Last week Tehanu had the privilege of spending an hour with Greg Lane, LOTR stuntman, and hearing some stories about the four years he spent working on the trilogy. Perhaps his most unforgettable role was as the “berserker orc” who sprints towards the wall of Helm’s Deep like a combination All Black and Olympic torchbearer, diving to detonate Saruman’s secret mine and blowing up the wall. But, Lane appeared in many memorable scenes. Continue reading “Greg Lane: Orc of a Thousand Faces”

Lance Owens sends along word that the lecture ‘J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life’ is now available online: A series of three lectures examining Tolkien and his imaginative experience is now becoming available online in audio and illustrated format. The lecture series runs from February 10 to March 17, 2009 at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. As the series is completed, all lectures will be made available for online listening and viewing. The second lecture is now available online. Be sure to catch the first one available here. For more information visit gnosis.org/tolkien Continue reading “‘J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life’ Lecture Part 2 Online”

Sir Ian McKellen
Sir Ian McKellen
Surprisingly for actors born within two years of each other in the neighbouring counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the 2000 blockbuster X-Men was only Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s second professional collaboration. Prior to that, they had shared a brief scene or two in the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour in 1977, but had otherwise pursued independent careers, albeit with a startlingly similar mix of high-brow and popular. Where one played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, the other played Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings. Where Stewart’s CV includes Prospero, Macbeth and Claudius, McKellen’s boasts King Lear, Richard III and Iago. And where Stewart is a sex-mad egotist writing a dire film script, McKellen is a pretentious thesp who treats every banal idea as if it were a profound revelation – that is, according to their brilliant self-parodies in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (“The rather appalling thing about that,” says McKellen with typical modesty, “is how close to me that parody is.”) Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart interview: Tramping the boards

The symphony created from the score to the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy is finally coming to Kansas City. Two performances of the “Lord of the Rings Symphony,” composed by Howard Shore, will be performed May 7 and 8 at the Music Hall, 301 W. 13th St., Kansas City Symphony general manager Andrew Birgensmith announced Thursday. Tickets will go on sale at Ticketmaster Friday. “Every year we try to squeeze in additional Pops specials,” said Birgensmith, who said the opportunity to put on this orchestral crowd-pleaser “came to us at the last minute.” ‘Lord of the Rings Symphony’ added to Pops schedule