#robert helpmann

Lynn Seymour as Ophelia and Rudolf Nureyev as Hamlet in rehearsal for Robert Helpmann's Hamlet.

London, Royal Opera House, 1964. 

Danny Kaye (The Court Jester, The Inspector General)—Danny Kaye, idol of my childhood, maker of the weirdest faces! This man SETS HIMSELF ON FIRE and then puts himself out in a bucket in a movie based on a Gogol short story. In the same movie (Inspector General), he flirts by playing a carrot as a musical instrument. In Wonder Man, he's brilliant but struggles with things like riding buses. I have been envious of his fake Italian/French/German/Spanish monologues in The Court Jester for the past three decades. As Walter Mitty, he is SUPREMELY SILLY yet also somehow manages to be a comic foil for none other than Boris Karloff. All this is to say nothing of The William Tell Song (TV, thus not linked, but great.) I adore him.

Robert Helpmann (The Red Shoes, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)—an extremely enticing combination of graceful and balletic and scrungly weirdo who looks kind of like if you put fred astaire and young boris karloff circa the black cat into the splicer machine from the fly. a literal actual ballet dancer, choreographer, shakespeare actor, and theater director, who left a mark on the psyches of many children as the terrifying child catcher in chitty chitty bang bang. undeniably scrungly but elegant and spidery in his scrungliness. in powell and pressburger's opera film tales of hoffmann he can be seen playing four different characters!

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[additional submitted propaganda + scrungly videos under the cut]