Noticias

Beloved actor Michael Gambon has passed away at the age of 82, it has been confirmed. Renowned for his performances both on screen and on stage, Gambon died peacefully following an illness. “We are devastated to announce the loss of Sir Michael Gambon,” reads a statement on behalf of his wife Lady Gambon and son Fergus, released via his publicist. “Beloved husband and father, Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife Anne and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia. Michael was 82. We ask that you respect our privacy at this painful time and thank you for your messages of support and love.”

For an entire generation, Gambon was known for playing Albus Dumbledore in many of the :a[Harry Potter films]{href='https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/every-harry-potter-movie-ranked/' target='blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} – taking on the role of the Hogwarts headmaster from 2004’s :a[The Prisoner Of Azkaban]{href='https://www.

An adaptation of the book by Georges Simenon, Patrice Leconte’s new film starring Gérard Depardieu and currently being shot has arrived in the French vendor’s well-stocked line-up. The international sales division of Snd is setting a course for the 71st Berlinale's European Film Market (online 1-5 March), armed with a watertight line-up of 10 titles, which now includes a particularly interesting new work which began filming on 8 February: Maigret and The Mysterious Dead Girl by Patrice Leconte, an adaptation of the detective novel of the same name by the prolific Belgian writer Georges Simenon. This will be the 30th feature film to come courtesy of the seasoned and eclectic director, who was well-received...

The number of subscribers to BritBox has hit 500,000, the streaming service said Thursday. The platform, launched as a collaboration between BBC Studios and ITV, is designed to offer U.S. and Canadian viewers the best of recent and classic British television content.

The streaming service launched in the U.S. in March 2017 with a host of the latest British dramas and soaps, as well as classic comedy titles such as “Fawlty Towers,” “The Office,” “Gavin & Stacey” and “Absolutely Fabulous.” The service’s Canadian launch followed in February 2018.

Content and subscribers have grown rapidly, with BritBox leveraging programming including simulcast events, such as the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry last May, and new star-led programming like “Hold the Sunset,” which marked “Fawlty Towers” and Monty Python star John Cleese’s first leading role in a British sitcom in nearly 40 years. BritBox is now home to the largest collection...

Italy’s expanding Effe TV has inked a flurry of deals for high-end international dramas from players such as Entertainment One, BBC Studios, Endemol Shine and ITV Studios Global Entertainment, from which it picked up the BBC’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel “The War of the Worlds.”

All six acquired dramas are based on literary properties. The deals signal the ambition of Effe TV, a subsidiary of Italian publisher and bookseller Feltrinelli Group, “to bring top international products to Italian TV audiences,” said Riccardo Chiattelli, director of the company’s Laf channel. The channel airs on Sky Italia, the Italian unit of Comcast-owned paybox Sky.

Besides the BBC’s three-part “War of the Worlds,” which toplines Rafe Spall (“The Big Short”) and Eleanor Tomlinson (“Poldark”) and is being produced by ITV-owned Mammoth Screen, Laf has also picked up three seasons of crime drama “Cardinal,” an...

Fremantle has acquired international distribution rights to “Taken Down,” a politically minded crime series directed by David Caffrey (“Pinky Blinders”) and produced by Spiral Pictures.

Set in contemporary Ireland, the series follows an investigation launched in the aftermath of the violent death of a young Nigerian migrant who was found abandoned close to a Direct Provision Centre, where refugees wait for political asylum.

Commissioned by RTÉ Television in association with Arte France, “Taken Down” stars Aissa Maiga (“Anything for Alice”), Brian Gleeson (“Resistance”), Lynn Rafferty (“Love/Hate”). The cast is completed by Orla Fitzgerald (“The Young Offenders”) Jimmy Smallhorne (“Love/Hate”), Barry Ward (“The Fall”), Enoch Frost (“Skyfall”) and Slimane Dazi (“A Prophet”).

“‘Taken Down’ is a gripping and authentic drama which highlights the reality of living as a refugee in Ireland today,” said Rebecca Dundon, director of international acquisitions at Fremantle. The executive said the series will have “global audiences transfixed...

Prolific UK television and feature film scribe Stewart Harcourt has signed with ICM Partners for representation in all areas. This is the first concentrated effort in the U.S. for ITV’s Maigret writer Harcourt. His other TV work includes Dracula for BBC1, Treasure Island (Sky1), Hearts and Bones starring Michael Fassbender and Damien Lewis, Love and Marriage (ITV1) and last year’s praised Churchill's Secret starring Michael Gambon on Masterpiece. Harcourt has developed…...

Ealing Studios has acquired a significant stake in TV and film company GreenAcre Films and forged a new creative partnership with the company that will see Ealing Studios expand its TV division.

Having already announced earlier this year the ITV commission of Maigret for two stand-alone films starring Rowan Atkinson, Ealing Studios’ stake in GreenAcre will see them develop a TV slate for both UK and international broadcasters.

It marks the first partnership at the newly restructured Ealing Studios headed by Ben Latham-Jones.

Co-founded by Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Amanda Jenks in 2010, GreenAcre Films became a division of Wall to Wall in 2012. It will continue to co-produce its current drama slate, which includes projects for HBO, BBC and ITV.

As well as developing new TV projects, GreenAcre will also expand its feature film roster which already has a number of titles in development with the BFI.

In a joint statement, GreenAcre co-founders Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Amanda Jenks said:...

The nominees for this year’s Möet British Independent Film Awards were announced earlier this month, celebrating the best and most promising talents in the British film industry over the past year.

The ceremony itself is to be held on 9th December, and the joint directors of the awards, Johanna von Fischer and Tessa Collinson, have announced that the recipients of The Richard Harris Award and The Variety Award will be Sir Michael Gambon and Jude Law, respectively.

The Richard Harris Award is held in recognition of an outstanding contribution to British film by an actor, and very much deservedly earned by Gambon, who took over from the late Richard Harris, himself, as Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series. He will soon be seen in Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut, Quartet, starring alongside the likes of Dame Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins, and Sheridan Smith, which...

Versatile producer and director who made Prime Suspect an enduring success

Paul Marcus, who has died of cancer aged 56, was best known for his award-winning work as producer of the television series Prime Suspect. However, most of his career was devoted to directing, for theatre and cinema, as well as for TV.

The first series of the police drama Prime Suspect, written by Lynda La Plante and following Dci Jane Tennison (played by Helen Mirren) as she led her first major murder investigation, was aired by Granada TV in 1991, to wide acclaim. Marcus was asked by Granada to take over as producer on the second series. He bravely invited an unknown director, John Strickland, to oversee the drama, but his choice proved justified, with Prime Suspect 2 matching the success of the first series and receiving an International Emmy award as well as Bafta recognition.

Fired by the belief that...

French actor famed for his long-running role as Simenon's Maigret

Georges Simenon described his creation Jules Maigret, the gruff, pipe-smoking, Parisian police inspector, thus: "His build was plebeian. He was enormous and bony. Hard muscles stood out beneath his jacket… Above all, he had his very own way of planting himself in a spot… He was a solid block and everything had to break against it." Simenon could have been describing the French actor Bruno Crémer, who has died of cancer aged 80. Crémer, who played Maigret on French television in 54 episodes over 14 years (from 1991 to 2005), had hard acts to follow in Pierre Renoir, Jean Gabin and Jean Richard in France, but the role fitted him as perfectly as the hat and heavy overcoat he wore most of the time.

Maigret was the hero of 75 novels, 28 short stories, many films and endless TV series in numerous languages, including Japanese. In the two British series,...

Bruno Cremer, best known for playing Georges Simenon‘s Inspector Jules Maigret in the long-running (1991-2005) French television series Maigret, died in a Paris hospital on Saturday, Aug. 7. Cremer, who had been fighting cancer for a number of years, was 80. Cremer’s acting career spanned half a century. He began appearing in bit parts in films in the ’50s; following a slow ascent, he landed several major roles in French productions of the ’70s. Most notable among those was Claude Sautet‘s Academy Award-nominated drama A Simple Story (1979), co-starring Romy Schneider and Claude Brasseur. Cremer kept himself busy in the ’80s, but from the early ’90s on his film/TV work was almost exclusively restricted to playing the pipe-smoking Maigret.

When Maigret met Magritte.

I'm not, in seems, the first to compare Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads) to Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. It's an odd congruence—Renoir's film is a policier based on one of Georges Simenon's popular Maigret novels, and Dreyer's is a supernatural thriller based on a vampire yarn by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu—which perhaps needs a little unpacking.

The first sense of a resemblance starts early, in the odd way in which the movie moves. This was the thirties, another country far more distant than France, and they do things differently there. The rhythms are different, the camera placement is eccentric, the movement of the camera has a cumbersome quality. While Dreyer's camera has a somnambular drift of its own, Renoir's does move with a greater sense of narrative emphasis...but what he chooses...

A stray Chabrol, the next Juno and more Toni Servillo brilliance are among this year's hidden gems on the festival circuit. Hunt them down now before they're buried for ever

Home festivaling is one of the few perks of losing mobility through a back injury. What better way to cover 300+ screen events across the UK for Empire Online's Festivals & Seasons page than letting them come to you? Much festival fare falls squarely into the three-star category. But, every now and then, a disc arrives in the post containing a gem that leaves you wondering how the distributors missed it. So here's a personal selection of the festival favourites that have either failed to secure a UK release in 2009 or are not currently on the schedule for next year.

10) Let's Dance (dir. Noémie Lvovsky, France)

Festivals are invariably stuffed with quirky ensemble pieces, with Laís Bodanzky's superbly choreographed The Ballroom...

PARIS -- What do hit Gallic detective series like Maigret and Alice Nevers, miniseries like the biopic on the eponymous singer Dalida and such animated features as the Oscar-nominated Les Triplettes de Belleville and Kirikou and the Sorceress have in common? They are all produced by Carrere Group or one of its subsidiaries. The independent producer-distributor has bought controlling stakes in more than a dozen production banners since it floated on the Paris stock market in 2001 and now comprises a galaxy of some 40 companies. This spate of acquisitions has helped drive up the company's revenue for 2005 to €123.5 million ($147 million), up nearly 73% from the previous year when adjusted for new accounting norms. The acquisitions have made it a top performer on the Paris stock exchange, Carrere shares having gained 38% last year, outperforming all other listed French media companies.