Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
“Jolly nice meeting you but I’m sorry, you won’t ever make a film because your face is wrongly arranged.”
Director giving Judi Dench advice after an audition in 1960, as recalled in conversation with Richard Eyre on the BBC.
Glad that she didn’t listen to the advice. In Lindsay Shapero’s Red Joan, a spy drama based on actual events, she plays Joan Stanley, accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. So a complete contrast to ‘M’.
Katherine Parkinson’s character Mary sits for her portrait in Lights Up: Sitting on BBC4 this evening. Writing the play and acting the single character who appears – we never glimpse the artist – she’s caught the awkwardness of most life class poses in the photograph in this week’s Radio Times.
After six or seven years I gave up on the weekly life class at Wakefield College because, looking back on my drawings, I preferred some of the early ones to my later efforts. The five-minute poses that the tutor used to start off the class livened things up a bit but for a pose that the model had to hold for an hour the possibilities were somewhat limited.
These days I prefer draw people on location, preferably while I’m sitting outside a coffee shop, which could be a possibility starting next week.