Calgary Herald from Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 38

Entertainment CALGARY HERALD Editor: Eric Dawson 235-7580 Fax: 235-8725 Wednesday, June 25, 1997 C8 Pete Postlethwaite w. rv- THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK: Pete Postlethwaite plays a bad guy dinosaur hunter ories terribly destructive. I think Thatcher made an example of Grimethorpe. She not only closed the pit. She buried it and covered it with concrete, making the cost of reopening it prohibitive.

What was once a teeming community is now full of barbed wire, closed-up shops and concrete." Still, he admits that what really attracted William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and In the Name of the Father, for which he received a 1993 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. "A nomination opens lots of doors, doors of choice, really, and I've loved everything I've done," he said. "I've been very lucky in that." him was the human side of director Mark Herman's script, which re JOHN HARTL Knight-Ridder Newspapers volves around his character, Danny, who tries to keep the band together even while the town is closing around them. "It was a wonderfully rich character, marvel-A lously funny and terri-k bly tragic," he said. "It's also a seamless 1 blend of form and con-4 tent, with no division i between them." One of the In addition to the Spielberg offer, he's considering another script by Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for The Usual Suspects, and he might return to the London stage to do a Shakespeare play later this year.

A onetime member of the Royal Shake- speare Company, he said he's now done more ete Postlethwaite, who turns up as a dinosaur hunter in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park, doesn't miss a thing. As a publicist quietly slips through a door that's behind his back, he calls her by name. How did he know? story's key ironies is that the miners and band "I have raptor vision," he smiles. Currently one of Spielberg's favorite actors, Postlethwaite co-stars with raptors and T. rexes in The Lost World, and he's coming away with some of the best reviews.

Variety's Leonard Klady praised his performance as one of two in the film that "rise above the material's limitations" (newcomer Vince Vaughn gives the other one). It helps that he has some of screenwriter David Koepp's good lines. In Spielberg's recently completed drama about a slave revolt, Amistad, Postlethwaite plays a 19th-century lawyer. And Spielberg has asked him to appear in Private Ryan, the Tom Hanks movie that he'll be shooting soon. "Whether I'll have the time to make movies than plays.

Postlethwaite made his film debut 20 years ago in Ridley Scott's The Duellists shaved Robert Stephens; blink and you'll miss and played a larger role in the Maggie Smith comedy A Private Function (1983). The part that established him was the abusive father in Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which somehow did not typecast him in tyrant roles. He admits that Davies' insistence on the character's brutality sometimes threw him, but that Davies claimed it was an honest portrait of his own father. In the Name of the Father, a father role at the other end of members are fighting to preserve a way of life that makes them sick, and Her- man doesn't shy away from that contradiction. Danny, who is about 10 years older than the 52-year-old Postlethwaite, is on the that one, I don't know," Postlethwaite says.

The much sought actor is also the star of the low-budget British comedy-drama Brassed Off. In that film he plays the fanatical conductor of a Yorkshire brass band. the catering bill on Lost World, you could have made 10 Brassed Offs," he says. "But I liked Spotlight Pete Postlethwaite stars in The Lost World and Brassed Off, now in its fifth week at the Plaza Theatre. verge of dying from pneu moconiosis.

"Why should they fight for the right to get black lung disease?" he asked. "Because if you take 1 1 anyone's job away, you demean them." the spectrum, was the most successful of the recent series of IRA movies. However, Postlethwaite regards Brassed Off as a more politically charged film. It's been exceptionally popular in England, where he believes it reflects the recent change in government. In fictionalized form, it depicts Margaret Thatcher's closing of a mining town, Grimethorpe, where much of the picture was shot.

Several members of the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band appear more or less as themselves in the band scenes. "I'm not a Tory lover," says Postlethwaite. "I find their the- STARRING IN TWO FILMS the scripts of both films. As Hitchcock said, there are three important things in any movie: script, script and script." Postlethwaite describes his character in Brassed Off as "a northern working-class kind of pedagogue, almost a fascist in his insistence that only music matters." In The Lost-World, he's recruited by the villain Arliss Howard) to hunt prehistoric beasts. I play Roland Tembo, one of the last of the philosopher-h utters," he says.

"I'm completely bald, and I look like a pickled walnut. He's someone who's retired, not interested in hunting again until a T.rex is dangled in front of him." Id between the shooting of Brassed Off and Lost World, PdSllethwaite appeared in Philippe Rousselot's Serpent's Kiss with Greta Scacchi and his Brassed Off co-star, Ewan McGregor. He's also turned up in prominent roles in-T'he Usual Suspects, Dragonheart, POSTLETHWAITE IS IV jsA -r-i -i i auA.v' -m, u. I BHHn' lannel "We want people to be part of the whole process instead of being out in an industrial area," Craig said. A-Channel is aiming for a hip image, but viewers will likely know it just as much for all those movies, including a doubleheader Sunday nights.

At rival Channel 3, vice-president Bruce Nelson said his station's schedule, also released this week, BRIAN KEITH Actor dies in apparent suicide pterin' to go with movies lin prime time The Associated Press MALIBU, Calif. Brian Keith, the burly star of TV's Family Affair and Hardcastle and Mc; Cormick, was found dead Tuesday at his home, an apparent suicide. He was 75. Keith had been suffering from cancer, said a spokeswoman for his manager, Bob Schiller. Tabloid reports said vV7 Keith had lung cancer and emphysema.

In Family Affair, which ran from 1966 to 1971, Keith played a bachelor raising three children with the help of a proper English but will stick with what he sees as a winning formula such shows as Murphy Browrn, Law Order, Drew Carey and the above-mentioned hospital drama, plus newer products like Soul Man and the new Americanized cop series Cracker. "We've got a proven program supply," Nelson said. "If people find a movie that they like, they may go watch it. But it's really a different kind of television program on an on-going nightly basis. People watch television as a function of habit.

The challenge of movies is that every single day, you've got to convince them that tonight's movie is pretty good, even if last night's wasn't." Calgary 7 president Jim Bagshaw is also showing no signs of trepidation at the arrival of new competition. He said he wishes them well with their big movie-dominated schedule, "but not too w-ell." His station's parent company, WIC, recently struck a deal with Can West Global and now combines WIC's shows with the Global series imported from Hollywood. Calgary 7's fall lineup this year includes first-run episodes of Friends, Frasier, NYPD Blue, 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Nanny and such new comers as Veronica's Closet and Michael Hayes. "We literally have the best schedule of any station in North America," Bagshaw said. "NBC would kill for our schedule." Nightly movies, Bagshaw said, are a tough sell in television because consumers have so many viewing options with theatres, video rentals and an increasing number of cable channels.

A-Channel points to at least one area it plans to invest in heavily, namely Alberta-made movies. Its $14-million, seven-year production fund has already partly financed the films BLAKEY Xalgary Herald A-Channel will blaze its way into Calgary a living-rooms this September with prime-time movies like Assassins, Judge Dredd and Executive Decision, along with 90 minutes of daily sup-Ipertime news. That, plus nightly reruns of The Simpsons, Friends, Frasier and Highlander will go head-on against the existing TV stations' programming of Tfirst-run TV dramas, sitcoms and sports. Let the other guys court viewers with a few hits rJUke ER and Beverly Hills 90210 and the gamble of -new shows, A-Channel boss Drew Craig said Tuesday. "We're not going to get in the series game lock, Ttock and barrel," he said.

"Our research and our experience show us the jjiewer wants consistency If you give them quality and consistency, that's a winning formula." Craig's rivals don't buy that logic, but they will be 'watching, with interest, the first launch of a new Calgary TV station in more than two decades. The A-Channel, signing on in late September, will also have something unusual among all of Calgary's major media downtown headquarters. It have no traditional TV studio. Instead, the building will be wired for cameras and mikes to permit shows to be made anywhere inside. A-Channel was approved last year by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Com-rmission after two attempts at a licence, beating Izzy Asper's Can West Global.

The station, owned by Craig Broadcasting of Manitoba, will operate on Channel 5 over the air and on an undetermined cable channel somewhere between 2 and 13. It will 'iave a sister station in Edmonton. With a design similar to that of CityTV and MuchMusic in Toronto, A-Channel's Calgary of-'fices at 7th Avenue and 5th Street S. W. will feature ler, Mr.

French, portrayed by Sebastian KEITH: Had cancer Cabot. He was Judge Milton G. Hardcastle in Hardcastle and McCormick from 1983 to 1986. Sheriff's Deputy Bob Killeen said the, death was listed as an apparent suicide. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.

Keith was born in Bayonne, N. to actor parents. He starred as Matt Anders in the 1955-56 drama Crusadi-r an as Dave Blassingame in the 1960 show The Westerner. Through the balance of the '70s he starred in the comedy The Brian Keith Show and the dramas Archer and Centennial. 4 ML Ebenezer and Silent Cradle, and Craig expects that two more Alberta-made films backed by A-Channel will begin shooting before the end of the year.

HIGHLANDER: Adrian Paul wields his sword Large windows so passers-by can see inside and watch TV programs being made..