By Baz Bamigboye
Published: 19:20 EST, 29 May 2014 | Updated: 05:02 EST, 30 May 2014
Sophie Okonedo will star in the next series of The Hollow Crown as the queen who curses Benedict Cumberbatch's Richard III.
The actress will play Queen Margaret in the three BBC TV films that will encapsulate Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and Richard III.
Margaret's the only character who appears in Henry VI Part 1 and is still alive at the end of Richard III.
Shakespeare's battling royals: Sophie Okonedo and Benedict Cumberbatch will meet in The Hollow Crown
As Henry VI's widow, she rails against cruel Richard's bloody actions and curses him and his offspring. She's determined to do him down because he killed her husband.
Ms Okonedo will take on the role once her run in A Raisin In The Sun ends on Broadway on June 15.
The superb production, which also features Denzel Washington, has garnered Tony nominations for Sophie and her Raisin co-stars LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Anika Noni Rose.
The Henry VI plays will be divided into two films. They, and Richard III, will be filmed from late September into early 2015.
The first series of The Hollow Crown — Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V — starred Ben Whishaw, Jeremy Irons and Tom Hiddleston and was a major hit for BBC2.
The films were the brainchild of Sam Mendes and his Neal Street Productions.
In the new series, Richard Plantagenet will be played by a young actor in the first picture.
Cumberbatch will assume the character, playing him fully grown — and evil — in the second Henry film and, of course, in Richard III. Dominic Cooke will direct all three of the new Hollow Crown dramas.
Lyndsey Turner, meanwhile, will direct Cumberbatch on stage at the Barbican in London in Hamlet from August until October next year.
AMANDA SEYFRIED IS JUST PERFECTLY NASTY IN COMIC WESTERN
Mean - and liking it: Amanda Seyfried
Amanda Seyfried said she's happy to play a 'perfect bitch' in her new film.
The actress, who stars in A Million Ways To Die In The West (which labels itself a comedy Western) along with Seth MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, and Neil Patrick Harris, plays a schoolteacher who dumps MacFarlane's character because he's too cowardly.
Despite admitting she's a 'mean girl with men sometimes', Amanda said it was 'a change for me to play a perfect bitch'.
Well, she's always perfectly polite to me!
She will work with MacFarlane again soon on Ted 2, the sequel to his box-office hit about a badly behaved bear. She has also been filming Joe Wright's Pan in and around London.
You can view a segment of my conversation with Amanda below
It's a tale of temptresses, bad daddy's girls and singing secretaries.
The musical City Of Angels, which opened on Broadway in 1989 and hit the West End four years later, is set in Forties Hollywood, in both black and white and colour.
The narrative divides between fiction and reality, with many cast members playing dual roles.
Temptresses: Rosalie Craig, left, and Samantha Barks, right, both star in Donmar Warehouse's City Of Angels
A new production running at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre from December 5 has Rosalie Craig, who won awards for her role in the National Theatre's musical The Light Princess, playing Gabby, a pulp fiction writer's super-smart wife, and Bobbi, a failed nightclub chanteuse.
More from Baz Bamigboye...
Samantha Barks, who starred in the film of Les Miserables, plays seductive Mallory, a stepdaughter straight out of the Big Sleep who's supposedly gone missing. A private eye who finds Mallory in his bed observes: 'For a missing girl, there's not a whole lot missing.'
Samantha also plays Avril, a movie starlet.
Josie Rourke, the Donmar's artistic chief, will direct City Of Angels, her first musical. She is obsessed with movies of the era such as His Girl Friday and The Maltese Falcon, and said Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, Celeste Holm and Lana Turner were actresses she admires from the golden age.
Josie said it was fascinating watching Russell speak 90 words a second in Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday, noting that women then used their wits and sexuality to get out of trouble.
'If a woman has a crisis now, it's "Lets open the Maltesers",' she joked.
I observed that the type of women in those hardboiled films of the Forties were called 'broads' — and were proud of it. Josie laughed: 'When you say "a broad" to a woman today, she probably thinks you want to take her on holiday.'
City Of Angels also stars Rosalie's fiance Hadley Fraser. An A-list creative team has been assembled for the show
by Cy Coleman, Larry Gelbart and David Zippel.
Stephen Mear will choreograph — and I hope there's more dance than there was in the original production — Robert
Jones will design sets and costumes, Howard Harrison's on lighting and the wicked Gareth Valentine has signed on as musical director.
From Voice reject to a striking role in the movies
Bronwen Lewis made it to one audition of the BBC's The Voice, but no further.
It was the best thing that ever happened to her.
Her appearance in front of Voice judge Tom Jones was enough to grab the attention of film-makers behind the movie Pride, which emerged as one of the hits of the Cannes Film Festival.
Songbird: Bronwen Lewis in Pride, which emerged as one of the hits of the Cannes Film Festival
WATCH OUT FOR...
█ Rosamund Pike, David Tennant and Billy Connolly, who star in What We Did On Our Holiday, a beautifully observed comedy-drama from Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the creators of Outnumbered.
It's heart-warming, joyous and quite courageous, in that it works purely through character development. You grow to like the people involved — and the film doesn't depend on special effects, or entire towns being destroyed. And there's only one loo joke.
I stand corrected. There are special effects, in the shape of children played by Harriet Turnbull, Bobby Smallbridge and Emilia Jones.
Rosamund and David play their parents, and all five go on a holiday to Scotland, where grandfather Connolly is about to celebrate his 70th birthday.
All the performances are spot on. Connolly is at the top of his game, underplaying sublimely and giving the most heartfelt performance of his career. Pike and Tennant are like two cats in a sack, going at each other whenever they can, but they don't overdo it. Their timing is flawless.
What We Did On Our Holiday is not opening till September 26, which I thought was daft until I remembered that, before then, the nation trots off on its own summer hols. But it's worth waiting for: a tiny, well-cut gem. The rarest kind.
█ Caroline Langrishe, Nabil Elouahabi, Sara Bahadori and Selva Rasalingam, who lead Rashid Razaq's new play The Nightmares Of Carlos Fuentes into the Arcola Theatre, East London, from July 23. Razaq's play is about an Iraqi refugee in London who discovers there's just as much persecution in the UK as there is in Baghdad, if you don't answer your citizen papers correctly.
Nicolas Kent directs the drama, which is based on a short story by Hassan Blasim.
Pride's director Matthew Warchus, screen writer Stephen Beresford and Sherlock star Andrew Scott — who has a role in the movie, about how a group of lesbians and gay men raised money for miners during the year-long strike in 1984 — saw Bronwen sing a version of Sting's Fields Of Gold in her native Welsh tongue on the talent show.
Despite failing to be picked for any of the show's teams, Brownen was offered an important part in the film, leading a moving rendition of Bread And Roses, which she sings in English.
In Pride, the camera pans to Bronwen, sitting in a packed welfare hall in Onllwyn, Neath, where the colliery once thrived.
Bronwen sings the opening verse of Bread And Roses and, ever so slowly, other women join her. The men chime in later.
Warchus had been shown footage of Bronwen's performance on The Voice.
'In an instant, I knew I wanted her in the film,' Warchus, who also directed the West End and Broadway hits Art and Matilda, told me. 'Her voice has a beautiful quality, and I didn't know this at the time, but she's from the very area where the film's set.
'You could search for a year and not find someone so suited to sing Bread And Roses in Onllwyn.'
At one of the screenings that I attended in the Directors' Fortnight section in Cannes, there was applause as the song reached its rousing climax.
Bronwen joked that she didn't need a session with a dialect coach before filming her scenes. 'I didn't audition, and I didn't need voice lessons for the accent, because I was born just up the road,' she said.
Her parents didn't work in the coal industry, but her family were involved in helping at the miners' social hall during the dispute. 'My grandmother helped with the catering, and they all remember meeting members of LGSM (Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners).
Bronwen was born ten years after the strike started, so she missed the events Pride is based on. But she said she learned a lot about what happened during the making of the film.
She appears in the background in several scenes, but the Bread And Roses number is her 'star' moment.
Pride features a sublime ensemble including Dominic West, George MacKay, Ben Schnetzer, Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, Jessica Gunning, Paddy Considine, Joseph Gilgun, Faye Marsay, Freddie Fox and scene-stealing Menna Trussler.
It's an indescribably wonderful movie about solidarity, friendship and tolerance — values almost extinct now — which is why it struck such a chord.
The film should be a huge crowd-pleasing hit for Pathe, BBC Films and the BFI when it's released on September 12.
Bronwen has meanwhile been signed up by manager Kim Revie and is working on an EP of her own compositions in English with a smattering of Welsh, to be released in the autumn.
█ Paulette Randall, one of the artistic architects of the brilliant London Olympics opening ceremony, will direct a welcome revival of Mustapha Matura's Play Mas at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, next March.
The play, which won Matura an Evening Standard young playwright award when it ran at the Royal Court in 1974, is set against the backdrop of independence in Trinidad and tells how its carnival became the victim of political interference.
It was picked by the Orange Tree's recently appointed artistic director Paul Miller.
SAY IT ALOUD: POP PRINCESS NADINE IS NOW A DANCE GODDESS
Aloud to dance: Nadine Coyle has been dubbed goddess Erin (translated as Mother of Ireland) in Michael Flatley's latest Lord Of The Dance iteration
Former Girls Aloud singer Nadine Coyle has been given mythological status in the new Lord Of The Dance show that hits the London Palladium in September.
Nadine has been dubbed goddess Erin (translated as Mother of Ireland) in Lord Of The Dance: Dangerous Games, which is Michael Flatley's latest iteration.
Original show Riverdance - which starred Micheal before he created Lord Of the Dance - first hit London two decades ago but played in Hammersmith, West London, never venturing into the heart of the capital's theatre-land.
One-time pop princess Coyle will be a special guest star during the eight-week run Dangerous Games will have at the Palladium from September 1.
She will join a troupe of 40 dancers including Flatley, who will be seen kicking his heels up (although his routine won't be as strenuous as it once was). Flatley has hired three young bucks to be the Lords Of The Dance, and do the high-step choreography he once excited audiences with.
I mentioned a while back that Lord Of The Dance would be one of several shows to be given a stint at the Palladium in the next couple of seasons, until a potential long-runner can be found.
Flatley will be seen discussing his entertainment philosophy in a special show on ITV on Sunday. Following its two-month Palladium gig, Dangerous Games will tour for several months before heading to Hammersmith.
Visit london-palladium.co.uk or call 0844 811 0058 for tickets, for which there are no booking fees.
Check that your ticket broker is certified before purchasing seats, because there are a lot of rip-off merchants out there.
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