Christina Hendricks is a sixties sex bomb as she accepts another role from that era

Christina Hendricks, the actress who gives the television drama Mad Men various its heat, is growing fonder of the Sixties.

Hendricks, who plays Joan Holloway, the no-nonsense head of office operations within the Sixties-set TV show, is in talks to seem in Sally Potter’s anti-nuclear movie, Bomb, that is also based in that decade.

The picture makes a speciality of two teenage rebels, played by Elle Fanning and Alice Englart, who get entangled within the Ban the Bomb movement and the sexual revolution.

Potter and producer Christopher Sheppard plan to shoot the film in February in London and at the South-East coast.

Alessandro Nivola has also been cast in Bomb, and Annette Bening is thinking about a component within the film.

Hendricks’s Jessica Rabbit meets Marilyn Monroe hour-glass figure caught audiences’ attention when Mad Men took off.

However,
she has done lots of other good work — as anyone who saw her
gangster’s moll role opposite Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn’s
terrific dark thriller, Drive, will attest.

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Dagenham musical strikes the suitable note

Everybody
out! The tale of the girls workers who went on strike for equal pay at
Ford’s Dagenham plant is being changed into a West End musical.

The
show would be according to the movie Made In Dagenham, which starred Sally
Hawkins as a machinist who becomes an unlikely workers’ heroine.

The
film boasted an array of top British actresses including Andrea
Riseborough, Geraldine James, Miranda Richardson, Rosamund Pike and
Jaime Winstone, with Bob Hoskins  and Daniel Mays within the leading male
roles.

But the musical wouldn’t be a straight lift. ‘One of the characters from the film might be dropped, and new ones introduced. Not the whole elements from the film can be on stage, and we’ll expand on things the film barely touched on,’ Rebecca Quigley, managing director of Stage Entertainment, explained. The corporate is producing the show with Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen — who also produced the image through their Number 9 film company.

Richard Bean, who adapted Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant Of 2 Masters and turned it into the smash hit One Man, Two Guvnors (with lots of help from Nick Hytner, Cal McCrystal, James Corden and Grant Olding) is writing the book.

Strike: The tale of the ladies workers, which featured Sally Hawkins within the feature film, is being changed into a West end musical

Action: The film boasted an array of top actresses however the show won’t be a straight rip off and a few characters should be dropped

David Arnold, who has scored several James Bond movies, is writing the score, with Richard Thomas providing the lyrics. Thomas penned librettos for the Jerry Springer and Anna Nicole operas. Joining them often is the award-winning director  Rupert Goold.

‘It’s a purely original British musical,’ Ms Quigley declared.
She noted, accurately, that there haven’t been too lots of them since Billy Elliot. When you consider it, tons of recent shows akin to Ghost, Love Never Dies or even Betty Blue Eyes have had foreign collaborators.

Bean has work to do at the book, and just a handful of numbers were written. a unique reading of some scenes was held a couple of days ago and the creative team were happy enough to progress to a rehearsed workshop of Act 1 early in February.
Then, if everyone’s happy, the show would be developed fully, a cast assembled — and a gap night scheduled for a while in 2013, counting on theatre availability.

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Daniel Radcliffe admits to having his little addictions. He used to be a two-a-day Flake man, but has managed to drop the chocoholic habit.

Then he hit the Red Bull . . . ‘I was doing a 16oz can an afternoon and wondering why I couldn’t sleep at night,’ Daniel tells me, adding that he now satisfies his caffeine needs with one coffee a day.

Chocoholic: Daniel Radcliffe once had to have two Flakes a day but he has now managed to kick the habit

He’s worried that he’ll lapse once he ends his barn-storming run in the Broadway musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying on January 1. After that, he’ll travel to promote the spine-tingling Gothic ghost movie The Woman In Black (pictured), before starting two new movies.

‘On film sets, the joke is there are two options: you’ll either eat or smoke,’ he says. ‘I hope not to balloon.’

Daniel confesses to one other addiction — campaigning for his Harry Potter co-star (and good friend) Alan Rickman to get an Oscar nomination for his superb performance as Severus Snape in Deathly Hallows II.
It would be great for the Potter series to be recognised by the Academy Of Motion Picture  Arts and Sciences.
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Meet Tom, the new Errol Flynn

Steven Spielberg has dubbed actor Tom Hiddleston ‘the new Errol Flynn’. He meant Flynn’s heroic swashbuckling acting in classic silver-screen pictures such as Captain Blood and The Adventures Of Robin Hood — not his legendary swordsmanship, off screen, with the ladies.

And Hiddleston, 30, certainly cuts a dash as Captain Nicholls, the World War I British cavalry officer who purchases Joey, the red bay, and takes him to fight the Hun in Spielberg’s glorious big-screen version of War Horse, which opens here on January 13.

Compliment: Director Steven Spielberg has dubbed Tom Hiddleston, pictured right as Captain Nicholls in War Horse, the new Errol Flynn

When we meet at Soho House in London, heads turn as Hiddleston walks by. Spielberg told me that when the British actor visited his West Coast office to discuss the role, all the girls were swooning over him. ‘They went all googly-eyed and I said: “That’s the next Errol Flynn!”.
‘He’s got honest charm,’ he added. ‘It’s not false. He’s very sincere. He’s the real deal.’

Hiddleston’s old-fashioned swagger is totally in keeping with War Horse’s nods to great movies from the past: Lawrence Of Arabia; Gone With The Wind; the films of John Ford and Howard Hawkes. Hiddleston — a Cambridge graduate — has about 15 minutes of screen-time, as one of  several people who take Joey’s reins for a while.

‘Captain Nicholls is not a soldier — he’s an educated gentleman, and he’s in the Army because he can ride,’ Tom told me. ‘For the officer class, it was almost summer camp for the generation that was fox hunting in the winter in red coats and in khaki in the summer.

‘They thought it’d be over by Christmas, but suddenly they’re charging across No Man’s Land with their sabres flashing in the sun, up against machine guns.’

One scene (right) shows Nicholls leading the charge on Joey. Spielberg wanted to capture the sense of confidence that abruptly turns to fear when Nicholls realises what he and his men are up against. The actor was 29 then; Spielberg told him to lop 20 years off his age.
‘He said: “I don’t want a look of shock and terror on your face. Show me the nine-year-old boy”,’ Hiddleston recalled.

You will know the moment we’re discussing because the expression on Hiddleston’s face is one you’ll never forget.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will attend the London premiere of War Horse on January 8.

Legendary: Errol Flynn pictured in The Adventures of Robin Hood

Hiddleston is about to ride another mount, in his role as Henry V in a BBC TV film. It’s part of a series of Shakespeare pictures based on Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. Tom also plays Hal in the two Henry IV dramas.

‘Hal goes from being a rebellious, drunken, irresponsible prince to one of the most courageous, charismatic kings of England we’ve ever had,’ he said.

He will shoot Henry IV, opposite Jeremy Irons, next month. Then, he’ll begin work on Thor 2, reprising his role as the dark prince Loki. Loki also crops up in The Avengers (out here in April).

Hiddelston has had a tremendous run lately: he’s also played F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, and a former fighter pilot in Terence Davies’s sublime film The Deep Blue Sea.
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De Vito brings a little sunshine to the West End

Richard Griffiths and Danny De Vito have found their place in the sun. The two stars will open in the West End towards the end of April in a new version of Neil Simon’s comedy The Sunshine Boys.

Producer Sonia Friedman confirmed a story that this column broke a couple of months ago: that the two men have ‘connected’ and that rehearsals will begin in March, with an opening at a London theatre which will be finalised some time in January.

‘I think these two — Richard and Danny — and the play will be just what we need to give us all a lift,’ Ms Friedman told me.

The Comedy Sunshine Boys: Richard Griffiths and Danny De Vito will open in the West End next April

The playwright has met director Thea Sharrock and is rewriting some of the play’s  40-year-old dialogue, inserting some new, up-to-date gags. Set in the early Seventies, The Sunshine Boys is a celebration of the art of vaudeville — told through the eyes of a successful, but now retired double-act called Lewis and Clark.

The funnymen performed together for four decades but grew to loathe each other. Clark, in particular, hates Lewis with a passion because he blames him for breaking up the act.

Griffiths, who appeared in the Harry Potter films, and who won accolades as the brilliant teacher Hector in Alan Bennett’s landmark play The History

Boys, will play level-headed Al Lewis. De Vito — who made his name in movies such as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Terms Of Endearment and Throw Mamma From The Train — will play difficult, argumentative Willy Clark.

Although the role will mark De  Vito’s London theatre debut, the actor is not a stage novice. He’s very much of the theatre, having trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

He has appeared in many  off-Broadway productions, including the original stage version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
The Sunshine Boys is being scheduled to run until July. If it clicks in London, it will head to Broadway.
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It’s a good job New York has no Shame

When director Steve McQueen and screenwriter Abi Morgan were researching sex addiction for their new movie, Shame, they got nothing from zipped-up Brits, so they flew to New York and it all spilled out.

‘We were like Miss Marple and Columbo, delving into people’s sex lives the way detectives probe murders,’ McQueen told me.

The result of their labours is Shame, a scorching picture from McQueen, who also gave us the powerful drama Hunger.

Shame features a virtuoso performance from Michael Fassbender (also the star of Hunger) as a Manhattan-based advertising executive who needs sex the way a junkie needs a fix.

‘It’s an illness,’ McQueen asserted. ‘This man struggles with his sex life.’

No shame: Steve McQueen pictured with Michael Fassbender. The director had to go state-side to get the dirty about sex addiction

Fassbender’s character has to clear out his porn videos and magazines when his estranged sister (Carey Mulligan) arrives to stay.

McQueen told me he hadn’t intended the part for Mulligan, but she wore him down. ‘i used to ben’t ready to give it to her initially, but she wasn’t going to let me go,’ he says. ‘I’m glad I did — she’s a terrific actress.’
Shame got slapped with an NC-17 rating inside the U.S., which McQueen thought was the name of a rap group.

‘They’re usually given to irresponsible movies, and this is a responsible movie,’ said McQueen. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got scenes with an assault rifle and heads being blown off. The elephant in the room is that people never talk about sex.’

I ask whether Fassbender had a stand-in, as it were, for his naked close-ups. ‘It’s all him and it’s all his own,’ McQueen replied.
The movie isn’t just about sex, though. It also looks at alienation and loneliness. It opens here on January 13.
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The third season of Downton Abbey starts shooting some time in February, and that i hear Julian Fellowes has already sketched out a storyline for a fourth series of the phenomenally popular ITV drama.

It has to be the most entertaining show on television, and even though I’ve already seen the 90-minute Christmas Day special (and it’s a cracker!) I will be tuning in on Sunday to have a second look. The show certainly deserves to scoop a few gongs at the Golden Globe Awards next month.

Hugely popular: The next series of Downton Abbey starts filming in February with a fourth series already inside the works

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Henry Goodman and Geoffrey Streatfeild, who portray physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s fictionalised account of an actual meeting between Heisenberg and his mentor in 1941.

Frayn offers us a gripping study of the politics and moral qualms surrounding the development of nuclear weaponry.

The play is running as component of Sheffield theatres’ Michael Frayn Season from February  29, with David Grindley directing. Benefactors, with Abigail

Cruttenden, and Democracy, with Patrick Drury, Richard Hope and Aidan McArdle, will also be part of the season.
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Sinead Matthews, who will play Millamant, the young widow who becomes the object of Mirabell’s (up-and-coming young actor Ben Lloyd-

Hughes) affections in Congreve’s The Way Of The World, being revived at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre from February 2.

Ms Matthews is such a fun, accomplished actress, and I always remember how good she was in Michael Grandage’s production of The Wild Duck at the Donmar several years ago.

Revival: Sinead Matthews plays the object of affection for Ben Lloyd-Hughes’s character

Director Lyndsey Turner has assembled a first-class company that includes Deborah Findlay as lustful Lady Wishfort, Daisy Lewis because the tittle-tattle Mrs Marwood, and Samuel Barnett and Joel Gillman because the malicious gossips Witwoud and Petulant.

Congreve wrote The manner Of The area greater than three centuries ago, yet the scheming over money and love still feels fresh today. The young lovers have what we might describe as a prenuptial agreement — only their  pre-nup included what can be served at tea. Quite right!