Susannah York's full circle

The Scotsman talks to Susannah York, who will be on stage in Edinburgh next week playing Nelly Dean in April De Angelis's adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

In a career that spans nearly 50 years and has covered stage, television and film, it's not surprising that for York, 67, there are few firsts. Appearing as Nelly Dean, the narrator of Emily Bronte's powerful and passionate story of doomed love set on the wild Yorkshire moors, York is reminded of another Bronte role she played. It was 1970 and she was starring alongside George C Scott in a film of Jane Eyre.
"I loved it," she says. "It's one of my favourite films that I've made. There was something unlikely about me playing Jane, I felt more akin to the Wuthering Heights subject, but actually I loved Jane and the thought of getting under her skin. It's a nice coming of full circle now being in one of Emily's." [...]
The passion comes from the desire to explore characters, to become other people. She may have felt that need for more than 50 years and appeared in more than 80 films but for York, this hasn't changed.
"Becoming, really feeling that you are them, becoming them," she says trying to explain what she loves about performing. "I have a sort of little mantra I suppose," she says with a slightly embarrassed laugh. "Before I go on stage I say I am Peter (when playing Peter Pan], I am Nelly Dean, I am Nelly before I go on in this play. It's about becoming. The charge always laid against actors is that they're always performing, so where are they? And yet in another way, I think it was George Bernard Shaw when he was talking about Henry Irving in a letter to Ellen Terry, who said Henry acts to escape himself, you act to become yourself. In a weird way, that's what I think I do."
• Wuthering Heights, November 4-8 at the King's Theatre. For tickets, call the box office on 0131-529 6000. A Life in Colour, 29 October at 7.00pm, The Cameo. For tickets call 0131-228 2800 (Claire Black)

The York County Coast Star has an article about bogs:

The words used to describe bogs all share a haunting quality: Peatland is a generic term applied to any wetland where the accumulation of organic matter exceeds decomposition and at least one foot of peat has accumulated. Muskegs, moors, mires, heaths and carrs are all peatlands and all conjure up gloom, horror and despair. Think about the stormy moors of "Wuthering Heights," the dark menacing moors found in "The Hound of the Baskervilles," or the creepy corpse-filled Dead Marshes (a vast network of mires) of "The Lord of the Rings."(Sue Pike)

And finally, Movie City News, inspired by High School Musical 3, makes the point that not everything for children needs to be educative: children have as much right as adults for some 'mindless' entertainment:

Is the writing in most of the kiddie-lit books on par with the Brontes or Mark Twain or Lousia May Alcott? Of course not, and it's not intended to be. (Kim Voynar)

Categories: Theatre, Wuthering Heights