Benedict Cumberbatch, backstage at the Old Vic Theatre, London, November 14, 2010. Photographed by Simon Annand before performing in The Children’s Monologues for Dramatic Need.

For those of you who managed to grab a copy of The Sunday Times this weekend you would have seen this image across a full-page spread in the Middle of the Sunday Times Magazine. The pictures were taken backstage at the Old Vic in London as the 17 actors performing in the Children’s Monologues waited to rehearse their individual pieces on stage with director Danny Boyle.

Each Monologue was adapted by professional playwrights from over 300 South African and Rwandan children’s testimonies collected by Dramatic Need. The actors had seen their individual monologue but had not read any of the original children’s stories. Some of these testimonies, written in childish writing on scraps of paper, are absolutely harrowing and make for very difficult reading. They contain terrible things, burdens that should never be carried by children. These actors where photographed before (as themselves, not in character) and then directly after reading the child’s testimony that inspired their monologue, so that an instant reaction was captured. These actors are not acting, they are just feeling what any human being would upon reading what these children have been through. As the Times put it: shaken up.

Check in later in the week as we put more ‘before and after’ shots on the DN blog.

@темы: фото, Benedict Cumberbatch

08 июня 2014 г. Бенедикт наблюдал за финальнм матчем мужского турнира Роланд Гаррос.




LACOSTE UK‏@LACOSTE_UK
Benedict Cumberbatch arriving in the @Lacoste Village @RolandGarros today! Looking very elegant in his #L1212 polo! pic.twitter.com/OT8XhAUMdk


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@темы: фото, Benedict Cumberbatch, Roland Garros

@темы: диетическое

@темы: диетическое

31 мая - второй день пребывания Бенедикта на литературном фестивале в Хее.
Программа дня - "Letters Live" с друзьями.
Среди друзей были Луиза Брили и Джеймс Роудес.


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Бенедикт прочёл 6 писем: Игги Попа, Курта Воннегута и 4-ре письма Крисси к Бесси (вместе с лу Брили), Ричарда Авандона


Если что - все письма можно посомтреть здесь.

Письмо Игги Попа поклоннице.

Hang on, my love, and grow big and strong

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dear laurence,

thankyou for your gorgeous and charming letter, you brighten up my dim life. i read the whole fucking thing, dear. of course, i'd love to see you in your black dress and your white socks too. but most of all i want to see you take a deep breath and do whatever you must to survive and find something to be that you can love. you're obviously a bright fucking chick, w/ a big heart too and i want to wish you a (belated) HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY 21st b'day and happy spirit. i was very miserable and fighting hard on my 21st b'day, too. people booed me on the stage, and i was staying in someone else's house and i was scared. it's been a long road since then, but pressure never ends in this life. 'perforation problems' by the way means to me also the holes that will always exist in any story we try to make of our lives. so hang on, my love, and grow big and strong and take your hits and keep going.

all my love to a really beautiful girl. that's you laurence.

iggy pop



2 письмо Криса Баркера к Блесси Мун (1944г. и 1945 г.)



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Dear Bessie,
Yesterday I got your letter card dated the 3rd of April. There was one from deb and another one from Mum, and of course, I had to read these first. And I could read yours only once, and then had to put it in my pocket, while my poor old head tried to cope with its content as far as I could remember. You have come at me with such terrific rush of warmth, and I am so very much in need of you.
Well, I washed and made my bed, it was six o’clock before I received your letter and fidgeted around. Then I thought, ‘I must read it again before I go to sleep’, so I pushed off to the latrine where the humblest may be sure of privacy and read your words again. The comic expression ‘It shakes me’ is true in a serious sense about this deeply thrilling state of well-being that you have caused or created.After I had re-read your letter, out came the chessman, and we played one game which I won before adjourning to the canteen to gather round wireless for the news, a rite in these surroundings. Then we were collared for Bridge which we played till ten o’clock. All the time, the only thing I wanted to do was read your words, this tiny part of you, again and again.
Back in the tent, and to bed. How impossible to sleep with thought and wonder of you hot within me. As I toss and turn and wriggle and writhe I think of you, probably doing the same. Isn’t it blooming awful? I know that if I think of you, I will not sleep, yet I keep on thinking of you, and get hotter and hotter. Phew! I could do with a couple of ice-blocks around me.
Finally to sleep. Up in the morning, my first thoughts, of your nearness and your distance from me, and the hope that I can race off this first six pages, to post this afternoon. Unfortunately there is no likelihood of my early return. I must be another year; I may be another three or four. Relax, my girl, or you’ll be a physical wreck in no time. Regard me as what you will, but don’t altogether forget circumstance, distance, environment. I do so joyfully, happily, eagerly, but you must have more sense.
In the film tonight there was a joke that the state of being in love was the happiest way of being miserable. So be miserable happily, don’t look over your shoulder too much, enjoy what is, so far as you can, and remember the old, wise tag ‘Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday’. I am a born worrier myself, but feel I could be all that you wanted me to be. Probably more important, I know that you are what I want, not in any limited sense, but in all. I want to confide in you. I want to creep into you. I want to protect you. That I am not capable is unimportant, what is significant is that you should think I am. My hands cannot caress you; my words strive hard to tell you all the things I dare. You spoke of yourself being ‘guilty of slobbering’ – it’s no crime. I am proud of it. If your incoherent babbling mean what mine do, it’s jolly good. Don’t worry about being bounced out of favor, and try to grow out of this engulfed, nothing belongs to oneself feeling. Regard me as a promise rather than a threat, and pick holes in me where you can, so that I seem less regal. Remember we are both in this together, and that it has somehow occurred undesignedly, unrehearsed, because we had it in us. Yes, I wish that I was with you. But life is hard – wishing won’t make it easy. My thoughts are with you far too often for my physical serenity and my mental equilibrium. During the day I simply lap you up and cause trouble at night. Engulfed describes my state, too, a rather floundering, uncertain one.
I wonder what you look like. Don’t have a special photograph taken. I know you haven’t a bus-back face but I have never looked at you as now I would. I wonder how many times I have seen you, and how many we have been alone. Now my foolish pulse races at the thought that you even have a figure. I want, very much, to touch you, to feel you, to see you as you naturally are, to hear you. I want to sleep and awaken with you. I want to live with you. I want to be strong and I want to be weak with you. I want you.
I want my letters to be of interest, so please let me know how and what you want me to write. On occasions, you’ll understand, I may not be in a position to write.
Let me know if you think I am mad. When my signature dries I am going to kiss it. If you do the same, that will be a complete unhygienic circuit.
Yours,
Chris



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My dearest one,
I have just heard the news that all the Army men captured by ELAS are to return to their homes. Because of the shipping situation we may not commence to go before the end of February, but can probably count on being in England sometime in March. It may be sooner. I have only just left our Major giving the signal as received from Alexander. It has made me very warm inside. It is terrific, wonderful, shattering. I don’t know what to say, and I cannot think. The delay is nothing, the decision is everything. Now I am confirming in my head the little decisions I have made when contemplating just the possibility. I must spend the first days at home, I must see Deb and her mother. I must consider giving party somewhere. Above all, I must be with you. I must warm you, surround you, love you and be kind to you. Tell me anything that is in your mind, write tons and tons and tons, and plan our time. I would prefer not to get married, but want you to agree on the point. In the battle, I was afraid. For you. For my mother. For myself. Wait we must, my love and my darling. Let us meet, let us be, let us know, but do not let us, now, make any mistakes. I am anxious, very anxious, that you should not misunderstand what I have said. Say what you think – but – please agree, and remember I was afraid, and I am still afraid.How good for us to see each other before I am completely bald! I have some fine little wisps of hair on the top of my head. It is not much good me trying to write about recent experiences now that I know that I shall be able to tell you everything myself within such short time. What I have my eye on now is the first letter from you saying that you know I am alright, and the next, saying you know I am coming to you. I must try to keep out of hospital with some of these post P.O.W. complaints. Plan a week somewhere (not Boscombe or Bournemouth) and think of being together. The glory of you. When I was captive I used to try and contact you and think hard ‘Bessie, my dearest, I am alright. Do not worry.’ I never felt that I got through, somehow. But now it is over, and you know that I am alright and going to be with you soon, to join and enjoy. Do not get very excited outwardly. I am conscious of the inner tumult, the clamour, but I am not too much outwardly joyful. Moderation is my advice. Watch the buses as you cross the street.
We are free of duties and yesterday I went to our friends in Athens, taking some of your coffee and cocoa, which they were very pleased to have. Thank you for sending it. We were embraced very kindly, kissing and so on, continental fashion.
I hope that you will not start buying any clothes (if you have the coupons left), because you think you must look nice for me. I shall be sorry if you do. Just carry on as near as possible to normal. My return at the present time allows us to make public our mutual attachment. I shall tell my family I hope to spend a week away with you somewhere during my leave. My counsel to you is to tell as few people as possible. To someone like Miss Ferguson you can politely reply to her observations that you thought it was your business, rather than hers. Try to avoid preening yourself and saying much. This is my advice, not anything but that. I hope you understand. I do not ever want it to be anything but our affair. Do not permit any intrusion.
I do not know how long leave I shall get. I could get as little as fourteen days, and I may get as much as a month. I am wondering how I shall tell you I am in England. Probably it is still quicker to send a telegram than a letter, and I hope to send you one announcing that I am on the same island. I will send another when I am actually soon to get on the London bound train, and you can ring Lee Green 0509 when you think I have arrived there. You must bear in mind that I shall be with my brother until we get home. Also, that, having been away from home for so long, my parents will want to see a lot of me. I hope that everything will work itself out without any unhappiness to anyone. I shall be in great demand from two or three points and it will be difficult to manage without offence.
It is a strange thing, but I cannot seem to get going and write very freely. All I am think about is I am going home. I am going to see her. It is a fact, a real thing, an impending event, like Shrove Tuesday, Xmas Day, or the Lord Major’s Banquet. You have to be abroad, you have to be hermetically sealed off from your intimates, from your home, to realise what a gift this going-home is.
The few letters of yours that I had on me, I burnt the day previous to our surrender, so no one but myself has read your words. In the first ten days of our captivity I did not think any soft thoughts about you; all I did was concentrate on trying to tell you I was alright. But when we had a few supplies dropped by aircraft (at great risk to themselves in the misty snowbound Greek mountain villages) and we started hoping we might get sent home upon our release, I was always wondering about you, about us. It is a pity that the winter weather will not be kind to us out of doors. But it will be nice sitting next to you in the pictures, no matter what may be on the screen. It will be grand to know that we have each other’s support and sympathy. Won’t it be wonderful to be together, really together, in the flesh, not just to know that a letter is all we can send?
I love you.
Chris




Письмо Ричарда Авендона.

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Dear Dad,

I’m putting this in a letter because phone calls have a way of disappearing in the whatever it is. I’m trying to put into words what I feel most deeply, not just about you, but about my work and the years of undefinable father and son between us. I’ve never understood why I’ve saved the best that’s in me for strangers like Stravinsky and not for my own father.

There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day when I was growing up. It was by the Bachrach studio and heavily retouched and we all used to call it “Smilin’ Jack Avedon”—it was a family joke, because it was a photograph of a man we never saw, and of a man I never knew. Years later, Bachrach did an advertisement with me—Richard Avedon, Photographer—as a subject. Their photograph of me was the same as the photograph of you. We were up on the same piano, where neither of us had ever lived.

I am trying to do something else. When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. I want your intensity to pass into me, go through the camera and become a recognition to a stranger. I love your ambition and your capacity for disappointment, and that’s still as alive in you as it has ever been.

Do you remember you tried to show me how to ride a bicycle, when I was nine years old? You had come up to New Hampshire for the weekend, I think, in the summer when we were there on vacation, and you were wearing your business suit. You were showing me how to ride a bike, and you fell and I saw your face then. I remember the expression on your face when you fell. I had my box Brownie with me, and I took the picture.

I’m not making myself clear. Do you understand?

Love, Dick


Письмо Курта Воннегута

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November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut







Бенедикт читает письмо Игги Попа.




Бенедикт читает письмо Курта Воннегута




Бенедикт читает письмо Ричарда Авендона




Бенедикт читает письмо Криса




Лу читает письмо Бесси






















Бенедикт на 16:00

@темы: видео, фото, Benedict Cumberbatch, Hay Festival

С 22 мая по 1 июня 2014 в деревушке Hay-on-Wye в Уэльссе проходил очередной литературный фестиваль Hay Festival.


Бенедикт Камбербэтч принял участие в фестивале 30 и 31 мая.

Вообще-то он был изначально заявлен на 31 мая 2014 г., но из-за большого спроса на билеты организаторы устроили второй день, 30 мая.
Бенедикт прибыл в Хей-он-Уей накануне, 29 мая, и с утра принял участие в церемонии награждения победителей "500 слов". Это конкурст рассказов в 500 слов, написанных детьми.





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Бенедикт объявляет победителя,занявшего 3 место Juliette Lea


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Бенедикт, Крис Эванс (телеведущий и ведущий церемонии) и мальчик Ноан представляет победительницу Джульет Ли


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Бенедикт читает рассказ победительницы


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Бенедикт измеряет рост победительницы ) (дело в том, что победитель получает для себя количество книг, выложенных в высоту по росту победителя. Бенедикт немного смошенничал ) )


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Послушать онлайн на BBC2
Бенедикт на 1:43:00.

Только Бенедикт.


Should-Be's




Прослушать или скачать Benedict Cumberbatch Should-Be бесплатно на Простоплеер




Прослушать или скачать 500 words Shouls-Be's бесплатно на Простоплеер

By Juliette Lea, aged 9

The crackling of the fire startled me. It was a cold winter’s morning when the snowflakes danced around you and the crocuses fluttered in the stormy wind. My grandmother smiled sadly at me again. It was the 11th of November. Her white apron was patched with mud and she still had soil beneath her fingernails. Some wet petals were stuck to her black dress. She had been to the Memorial to plant more flowers. I didn’t know what was wrong: maybe it was because she had lost a button on one of her boots.

She always said: “We have to remember those that died for us; without them, we wouldn’t be here.” But strangely, she did not say that today. There was something else bothering her. She was telling me a story about snowdrops popping out of the ground like messengers going around telling everyone that spring was back. I don’t know why she doesn’t tell me stories about winter anymore. But somehow winter seemed more real to me. I could feel the cold of winter but I could barely remember the warmth of the first summer day.

My grand-mother was still upset the next morning when she finally came out of her office. She was a historian and always spent a lot of time there amongst her books. For breakfast, she put some fig jam on my toast instead of honey. I would have liked some of the apricot jam she had described in one of her stories. When she stood up, a piece of scrunched-up paper fell from her pocket. I picked it up for her and saw a word written on it : “Should-be’s”. I asked her what the strange word meant but she just walked out of the house crumpling the paper at the bottom of her pocket.

I knew it wasn’t right. I knew she would be cross with me again but I had to find out what “Should-be’s” were and why she was so secretive this particular morning. So I crept into her office. The smell of lavender reassured me. It smelled like the handkerchief that she uses to wipe honey off my face. The office had piles of history books but they were no longer neatly put on the shelves; she had spread them on the floor and, on each of them, had crossed out the word “history” and replaced it with “fiction”.

On her desk, wide open, was a volume about the First World War; she had scored out 1918 and replaced it by 1919 on every page. In the margin with her thin handwriting I read with growing horror: “For the war did not end in 1918. My father never came back from France. We are Should-be’s; we are the souls of the ones who should have been born when the war was over and November is our only month. We have never seen the golden daffodils bloom, nor has the warmth of the sun ever tanned our skin…”

@темы: видео, фото, фестиваль, Benedict Cumberbatch, Hay Festival

@темы: диетическое

Канадское издание ici.radio-canada опубликовало несколько стиллов.

@темы: фото, Sherlock, Sherlock BBC

Самое главное на диете, особенно когда ограничения - не думать о еде. Но она повсюду и постоянно.
На работе заварили кофе - всё, тоже хочу, да ещё и с булочкой. Жру яблоко. Яблоки невкусные. Потому что дешевые и почти зеленые. От них у меня оскомина.

И анекдоты постоянно попадаются про еду и диету.

Ну, конечно, все женщины с годами полнеют… Было время, когда и я весила ……3,5 кг…

Худею.... Приготовила морковные котлеты.... Муж ржет и просит завтра сделать отбивные из укропа.

А мне сейчас даже морковных котлет нельзя, потому что жаренное.

@темы: диетическое