, 04:24:28 pm »





[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66N5hjkq740[/youtube]






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and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #1 on: December 10, 2011, 05:13:51 pm »


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/movies/glenn-close-as-a-man-in-albert-nobbs.html


The Heart That Beats
in Albert Nobbs

By DAVID ROONEY
Published: December 9, 2011



Glenn Close, left, on the set of her television show “Damages,” and right as the guesthouse
waiter Albert Nobbs in her new film.



MOST failed auditions are quickly forgotten. Rarely does one generate a part that haunts an actor for three decades, lingering like an unresolved relationship that refuses to be eclipsed by successes across film, theater and television. But a botched stab at the title role was the beginning of Glenn Close’s enduring fascination with “Albert Nobbs.”

The audition was for Manhattan Theater Club’s 1982 Off Broadway production of “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs.” Adapted by the French playwright and director Simone Benmussa from the George Moore story of that name, the play was a minimalist retelling of the lonely existence of a woman in 19th-century Ireland passing as a male servant in order to survive.

Ms. Close’s theater credits at that time included a Tony-nominated role in the musical “Barnum, ” and she was awaiting the release of her feature-film debut, “The World According to Garp,” which would bring her the first of five Oscar nominations. She was not yet the major screen name known for “The Big Chill,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Dangerous Liaisons.” Her three Tonys and three Emmys (the most recent for “Damages”) were still to come. So the audition was no fait accompli.

“I was never a very good auditioner,” Ms. Close, 64, confessed over a recent Sunday brunch at August, a restaurant near her West Village home. “I went in and read, and in the middle of the audition I said: ‘I’m boring myself, so I must be boring you. I think I’m going to go home.’ I just knew I wasn’t hitting it.”

“That evening I heard from my agent that they thought it was the most interesting thing that had happened that day,” she continued. “They asked me to go back. I remember thinking how sick and tired I was of being bad at auditions, and that I really wanted this part.”

Ms. Close called her friend Kevin Kline, who recommended the acting coach Harold Guskin. She made an appointment, gleaned a few practical tips to help unlock the character, dressed in something more appropriate to the role, then went back for a second audition and nailed it. Reviewing the play in The New York TimesMel Gussow called the performance transforming.

 “I always felt that if I could pull off Albert, there was nothing else I had to do because it brings into play everything I’ve learned as an actor — movement, costume, voice — just trying to create the inner life of someone who’s so silent,” Ms. Close said. “She’s an unfinished person.”

A film based on the play has been a longtime passion project for Ms. Close. “Albert Nobbs” is finally opening this month with Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles, followed by a national release Jan. 27. Ms. Close’s performance and that of her co-star Janet McTeer drew major plaudits at festivals this fall, landing them on the radar of awards-season handicappers.

In many recent screen portrayals of women passing as men, the gender reversal has been tethered to a stylistic device. In “Shakespeare in Love” it played into a rich history of cross-dressing theatricality. In “Orlando” it sprang from a fantastical literary conceit. In “Yentl” it occurred within the elastic framework of movie-musical reality. Elsewhere, as in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Transamerica,” the switch was grounded in subject matter that directly addresses sexual identity from a contemporary perspective.

“Albert Nobbs” arguably has more in common with the current release “Tomboy,” a delicate French drama about a 10-year-old girl whose efforts to pass as a boy are driven less by sexual awareness than natural impulse. Standard definitions like transgender or lesbian don’t apply.

“Gender becomes almost irrelevant because it’s about human connection,” Ms. Close said. “The thing I’m most proud of in the movie is that you forget what you’re looking at.”

Directed by Rodrigo García, who had worked with Ms. Close on “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her” and “Nine Lives,” the film is an ensemble drama set mainly in the Dublin guesthouse where Albert has worked for the past 17 years, her secret undetected. Her life of self-exile is opened to new possibilities after she is forced to share her room one night with Hubert, a brawny housepainter.

The revelation comes early on and is not treated as a surprise twist à la “The Crying Game,” so it’s no spoiler to reveal that Hubert is played by Ms. McTeer. Like Albert, Hubert is a woman living in disguise, but without the sense of fear or shame that grips the timorous butler. The similarities and differences between these women, both of whom have experienced poverty and abuse, form the central dynamic of “Albert Nobbs.”

“Albert had never lived as a woman,” Mr. García said in a phone interview. “So inside Nobbs was a girl so suppressed that all she could think was: ‘Hide and survive. Fade against the wall. Be invisible.’ The layers of self-erasure are humongous. But Hubert knows who she is and what she wants.”

Given the polar-opposite approaches to their characters’ camouflage, the actresses drew on vastly different inspirations for their physical characterizations.

“I wanted Hubert to be very working-class, very Irish,” said Ms McTeer, also speaking by phone. “A big, barrel-chested kind of Viking. So the people I looked to were my friends Brendan Gleeson” — who appears in the film — “and Liam Neeson.”

“Liam has this wonderful way that he stands on the back of his heels,” she continued. “He has a simplicity of movement that’s somehow very attractive. And Brendan is a very cheeky guy with a great sense of humor. I wanted all that.”

Ms. Close is a handsome woman whose natural warmth and poise bear little resemblance to the painfully shy figure on screen, with her downcast eyes and prosthetically altered wingnut ears. She said that one of her references was a photograph from a National Geographic  article about Albania’s “sworn virgins,” women designated to dress and live as men by families without male heirs. She also studied the sad-tramp circus clown Emmett Kelly and Charlie Chaplin, influences reflected in Albert’s baggy pants, splayed feet and elongated shoes.

“The trick with this material is you have to have a lightness of touch and a sense of comedy,” Ms. Close said. “I thought in the way she moves through the world that Albert had a comic side to her as well as tragic. She’s never been in the body or the clothes that really say who she is.”

Ms. Close, who is also a producer and screenwriter on “Albert Nobbs,” said she first began nurturing the film in earnest more than 15 years ago. She showed the material to a number of potential collaborators before finding a match in the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, with whom she had made “Meeting Venus.” He wrote a treatment, and his script editor, Gabriella Prekop, completed a first draft; Ms. Close then brought in the distinguished author John Banville to “Irish-ize” it. But while plans were made to shoot the film in the early 2000s, with Mr. Szabo directing, financing failed to come together.

The project languished until Ms. Close took it in hand again around five years ago, undertaking a process she described as “culling it back” to find the elegance and simplicity, and bringing Mr. García on board.

“The psychological effect of finally doing ‘Albert Nobbs’ is a sense of joyous closure,” Ms. Close said. “I think the definition of an independent film is a film that almost doesn’t get made. But there came a point where I asked, ‘Am I willing to live the rest of my life having given up on this?’ And I said, ‘No I won’t. ’ ”
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline ifyoucantfixit

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #2 on: December 10, 2011, 05:22:24 pm »
    Just a personal comment.  I love her devinely.  She never, never fails to do a wonderful job.
 
  That poster is eerily compelling.  You cannot take your eyes off it.
  This seems to be a fine followup to "Sarah plain and Tall."



     Beautiful mind

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #3 on: December 10, 2011, 05:46:05 pm »



http://www.ramascreen.com/albert-nobbs-set-photos-mia-wasikowska


Mia Wasikowska and Glenn Close


(....)


Aaron Johnson replaced Orlando Bloom to play the character Joe

Mia Wasikowska replaced Amanda Seyfried to play the character Helen.

Co-written by and starring Glenn Close, the film also co-stars Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and it’s directed by Rodrigo Garcia (Mother And Child )

Close who also produces, wrote the script with John Banville and Close will play “a woman in 19th century Ireland who disguises herself as a man in order to survive and work but whose deception leads her to an unusual love triangle.”

Based on the Off-Broadway play The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs,  which is based on the short story by George Moore.

Close starred as the lead in the stage version.

It’s described as Gosford Park  meets Boys Don’t Cry ..Here’s the current plot:
 

“19th century Ireland: a woman with no husband or family and without work would face a bleak life of poverty and loneliness. Albert, a shy butler who keeps himself to himself, has been hiding a deep secret for years – ‘he’ is a woman who has had to dress and behave as a man all her life in order to escape this fate. When handsome painter Hubert Page arrives at the hotel, Albert is inspired to try and escape the false life she has created for herself. She gathers her nerves to court beautiful, saucy young maid Helen in whom she thinks she’s found a soul-mate – but Helen’s eye is on a new arrival: handsome, bad-boy Joe, the new handy-man! As Albert dares to hope that she might one day live a normal life, we catch a glimpse of a free-spirited woman who is caught in the wrong time…”






http://mynewplaidpants.blogspot.com/2011/10/youve-got-my-attention-albert-nobbs.html

You've Got My Attention, Albert Nobbs
Thursday, October 13, 2011



Aaron Johnson




Mia Wasikowska and Aaron Johnson


It only takes about fifteen seconds into the trailer to Albert Nobbs,  the "Glenn Close plays a stodgy-lookin' old dude" movie, for Aaron Johnson to doff his top, which was as unexpected a greeting as it was welcome.

(You can think up your own "Aaron Johnson's Nobb" joke here, it's early and I don't have it in me. Ha, I don't have Aaron Johnson's Nobb in me! I did it without even trying! I'm awesome.)

Anyway I am pleased to make your acquaintance, movie! We will be seeing some of each other in the near future. Watch the trailer over at Yahoo. It also stars the always worth watching Mia Wasikowska, who's gotten to rub her stiff britches up on both Aaron and Fassy in one year! Everybody takes notes - this is how you manage your career. Albert Nobbs  is out on January 27th.

"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Sophia

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #4 on: December 10, 2011, 05:47:07 pm »
I am thinking this movie will make Aaron Johnson bigger then KutcherandMoore
He is 21 years, and his wife is 23 years older. ( AND  :o :o they have mutual kids  :laugh:)

He also played John Lennon in Nowhere. Which his wife directed.




Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #5 on: December 10, 2011, 05:47:48 pm »


http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/albert-nobbs-telluride-film-review-231005



Telluride Film Review:
Albert Nobbs
12:17 PM PDT 9/3/2011 by Todd McCarthy



Glenn Close, who co-produced and co-wrote the Rodrigo Garcia-helmed project, stars as a woman
who dresses as a man in order to make a living in late 19th century Ireland.



The curious tale of a woman passing herself off as a man in late Victorian–era Dublin, Albert Nobbs generates a degree of engagement by virtue of its sheer oddness and the carefully calibrated performances of Glenn Close and Janet McTeer. But Rodrigo Garcia’s film only intermittently surmounts the limitations of the central character’s parched emotional existence and restricted horizons, and the resolutions to some principal dramatic lines seem rather too easy. Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions will be able to draw considerable attention to this longtime dream project of actor, co-producer and co-screenwriter Close, but the odds seem against its breaking through beyond specialized venues to connect with a general public.

Based on 19th century Irish writer George Moore’s short story The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs,  this incarnation of the tale has its origins in a spare stage piece created by the late Simone Benmussa that was first seen in France and was then done in London in 1978 with Susannah York in the title role. Close starred in a 1982 New York production and has ever since tried to mount a screen version and came close about a decade ago with Istvan Szabo, which accounts for the Hungarian director’s story credit on the present film.
 
Threatening to become known as the modern George Cukor for his consistent skill in eliciting superb performances from actresses, Garcia only adds to his reputation here.  Almost never seen in anything but the professional wardrobe of servant at the elegant Morrison’s Hotel, the Albert Nobbs known to fellow workers and the fancy clientele is a fastidious, polite, impeccably correct gentleman who says little and, off-hours, keeps to himself in a drab upstairs room where, unbeknownst to anyone, he keeps his earnings under the floorboards.

When the proprietress Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins) informs Nobbs that he’ll need to share his room (and bed) for a night with a painter doing some touch-ups at the hotel, Nobbs invents every excuse as to why this is impossible. But before morning, Nobbs’ secret it out and the panicked woman, whose any chance at a livelihood in impoverished 1898 Ireland will be ruined if her secret is revealed, implores the stranger not to blow her cover.
 
It isn’t long, however, before the painter, Hubert Page, exposes to Nobbs a secret of his own: He’s actually a she as well. This happens so early that it can’t legitimately be considered a spoiler –it’s no The Crying Game --and there’s no way the remainder of the story can be discussed without knowledge of the twin disguises. The revelation scene is an eye-popper, with this tall, rangy individual, who’s always dressed in bulky jackets and sweaters and has a self-rolled cigarette perennially dangling from mouth’s corner, suddenly flashing Nobbs with the sight of two mountainous breasts.

The complicity of these two cross-dressers provides what drive the narrative possesses. A much more easy-going personality than the terminally repressed Nobbs, “Hubert” not only passes as a man but is married to a woman (the wonderful Bronagh Gallagher). One of the story’s dissatisfactions is that Nobbs’ curiosity over how this came about—did her friend reveal the truth before or after the wedding?—is never answered, an issue which bears on dreams that Nobbs , inspired by Hubert, now dares to entertain.
 
With the money she’s saved, Nobbs sets her sights on opening a tobacconist’s shop. But for legitimacy’s sake she determines to marry the most attractive member of the hotel service staff, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a flirty young thing passionately involved with Joe (Aaron Johnson), a dashing but troubled lad set on taking her to America.




* * * * * * * * * * *

S  P  O  I  L  E  R  S

After the relatively dry but passably involving initial stretch, this is where the script, written by Gabriella Prekop, John Banville and Close, begins running aground. Bedding down with Joe one moment, Helen deigns to take outings with Nobbs the next, inducing her to spend hard-earned cash on lavish gifts. Helen’s leading Nobbs on makes little sense unless Helen and Joe are planning to rob Nobbs to finance their voyage, and the whole courtship charade feels wrong for multiple reasons; Nobbs knows Helen is already with Joe and, more to the point, it reveals the ultimate narrowness of Nobbs as a character. This is someone without an inner life or emotions other than the perpetuation of the façade she has created. A brief passage allows her to sketch in how she came to such a station in life, but any sense of blood and feelings coursing through her being is missing, leaving Nobbs lacking in multiple human dimensions. The denouement also takes a convenient way out rather than truly grappling with key central issues.


* * * * * * * * * * *



 
As far as it goes, Close’s characterization is an object of odd fascination; with pale and taut skin, wavy short hair, stiff posture and blank eyes shot through fear, Close entirely expresses the external life of a woman for whom maintaining appearances is truly everything. But unlike the theatrical version, which was a stylized chamber piece, the film cries out for a deeper exploration of this pinched, unrealized human being.

In this regard, Nobbs becomes eclipsed by the Hubert Page character, who has traveled much further down the road to living a full, if still compromised, life. Not only does McTeer have more to play—as a man she seems like a combination of a laconic seafarer and giant street urchin—but she goes at it with real gusto, giving a pulse to the scenes she’s in that is largely absent elsewhere, even though such fine actors as Collins and, as a resident alcoholic doctor, Brendan Gleeson do offer spirited support.  Wasikowska is, as always, a welcome presence, but even she has trouble legitimizing the behavior of her character in the late-going.
 
The opulent but intimate hotel has been warmly and immaclately  realized by production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein and Pierre-Yves Gayraud’s costumes also play a key role in helping define the characters, all captured handsomely by Michael McDonough’s camerawork.

 
Venue: Telluride Film Festival

Opens:  December (Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions)
Production: Trillium, Mockingbird Pictures, Parallel Films Productions
Sales: WestEnd Films

Cast: Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Janet McTeer, Pauline Collins, Brenda Fricker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Brendan Gleeson, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Antonia Campbell Hughes, Mark Williams, James Green, Bronagh Gallagher, John Light
Director: Rodrigo Garcia

Screenwriters: Gabriella Prekop, John Banville, Glenn Close, based on a novella by George Moore, story by Istvan Szabo
Producers: Glenn Close, Bonnie Curtis, Julie Lynn, Alan Moloney
Executive Producers: Cami Goff, John C. Goff, Sharon Harel-Cohen, Daryl Roth, David E. Shaw
Director of Photography: Michael McDonough

Production Designer: Patrizia Von Brandenstein
Costume Designer: Pierre-Yves Gayrand
Special Make-ups Designer: Matthew W. Mungle

Editor: Steven Weisberg
Music: Brian Byrne

103 minutes
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #6 on: December 10, 2011, 06:06:13 pm »





Close and McTeer




Johnson and Close



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Sophia

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #7 on: December 10, 2011, 06:22:04 pm »
all these readings about Albert Hobbs, made me start to think about this lady




 

 

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (18 March 1928 - 30 April 2002) was the founder of the Gründerzeit Museum (a museum of everyday items) in Berlin-Mahlsdorf.
 
 
Von Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Berfelde, the son of Max Berfelde and Gretchen Gaupp in Berlin-Mahlsdorf, Germany. At a very young age she felt more like a girl, and expressed more interest in the clothing and articles of little girls. In her younger years she helped a second-hand goods dealer clear out the apartments of deported Jews and sometimes kept items for herself.
 
Max Berfelde, Lothar's father, was already a member of the Nazi Party by the late 1920s and he had become a party leader in Mahlsdorf. In 1942 he forced Lothar to join the Hitler Youth. They often quarrelled, but the situation escalated in 1944 when Lothar's mother left the family during the evacuation. Max demanded Lothar choose between her parents and threatened her with a gun. Shaken by this, Lothar struck her father dead with a rolling pin while he slept. In January 1945, after several weeks in a psychiatric institution, Lothar was sentenced by a court in Berlin to four years detention as an anti-social juvenile delinquent.
 
[edit] Career
 
With the fall of the Third Reich, Lothar was released. She worked as a second-hand goods dealer and dressed in a more feminine way. "Lothar" became "Lottchen". She loved older men and became a well-known figure in the city as von Mahlsdorf. She began collecting household items, thus saving historical every-day items from bombed-out houses. She was also able to take advantage of the clearance of the households of people who left for West Germany.
 
Her collection evolved into the Gründerzeit Museum. She had become engaged in the preservation of the von Mahlsdorf estate, which was threatened with demolition, and was awarded the manor house rent-free. In 1960, Von Mahlsdorf opened the museum of everyday articles from the Gründerzeit (the time of the founding of the German Empire) in the only partially reconstructed Mahlsdorf manor house. The museum became well known in cinematic, artistic and gay circles. From 1970 on, the East Berlin homosexual scene often had meetings and celebrations in the museum.
 
In 1974 the East German authorities announced that they wanted to bring the museum and its exhibits under state control. In protest von Mahlsdorf began giving away the exhibits to visitors. Thanks to the committed involvement of the actress Annekathrin Bürger and the attorney Friedrich Karl Kaul (and possibly also thanks to her enlistment as an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or Stasi collaborator) the authorities' attempt was stopped in 1976 and she was able to keep the museum.
 
In 1991 neo-Nazis attacked one of her celebrations in the museum. Several participants were hurt. At this time von Mahlsdorf announced she was considering leaving Germany. In 1992 she received the Bundesverdienstkreuz. Her decision to leave Germany meant that she guided her last visitor through the museum in 1995 and in 1997 she moved to Porla Brunn, an old spa near Hasselfors, Sweden, where she opened (with moderate success) a new museum dedicated to the turn of the 19th century. The city of Berlin bought the Gründerzeit Museum, and by 1997 it had been opened again by the "Förderverein Gutshaus Mahlsdorf e. V.".
 
Von Mahlsdorf died from heart failure during a visit to Berlin on 30 April 2002.
 
[edit] Doubtful past
 
In the 1990s questions arose about von Mahlsdorf's past. It became clear that her autobiography contained several contradictions, during both the Nazi period and the GDR period.
 
The accusation was made that her collection was largely the result of the breaking up of the households of Jews deported during the Third Reich and had grown in size from the breaking up of the households of those who had fled East Germany.
 
Moreover, she had supposedly become an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter of the Stasi on principle on November 17, 1971 and had allegedly supplied information under the code name "Park" until 1976.
 
Independently of this some people accused her of valuing the bourgeois lifestyle and dissociating herself from East Germany after the Wende, calling it a "rotes KZ" (a red concentration camp) and declaring Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski worse than Hermann Göring.
 
Biologically and economically questionable comments such as "Daß die Lesben und Schwulen keine Kinder kriegen, das ist doch ganz natürlich. Die Natur sucht sich ja auch aus, was sie gebrauchen kann, was sie sich vermehren läßt und was nicht. Und wenn wir’s mal so nehmen: Wenn die Lesben und Schwulen nun auch noch Kinder kriegen würden, dann hätten wir heute noch viel mehr Arbeitslose" ("That lesbians and gays can't have children is after all quite natural. Nature too seeks out what it can use, what can reproduce and what can't. If we look at it like that, if lesbians and gays did have children, then we'd have a lot more unemployed people today") - a remark made during a lecture on March 12, 1997 in Berlin [1] - meant that she lost friends within the gay scene as well.
 
[edit] Legacy
 
Regardless of these issues, some people still honour her memory, be it for her work as the founder of the Gründerzeit Museum, or for her public role as a transvestite and her foregrounding of the persecution of homosexuals in both the Third Reich and East Germany. The appeal for a memorial to von Mahlsdorf, organized by the "Förderverein Gutshaus Mahlsdorf e. V." and the "Interessengemeinschaft Historische Friedhöfe Berlin" was therefore a success.
 
The intention of the organizers was to erect a memorial with the inscription "Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I am my own wife) - Charlotte von Mahlsdorf - 18. März 1928 - 30. April 2002" on the first anniversary of Charlotte's death. However, von Mahlsdorf's relatives demanded the inscription be changed. As questions remained about the disposition of her estate, and the "Förderverein Gutshaus Mahlsdorf e. V." was concerned that her relatives could demand the return of her furniture, they yielded to these demands.
 
Although Charlotte von Mahlsdorf had been known almost exclusively by her "stage name" in recent years, her relatives pushed through the inscription "Lothar Berfelde, 1928 - 2002, genannt Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Dem Museumsgründer zur Erinnerung" (Lothar Berfelde, 1928 - 2002, known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. In memory of the (male) founder of the museum).
 
[edit] Ich bin meine eigene Frau
 
In 1992 German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim made a film about von Mahlsdorf called Ich bin meine eigene Frau. von Mahlsdorf appears in the film.
 
[edit] I Am My Own Wife
 
Main article: I Am My Own Wife
 
American playwright Doug Wright wrote the character play, I Am My Own Wife based on von Mahlsdorf's life from his own research of her biography. Since its initial run on- and off-Broadway the play has garnered every major theatre award including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, Drama League Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Lambda Literary Award for Drama.
 
Because the English translation of the German word Frau can be translated as "wife", or "woman", the title can be interpreted as either "I am my own woman", or "I am my own wife". Though the latter translation used by Wright more closely correlates to the word Ehefrau, the phrase, "Ich bin meine eigene Frau" is von Mahlsdorf's answer to her mother's question, "Don't you think it's time to get married?"
 
German author Peter Süß, co-author and publisher of von Mahlsdorf's book, has made another play called "Ich bin meine eigene Frau". The play had its premiere in spring 2006 at the Schauspiel Leipzig.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #8 on: December 20, 2011, 06:52:27 pm »


http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/movies/albert-nobbs-movie-review.html?adxnnl=1&src=dayp&adxnnlx=1324420284-zMH+sAPPNokHdflnha9N9w



Movie Review
Albert Nobbs
Finding a Safe Harbor in Male Identity
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: December 20, 2011



Glenn Close, left, as Albert Nobbs, and Mia Wasikowska as Helen, a flirtatious maid who
becomes the object of Albert’s wooing.



“Such a sweet little man,” remarks a guest at a shabby-genteel Dublin hotel, referring to a waiter named Albert Nobbs. One of Albert’s co-workers describes him, less kindly, as a “freak,” and there is certainly something odd about this elfin, diffident, ginger-haired fellow, who attends to his duties with fastidious care. He is not, indeed, a fellow at all, but a woman who has lived most of her life disguised as a man. And not just any woman: this self-effacing, cautious character, whose name is also the title of Rodrigo Garcia’s lively and touching new film, is played by the dazzling and infinitely resourceful Glenn Close.

Ms. Close does not exactly suppress her natural radiance to play Albert, whose practice is to hover half-invisibly at the edges of things, inscrutably observing the boisterous doings of the rest of humanity. Rather, she imparts a mysterious glow to his smallest gestures and actions, balancing nimbly on the line between comedy and pathos. On the streets of Dublin, wearing a bowler hat and a dark coat, wielding a rolled-up umbrella, Albert is a Chaplinesque figure. He walks stiffly and speaks in a low monotone, acting out a parody of masculinity that is charming, revealing and sad.

It is also effective enough to fool everyone at the hotel, a humming establishment run by Mrs. Baker, a shrewd and pretentious lady played with cooing, squawking relish by Pauline Collins. The film, based on a short story by George Moore and adapted by Ms. Close, Gabriella Prekop and the Irish novelist John Banville, entangles its protagonist in a skein of subplots, using minor characters to sketch a busy tableau of late-19th-century Ireland.

It is a place constrained by custom and defined by class hierarchy. A group of young aristocrats (led by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) floats in and out of the hotel. Most of the drama — and the comedy — takes place among the hotel workers, who include the “Harry Potter” stalwarts Brendan Gleeson (as the house doctor) and Mark Williams (as one of Albert’s fellow servers). A rough, handsome former militant named Joe (Aaron Johnson) is hired to fix the boiler and starts up an affair with Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a flirtatious maid who also becomes the object of Albert’s wooing.

Albert dares to approach Helen — asking her to “walk out” with him in the city’s parks and shopping districts — because he has encountered a kindred soul in the person of Hubert Page, a housepainter engaged by Mrs. Baker to do some sprucing up. It turns out that Hubert (Janet McTeer) is also a woman in disguise, and he becomes Albert’s mentor and model. Both of them decided to live as men to escape male violence, but they inhabit their assumed identities in very different ways. For Albert, maleness is a way of disappearing in public, a protective cloak of anonymity that guarantees safety. For Hubert, being a man is a form of self-assertion. Tall and loose-limbed, a smoker and a talker, Hubert is happy to partake of the privileges of his adopted gender, including the company of a lovely and devoted wife (Bronagh Gallagher).

“Did he tell her he was a woman before the wedding, or after?” Albert wonders about this arrangement, believing, mistakenly, that it is more of a business deal than a romantic bond. His pursuit of Helen follows along this cautious, practical track: He is saving his tips and wages in the hopes of opening a tobacco shop, and he imagines that a wife could supply him with labor and legitimacy as well as company.

Nothing is that simple, and “Albert Nobbs” explores the complications with a light and sensitive touch. Ms. McTeer’s sly, exuberant performance is a pure delight, and the counterpoint between her physical expressiveness and Ms. Close’s tightly coiled reserve is a marvel to behold. The rest of the film is a bit too decorous and tidy to count as a major revelation, but it dispenses satisfying doses of humor, pathos and surprise.

Ms. Close, who played Albert Nobbs on stage in New York almost 30 years ago, has been trying for many years to bring his story to the screen. She found an ideal director in Mr. Garcia, notable for his sympathetic view of women — as seen in “Nine Lives” and “Mother and Child” — and his ability to keep melodrama within the bounds of good taste. This last quality may count as a limitation, because it is possible to imagine a wilder, campier, more radical rendering of “Albert Nobbs.” (The Pedro Almodóvar version, for example, might be interesting).

But the sincere, sober, careful version we have is good enough, and it is in keeping with the way Ms. Close interprets the character, as a person for whom tact, formality and decency represent not the denial of feeling but its most profound and authentic expression.

“Albert Nobbs” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex and violence, more implied than shown.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline brianr

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #9 on: December 31, 2011, 12:32:57 am »
I note this movie has not yet been released in the USA so therefore it is unusual for me to see it before others on the list. I am in Sydney with family (do not know when it will be shown in NZ). We just wanted to fill in time on New Years Eve and the newspaper compared it with Downton Abbey so I thought it might be worth seeing and also Glenn Close was an attraction.  Perhaps just as well I knew nothing more or I might not have chosen it. It is very different from Downton Abbey.
Thought provoking, a bit slow in parts, Glenn Close is excellent. I can see why many say the ending was unsatisfactory but I cannot see how any other ending would have been realistic unless the movie went for another 30 minutes. My sister said it was very sad which was her only comment about Brokeback  :)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #10 on: January 28, 2012, 12:18:17 am »

http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/albert-nobbs-edelstein-2012-1/


Costume Drama
In Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close
becomes fear personified.


By David Edelstein
Published Jan 22, 2012





A s the title character in Albert Nobbs,  a woman impersonating a man in late-nineteenth-century Dublin, Glenn Close has cropped, orangey hair and a voice that rarely rises above a croak. Outdoors, she’s painfully ill at ease in an overlarge, three-piece black suit and a bowler hat. Inside the high-toned hotel and restaurant in which she lives and works as a waiter, she behaves with robotic obeisance, her lips pressed together, her searching eyes her only naturally moving parts. The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I’ve ever seen, or woman either. She’s the personification of fear—the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.
 
This hushed, almost unbearably sad film is based on a story by George Moore published in 1918, long after its events had supposedly taken place. By then, readers could look back on poor Nobbs as a martyr to a more benighted view of women, and see the story’s other major character, Hubert Page—a woman who leaves her husband and children and becomes a (male) housepainter—as a kind of working-class version of Ibsen’s Nora. Close played Nobbs in a theatrical adaptation in the early eighties, just before her star-making appearance as a militant feminist in The World According to Garp,  and has been working for the past two decades to repeat the role onscreen. The script she co-wrote with John Banville and Gabriella Prekop adds some melodramatic flourishes but sticks to Moore’s masochistic trajectory. Inspired by Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), who lives a cozy, blissful domestic existence with a dressmaker “wife” (Bronagh Gallagher), Albert dreams of opening a tobacco shop with a pert blonde housemaid, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), who’s already stepping out with the handsome boiler man (Aaron Johnson). Helen sees “Mr. Nobbs” as a ludicrous suitor but a potential source of money to escape with her man to America. Albert sees Helen as sweet salvation.

Is Albert Nobbs  a “gay” film? I don’t think Eros enters into the equation. It’s more a matter of Albert and Hubert’s finding somewhere safe in a society that treats all poor people badly but poor women worse.

The director, Rodrigo García, helped Close give a buoyant, tender performance (her least histrionic) in the final segment of his omnibus film Nine Lives,  and in Albert Nobbs he combines his gift for creating intimacy (he directed many episodes of In Treatment,  as well as the wrenching Mother and Child ) with a new attention to wide-screen bustle. The movie has no tight close-ups: Even in isolation, Albert is surrounded by people—chief among them the hotel’s mingy-minded mistress (the superb Pauline Collins)—who’d toss her into the street with the rest of the unemployed if they knew her secret. (The exception, Brendan Gleeson as a kind, drunken doctor who might have stepped out of a Chekhov play, has no idea who she is until it’s too late.) There is nowhere for Albert to be “herself,” if such a thing exists anymore. Even in her bed, she’s gnawed by fleas.

Close is very fine, at once tight and tremulous, but it’s a pity that it took so long for her and Albert to reunite. She was in her early thirties when she played the part onstage, a good age for Nobbs, who’d by then have spent two decades under wraps but could still look forward to a few decades more—and a whole new life. Thirty years on (Close is 64), her Albert is a hunched, wizened thing, a few years (if that) from being “a little old man.” It is not so much her sex as her seniority that makes her an inconceivable match for the girlish Helen, and so a fantasy that might have seemed unlikely but appealing is now obviously, thunderously delusional. At 50, McTeer is closer to seeming neither young nor old, male nor (in spite of her sprawling bosom, which she bares) female. She gives a marvelous performance, lightly ironic but above all easy, impishly at home in her present incarnation. Perhaps it’s her resemblance to Rachel Maddow that makes me see her as the movie’s beacon of potency. She looks as if she could set the whole country straight.


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #11 on: January 28, 2012, 08:47:28 am »





http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/01/albert_nobbs_glenn_close_plays_a_woman_playing_a_man_.html


What a Drag
There’s much to admire but little to love in Albert Nobbs.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Jan. 27, 2012, at 6:20 PM ET



Glenn Close and Mia Wasikowska in Albert Nobbs.


Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close), the diminutive protagonist of Rodrigo Garcia’s film of the same name, works as a waiter in a posh hotel in late 19th-century Dublin. He speaks little and, when he does, reveals still less. Outside of a cordial master/servant relationship with Dr. Holloran (Brendan Gleeson), a hard-drinking physician in residence at the hotel, the passive, blank-faced Nobbs seems to have no friendships at all. As he prepares for bed one night in his tiny, drab bedchamber, we learn the truth about this cipher of a man: Albert is in fact a woman who’s been passing as male since her hardscrabble teenage years in order to find work and avoid harassment at the hands of men.

Of course, Albert Nobbs’ true gender was never a secret to us, since the novelty of Glenn Close’s drag turn has played a key role in the movie’s advance marketing, and has now helped to garner both Close and her co-star Janet McTeer Oscar nominations. That’s not to say that Close and McTeer are undeserving; both women give outstanding performances (albeit in two completely different styles—more on that later.) But cross-dressing roles, however well-performed, do have a built-in Oscar appeal. They’re by definition big performances, even if the character in question is (like Albert Nobbs) a small, unobtrusive person.

The trick Close has to pull off here is all the more difficult given the closed-off nature of her character: She not only has to play a woman pretending to be a man, but to play a person who’s constantly pretending, who seems to have no idea, after so many years in hiding, what it would mean to live as a woman or a man. What, if anything, Albert desires, sexually or otherwise, we never really find out. Albert Nobbs is the portrait of a person with an inner life so inaccessible that even he or she no longer knows what’s going on in there. (I don’t even know whether to use the masculine or feminine pronoun in writing about the character; I’m choosing to go with “him,” if only because it seems like the hyper-discreet Albert would have wanted it that way.)

Albert does at one point try to court Helen Dawes (Mia Wasikowska), a much-younger hotel employee who’s more interested in her handsome, abusive boyfriend (Aaron Johnson). But it’s plain that Albert desires Helen more for the sake of companionship and respectability than for anything physical. Albert longs to get out of the personal-servant business, open his own tobacco shop and find himself a little missus; he hasn’t quite worked out when, how, or whether to tell said missus his lifelong secret.

Albert’s sudden commitment to settling down is inspired by his acquaintance with Hubert Page (McTeer), a workman who comes to the hotel to make some repairs and is forced by circumstance to spend one night in Albert’s bed. Hubert gets a glimpse of his roommate’s partially clothed body, and the jig is up—or not quite, as Hubert has a secret of his, or rather her, own to reveal the next day.

Outing Hubert as a woman couldn’t be said to constitute a spoiler even if the media hadn’t already briefed audiences on the movie’s paired cross-dressing performances: The reveal happens early on and is instrumental in setting the major storylines in motion. Hubert, unlike Albert, is no repressed cipher. She’s big, bold, and confident in her body, as we learn when she casually discloses her secret by flashing Albert a spectacular pair of breasts in what’s by far the movie’s funniest and sexiest moment. Hubert is legally married to a seamstress named Cathleen (Bronagh Gallagher in a small but memorable part), and they have a warm, happy life together—a revelation that leaves Albert first perplexed, then envious.

This film has been a passion project for Close since she played the lead in the 1982 Off-Broadway play The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs   (itself an adaptation of an Irish short story)—she co-wrote the script and also produced.  But her performance, while technically accomplished in every way (the Irish accent, the ramrod posture, the fey mannerisms) has a studied, fussed-over air about it. It isn’t just that the character she’s playing is laced so tightly; it’s that Close as an actress never seems to relax and disappear into the role. It’s an admirable performance but a difficult one to love.

Maybe the problem is also that, as a character, the needy, ingratiating Albert never really warms the viewer’s heart as much as he seems meant to. There’s something calculated, even maudlin, about the way Albert’s silent, wounded gaze plays on the viewer’s sympathies—it would be easier to root for him if he had more of an edge. McTeer, on the other hand, seems to be having a rip-roaring time stomping around as Hubert. The character as written may be a bit absurd—a kind of Magic Butch Lesbian who liberates everyone she meets from their sexual and economic shackles—but McTeer plays her with such wit and gusto you can’t wait till she breezes into view.

A couple of unlikely third-act denouements resolve all the major plotlines with bewildering haste, but though the end left me asking, “Wait, that’s it?,” I wasn’t too sorry the film was over. Albert Nobbs  is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It’s genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull—a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline southendmd

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Re: Glenn Close is.... Albert Nobbs....
« Reply #12 on: January 29, 2012, 09:48:32 pm »
Has anyone else seen it yet?  I did, yesterday. 

**possible spoilers**




I tried not to read most of the above reviews and such, wanting to see the film "fresh". 

Glenn Close's performance is what I would call "admirable" rather than great.  I know she had a hand in the script, and therein lies the fault, I'm afraid.  There's very little back story to explain her situation, the age thing was a little jarring, and the ending too facile.   

Janet McTeer steals the film, in my opinion.  All the articles on the film give away her character's secret--because it happens early in the film, a piss-poor excuse, and it's too bad.  We should be as surprised as Albert is. 

In an otherwise very serious film, there is one very funny moment.  It could have been simply ridiculous, but becomes poignant, if also heavy handed. 

Aaron Johnson is lovely, all rawness and ambition.  I too had seen him in "Nowhere Boy" as the young John Lennon.  I see that he is to play the Count in "Anna Karenina", out this year. 

Pauline Collins is a sentimental favorite, as I remember her from the Brit TV comedy "No, Honestly" from the 70s. 

I'm undecided about Mia Wasikowska as an actress.