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Exclusive: It is exactly 13 years to the day that Ralph Fiennes’ feature directorial debut Coriolanus – in which he also starred alongside Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox – world premiered to acclaim at the 2011 Berlinale.

The Oscar nominee and Bafta-winning actor has since directed Rudolf Nureyev biopic The White Crow and The Invisible Woman about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress, alongside appearing in another 40 films including The Menu, No Time to Die, The King’s Man and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The Berlinale will support another first for Fiennes, this time via its European Film Market, as Cornerstone kicks off sales on the actor’s next directorial feature project, based on his first feature film screenplay.

Set against Fiennes’ native English county of Suffolk, the drama revolves around an eco-idealistic family, living on a farm in a beautiful natural landscape by the sea, whose fault lines are revealed when the daughter’s...

Tom Stoppard and the late Terrence McNally have won the most Tonys for a playwright taking home four each. The 85-year-old Stoppard is a strong contender to pick up his fifth Tony for his latest (and perhaps final) play “Leopoldstadt.” The acclaimed drama revolves around a wealthy Jewish family who had fled the programs in Eastern Europe and settled in Vienna. In an interview, Stoppard noted that the play “took a year to write but the gestation was much longer. Quite a lot of it is personal to me but I made it a Viennese family so that it wouldn’t seem to be about me. “ Stoppard, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, lost all four of his grandparents in the Holocaust.

“Leopoldstadt” earned six nominations on May 2 including Best Play and best director for Patrick Marber. It will be vying for the top prize against Jordon E. Cooper’s...

When Netflix suggested I might like to preside over a conversation between Sophia Loren and Frank Langella, two titans of the screen and stage, it felt churlish to turn the opportunity down. They both appear in films handled by the streamer this year; Loren makes her return to screens after more than a decade away in The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, and Frank Langella delivers a blistering turn as Judge Julius Hoffman in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.

And what to say about two of the most accomplished actors of their generation that hasn’t been better spoken by the many decades of extraordinary work both of them have authored?

Frank Langella, of course, made his name in the theater, where he has won no fewer than four Tony Awards for performances in plays by Peter Morgan, Florian Zeller, Edward Albee and Ivan Turgenev.

Twenty years ago, Jennifer Garner thought her career couldn’t get better. She’d survived nine months of sleeping in a kitchen in Manhattan and eating spaghetti with butter while understudying for an Ivan Turgenev play on Broadway, scored a few walk-on parts on TV, and landed the lead in a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in which she played a 19th century orphan.

“Making a couple hundred dollars a week to pay for my apartment, I really thought that was as good as it was going to get,” laughs Garner on an afternoon in Los Angeles. “I was completely and totally thrilled with that.”

Her Hallmark director, Christopher Cain, invited her to fly out to Malibu and stay with him and his wife, Sharon. The rental car company ran out of cheap sedans, so they handed her the keys to a convertible. One day, she drove around, got lost,...

Russian actress and director Vera Glagoleva has died at a German clinic where she was being treated for cancer. She was 61.

Her death was announced late Wednesday by family and friends in Russia in a number of messages on social media platforms.

Natalia Ivanova, who produced Glagoleva's final film in 2014, Two Women, a 19th-century period piece based on Ivan Turgenev's play A Month in the Country that starred Ralph Fiennes, wrote on Facebook that Glagoleva was not only a "favorite actress" and director but also a "guardian angel, friend and accomplice."

Ivanova, who produces through her Moscow-based company...

This charmingly lugubrious adaptation of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country stars Fiennes as a cerebral man who has fallen for a married woman

Characters drift like sad ghosts across the screen in this highly conventional, muted adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s 1872 stage play A Month in the Country. It takes time to grow on you, but for me, there is a demure watchability. Ralph Fiennes has mastered Russian dialogue for the leading role, one of wan and fastidious melancholy – the kind of performance, in fact, with which he used to be identified, before recent comic flourishes in A Bigger Splash and The Grand Budapest Hotel. The drama is soapishly full of the inter-generational romantic intrigue you expect from Turgenev. Fiennes is Mikhail, a gentle, cerebral man who has fallen hopelessly for a married woman: Natalya (Anna Astrakhantseva), who has in turn conceived a secret passion for Alexei (Nikita Volkov...

Roskino revealed the project, amongst others, at a Marche presentation today.

A host of new Russian projects in all kinds of different genres were announced in Cannes at a special presentation organised by Roskino.

Vera Glagoleva [pictured], director of Ralph Fiennes-starrer, Two Women, introduced her new project A Friend From Afar. Produced by Natalia Ivanova, this is the story of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s fatal affair with a French opera star seen through the eyes of his illegitimate daughter.

Audiences were also given their first look at The Other Cheek from producers Anastasia Perova, Vincent Cespedes, and Julia Lukashuk. The film focuses on a former figure-skater turned sports reporter plunged into the heavy-hitting world of boxing.

Producer Ilya Stewart presented Blood On The Dancefloor, a futuristic Hunger Games-style project set in a Europe recovering from a global war which has lapsed into a militant, misogynist Puritanism. Stewart confirmed the casting of three young Russian stars in leading...

Classic Stage Company, under the leadership of Artistic Director Brian Kulick, Managing Director Jeff Griffin and Executive Director Greg Reiner, announced today that its production of Ivan Turgenev's A Month In The Country, starring Peter Dinklage and Taylor Schilling, will extend through Saturday, February 28 at Csc 136 East 13th Street. The production had been schedules to close February 22. Directed by Erica Schmidt, the cast also includes Peter Appel, Ian Etheridge, Anthony Edwards, Mike Faist, Elizabeth Franz, James Joseph O'Neil, Elizabeth Ramos, Thomas Jay Ryan, Annabella Sciorra, Frank Van Putten, Megan West and Kate Wetherhead.

It’s said that Chekhov was always trying to get the Moscow Art Theater to produce Ivan Turgenev’s neglected classic A Month in the Country instead of his own new plays. Was this homage, self-deprecation, or payment of a debt? So much of what we find great in Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and the rest of the holy canon finds its origins in the earlier work. It’s uncanny, really: A Month in the Country, completed in 1850, already contemplates, as Chekhov would a generation later, the collapse of Russia’s idle aristocracy amid new money and peasant awakening. It pioneers a form of comedy we now call Chekhovian, in which no one is happy. It even investigates the intersection of those two ideas. And yet Chekhov lifted more than just Turgenev’s genre and themes. Broad swaths of plot are appropriated, whole casts of archetypes redeployed.

Classic Stage Company welcomes Emmy Award-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Anthony Edwards 'ER', Annabella Sciorra 'The Sopranos' and Tony Award-winner Elizabeth Franz Death of A Salesman, Brighton Beach Memoirs, alongside Peter Dinklage Tyrion Lannister on HBO's Game of Thrones and Taylor Schilling Piper Chapman on Netflix's Orange Is The New Black in Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country, opening at Csc 136 East 13th Street tonight, January 29, for a limited engagement through Sunday, February 22.

Emmy nominees Peter Dinklage and Taylor Schilling are heading to the stage together. The prestige TV dream-team will star in Ivan Turgenev's 19th-century comedy of manners A Month in the Country, starring Schilling as a bored Russian wife named Natalya who falls in love with her son's tutor, much to the annoyance of her unrequited admirer Rakitin (Dinklage). Dinklage's wife, Erica Schmidt, is directing the play, which will run for a month in early 2015 at the East Village's Classic Stage Company. And then it's straight back to TV, right, guys? Promise?...

Ahh, just what we’ve all been waiting for: Tyrion Lannister and Piper Chapman on stage together! It sounds like a TV lover’s dream mash-up to have Emmy darlings/hopefuls Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) and Taylor Schilling (Orange Is the New Black) matched together, but dream no more: The duo will topline the Classic Stage Company revival of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, beginning previews in January 2015.

The play—part of an already starry Csc 2014/15 season that also includes Peter Sarsgaard in Hamlet and Chris Noth in Doctor Faustus—concerns a young country wife named...

It's a long way from the bloody battlefields and treacherous medieval courts of Game of Thrones, and from the badass women's prison corridors of Orange Is the New Black. But two stars of those television hits, Peter Dinklage and Taylor Schilling, will spend time together on a quiet Russian estate in A Month in the Country. The Ivan Turgenev comedy of manners, first performed in 1872, will be produced off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company, directed by Dinklage's wife, Erica Schmidt. The play begins performances Jan. 9 at the East Village venue, in a limited engagement scheduled through Feb. 15.

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New films from Krzysztof Zanussi and Ralph Fiennes to also world premiere at Window To Europe Film Festival.

New films by Gérard Depardieu, Krzysztof Zanussi and Ralph Fiennes will have their world premieres at the 22nd edition of the Window To Europe Film Festival (Aug 8-15) in the Russian town of Vyborg situated close to the border with Finland.

French director Philippe Martinez’s tale of redemption and revenge Viktor, which stars Depardieu, Elizabeth Hurley and Eli Danker, will open a competition section dedicated to films co-produced with Russia.

Viktor, which was shot in Chechnya and Moscow last summer and is being handled internationally by UK-based sales agent Saradan Media, will be released by Paradise in Russian cinemas on September 4.

Co-production competition

Other co-productions selected include Zanussi’s Foreign Body, produced by his own company Studio Filmowe Tor with Italy’s Revolver Film and Russia’s Ineureka and Bella Vostok Ltd; Uzbek director Dilmurod Masaidov’s thriller...

The Russian Cinema Fund, with backing from the Russian Ministry of Culture, presented 18 new Russian productions at a Cannes Market showcase yesterday.

The presentations were grouped into three sections: animations currently in production, completed features and works-in-progresss.

Highlights included hit animation sequel The Snow Queen 2 (already selling well for Wizart); Wizart’s new animation property Sheep and Wolves; Ralph Fiennes starrer Two Women (sold by Rezo) [pictured]; the English-language thriller Bathory; and Orlean from The Horde director Andrey Proshkin.

The films presented were:

Animation

The Snow Queen 2

Sold by Vizart, this 3D production from Melnitsa Animation will be delivered by the end of 2014. The first film was a hit released in several dozen international territories.

The Magic Tower

A 2D animated historical fantasy from Masterfilm, about a man with magical powers who realises that friendship is better than sorcery. Delivery set for November 2014.

Sheep and Wolves

To be delivered in spring or autumn 2015 by director Andrey...

The Russian Cinema Fund, with backing from the Russian Ministry of Culture, presented 18 new Russian productions at a Cannes Market showcase yesterday.

The presentations were grouped into three sections: animations currently in production, completed features and works-in-progresss.

Highlights included hit animation sequel The Snow Queen 2 (already selling well for Wizart); Wizart’s new animation property Sheep and Wolves; Ralph Fiennes starrer Two Women (sold by Rezo) [pictured]; the English-language thriller Bathory; and Orlean from The Horde director Andrey Proshkin.

The films presented were:

Animation

The Snow Queen 2

Sold by Vizart, this 3D production from Melnitsa Animation will be delivered by the end of 2014. The first film was a hit released in several dozen international territories.

The Magic Tower

A 2D animated historical fantasy from Masterfilm, about a man with magical powers who realises that friendship is better than sorcery. Delivery set for November 2014.

Sheep and Wolves

To be delivered in spring or autumn 2015 by director Andrey...

The AP is reporting that Austrian-born actor Maximilian Schell, a fugitive from Adolf Hitler who became a Hollywood favorite and won an Oscar for his role as a defense attorney in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” has died. He was 83.

Schell’s agent, Patricia Baumbauer, said Saturday he died overnight at a hospital in the Austrian city of Innsbruck following a “sudden illness.”

It was only his second Hollywood role, as defense attorney Hans Rolfe in Stanley Kramer’s classic “Judgment at Nuremberg,” that earned him wide international acclaim. Schell’s impassioned but unsuccessful defense of four Nazi judges on trial for sentencing innocent victims to death won him the 1961 Academy Award for best actor. Schell had first played Rolfe in a 1959 episode of the television program “Playhouse 90.”

Despite being type-cast for numerous Nazi-era films, Schell’s acting performances in the mid-1970s also won him renewed popular acclaim, earning him...

The actor, 52, on stage craft, what we can learn from children and why he loves being naked

Actors shouldn't necessarily be able to speak intelligently about what they do. That academic intellectualising of what you're up to is so alien to me. And, more than anything, I'm thick.

Simple tasks make man simple. That was Jung's philosophy, and I agree. Neuroses and psychoses come when we overanalyse. If you have to go and chop a tree down to get wood to build a fire to keep you warm, most human beings are happy doing that. I certainly am. Doing a simple activity makes you calm.

The happiest I've been was at the birth of my children, and I fluffed my lines on each occasion. At the birth of my second child I mistook the umbilical cord for a penis and called the wrong sex.

Children teach you how to love better.

The Daily Mail writes that Iain Glen Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey will star with Richard McCabe in Ivan Turgenev's Fortune's Fool at the Old Vic, beginning December 6. The play, to be directed by Lucy Bailey, hasn't been seen on the London stage since it was written 150 years ago. Glen will play Kuzovkin, a poor man living in a Russian estate.

The Guthrie Theater presents the world premiere of the bittersweet romance The Primrose Path by Crispin Whittell based upon the novel Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev. The production will be directed by Roger Rees and will feature actors Kyle Fabel Broadway The Farnsworth Invention Off-Broadway A Free Man of Color as Theodore Lavretsky, Suzy Kohane Acadia Repertory Theatre University of MinnesotaGuthrie Bfa Actor Training Program as Liza and Sally Wingert BroadwayWest End, London La Bete Guthrie Other Desert Cities, Appomattox as Maria.

The Guthrie Theater presents the world premiere of the bittersweet romance The Primrose Path by Crispin Whittell based upon the novel Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev. The production will be directed by Roger Rees and will feature actors Kyle Fabel Broadway The Farnsworth Invention Off-Broadway A Free Man of Color as Theodore Lavretsky, Suzy Kohane Acadia Repertory Theatre University of MinnesotaGuthrie Bfa Actor Training Program as Liza and Sally Wingert BroadwayWest End, London La Bete Guthrie Other Desert Cities, Appomattox as Maria.

The Guthrie Theater today announced complete casting for its world premiere of the bittersweet romance The Primrose Path by Crispin Whittell based upon the novel Home of the Gentry by Ivan Turgenev. The production will be directed by Roger Rees and will feature actors Kyle Fabel Broadway The Farnsworth Invention Off-Broadway A Free Man of Color as Theodore Lavretsky, Suzy Kohane Acadia Repertory Theatre University of MinnesotaGuthrie Bfa Actor Training Program as Liza and Sally Wingert BroadwayWest End, London La Bete Guthrie Other Desert Cities, Appomattox as Maria.

The Russian Cinema Fund is co-producing several titles with monies totalling $6.5 million, among them Ralph Fiennes' "The Two Women." The film is an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 19th century comedy play "A Month in the Country," about a woman and her-step daughter, both of whom are in love with the same man. Russia's Horosho Productions, Germany's Film Base and France's Fluid are producing. The film will shoot in Smolensk with director Vera Glagoleva at the helm, and is slated for  2014 release. Here's more from Variety on the Fund's other projects, including "Wwi," "Amphibian Man," "Crazy Regatta" and "Players." Now under control of the Ministry of Culture, the Fund's 2012 expediture included a total of $30 million in support of socially relevant film projects, including the promotion of Russian films internationally. Fiennes is also set for Wes Anderson's "Grand...

By Harvey Chartrand

Frank Langella played an aging writer in Starting Out in the Evening (2007). Who would have figured this for typecasting?

In his superb memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them (HarperCollins), Langella reveals that he is an incomparable memoirist and storyteller, recalling his encounters with scores of luminaries from the world of entertainment in a career spanning half a century. All of these luminaries are deceased and the cast of characters is listed “by order of disappearance”. Just as well, as many of the revelations are quite shocking.

Langella must be the most sociable and congenial actor on the planet, as the busyness of his social and professional lives and the breadth and depth of his friendships, romantic liaisons and acquaintances are very impressive indeed. He met Marilyn Monroe in 1953. She stepped out of a limousine and said “hi” to the adolescent from Bayonne,...

The Two Women

Ralph Fiennes will star in Vera Glagoleva's 19th century costume drama adaptation of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev's "The Two Women" for Film Base Berlin, Horosho Production and Producer Center. [Source: Deadline]

A Fall From Grace

Tim Roth is set to star in Jennifer Lynch's "A Fall From Grace" which will shoot this summer in St. Louis.

Roth is to play a homicide detective on the trail of a serial killer. Eric Wilkinson penned the screenplay and will produce with David Michaels. [Source: The Hollywood Reporter]

Zero Dark Thirty

Indie film darling Mark Duplass is set to play a key supporting role in Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's film based on the hunt for Osama bin Laden at Annapurna Pictures.

The actor joins a cast that includes Joel Edgerton, Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Nash Edgerton, Harold Perrineau Jr. and Frank Grillo.

You’ll have to excuse this — for myself, something about it feels a little embarrassing — but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. Deadline reports that Ralph Fiennes will be leading The Two Women, a Russia-set period piece based on the work of 19th-century author Ivan Turgenev that Vera Glagoleva will be directing. (No, it’s not a prequel to Robert Altman‘s 1977 classic.)

What’s odd, then, is that some basic searching around brings no evidence that Turgenev produced any work titled The Two Women, nor can I find any solid information pertaining to what may actually come. Film Base Berlin are moving forward with the project — whatever it may be — and, thanks to Fiennes, we’ll be paying attention as things start to develop.

Deadline has some other, more definitive news, saying that rapper T.I. is the next actor to climb on Identity Thief.

Aside from the superb films he co-directs with his brother Jay, like "Baghead," "Cyrus" and "Jeff Who Lives At Home," we've been seeing more and more of Mark Duplass as an actor recently. The writer/director/star appears in cult comedy series "The League," and has recently cropped up in indie festival favorites like "Your Sister's Sister" and "Safety Not Guaranteed," as well as in a role in Lawrence Kasdan's "Darling Companion." But it looks like the actor's just taken his first major studio role, in a film that's one of our most anticipated of the year.

Despite Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" (her film about the hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden) having been filming for quite some time now, it's still adding cast members, and the latest on board, according to Deadline, is Duplass, who'll take a 'key supporting role.' 'Zero' is very different from anything the actor's done before,...

Aside from the superb films he co-directs with his brother Jay, like "Baghead," "Cyrus" and "Jeff Who Lives At Home," we've been seeing more and more of Mark Duplass as an actor recently. The writer/director/star appears in cult comedy series "The League," and has recently cropped up in indie festival favorites like "Your Sister's Sister" and "Safety Not Guaranteed," as well as in a role in Lawrence Kasdan's "Darling Companion." But it looks like the actor's just taken his first major studio role, in a film that's one of our most anticipated of the year.

Despite Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" (her film about the hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden) having been filming for quite some time now, it's still adding cast members, and the latest on board, according to Deadline, is Duplass, who'll take a 'key supporting role.' 'Zero' is very different from anything the actor's done before,...

Ralph Fiennes is in talks to star in an adaptation of Russian author Ivan Turgenev’s 1872 play "A Month In The Country" for Horosho Production reports Screen Daily.

Despite the play's age, this would mark its first adaptation for the cinema. Fiennes has met with producer Natalia Ivanova and discussed the possibility of him playing Rakitin, the devoted, but resentful admirer of a rich landowner’s wife.

Fiennes has apparently said that he would even be prepared to learn Russian for the part. Fiennes previously starred in another cinematic adaptation of a Russian classic - Martha Fiennes’ 1999 film "Onegin" which was based on Alexander Pushkin’s epic verse novel.

American director best known for Bonnie and Clyde, he focused on disillusioned outsiders

Arthur Penn, who has died aged 88, was one of the major figures of Us television, stage and film in the 1960s and 70s when the three disciplines actively encouraged experimentation, innovation and challenging subject matter. "I think the 1960s generation was a state of mind," he said, "and it's really the one I've been in since I was born." He will be best remembered for Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a complex and lyrical study of violent outsiders whose lives became the stuff of myth.

The film, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and based on the exploits of the bank-robbing Barrow Gang in the 1930s, became a cause celebre. It was praised and attacked for its distortion, bad taste and glorification of violence in equal measure. Newsweek's critic, Joseph Morgenstern, retracted his initial view of the film's violence,...

From David Bowie's son, who rejected his name, to Cameron Douglas, offspring of Michael Douglas, who was jailed for drug dealing last week, the children of stars clearly struggle to forge their own identity

Like any father witnessing the jailing of his son, Michael Douglas looked grim and ashen-faced last week in Manhattan.

Sitting in the courtroom in which his son, actor and DJ Cameron Douglas, was awaiting sentencing for dealing drugs, the Hollywood star listened to Judge Richard Berman pronouncing a harsh judgment. "Get beyond and get over that idea … that Cameron Douglas is a victim," Berman said.

Yet that was the argument that the Douglas clan – Michael, grandfather Kirk and Cameron's mother, Diandra – had put forward in letters explaining Douglas's problems in terms of his dysfunctional childhood. Cameron, it was claimed, was suffering the fallout from an age-old struggle: the battle of the son growing up with a powerful,...

Frank Langella won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Richard Nixon in the play Frost/Nixon, but he prefers his performance in the film version. "It's less theatrical, more internal, and more tragic than on stage," he says. "The comedy elements have been played down." He credits director Ron Howard for helping him make the transition. "Ron is an actor-oriented, not concept-oriented, director," Langella says. "He spent hours with me trying to understand the man's emotions, his highs and lows. Ron is relentless, observing you down to the flutter of an eyelash. There were a lot of takes. The major challenge was endurance and concentration and being able to give Ron what he needed in 14-hour days." Langella captures the essence of Nixon — the walk, the body language, the speech patterns — without resorting to impersonation. To prepare for the role, he studied hours of tapes of the former president,...

In Clint Eastwood's suspenseful fact-based drama Changeling, stage-trained actor Jason Butler Harner tackled what he calls the most challenging role of his career: playing Gordon Northcott, a psychotic man convicted of the murders of several young boys in New York and subsequently executed. Born in New York and raised in Virginia, Harner studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, launching his professional career in 1997. He calls theatre his "first love," happily proclaiming that he has done at least four to five plays per year since his graduation. Back Stage: Has the majority of your acting been on the stage?Jason Butler Harner: Yes. Changeling is essentially my film debut. I mean I've done small parts in The Good Shepherd and Next, but this is a real role. Except for appearing in The Cherry Orchard [at the Mark Taper Forum in 2006], this was the first time I...