Today we celebrate three Brits because today was – and is – their birthday.
SIR THOMAS MORE.
This is the character portrayed by Sir Paul Scofield and for which he won the Oscar in A Man for All Season. The film won the Oscar for Best Picture, besting among others Alfie and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Also winning Oscars were the film’s director Fred Zinnemann and the playwright Robert Bolt who adapted his play for the screen. Critic Pauline Kael was not much of a fan of the film however. “There’s more than a little of the school pageant in the rhythm of the movie,” she wrote. “Though it’s neater than our school drama coaches could make it, the figures group and say their assigned lines and move on.”
CHARLES DICKENS
“The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.”
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”
“The clock ticks over the fireplace, the weather-glass hangs in the hall. Neither clock nor weather-glass is ever right; but we believe in both, devoutly.”
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