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What are you gonna do, kill me?

@timelessclassicmovies / timelessclassicmovies.tumblr.com

25, she/her, I reblog what I like, which is usually Call the Midwife (esp. Turnadette) Once Upon a Time (esp. Outlaw Queen), Old Hollywood, and things that I laugh at.
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I just want to read a few books per week, learn multiple languages, and a couple of instruments, become more proficient at advanced mathematics, write essays and books, exercise regularly, sleep eight hours per night, eat really healthily, have an active social life including enjoying all of my close relationships, and be really sexy. Is that really so unreasonable

oh, look, it’s a description of me…

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I just want to read a few books per week, learn multiple languages, and a couple of instruments, become more proficient at advanced mathematics, write essays and books, exercise regularly, sleep eight hours per night, eat really healthily, have an active social life including enjoying all of my close relationships, and be really sexy. Is that really so unreasonable

oh, look, it’s a description of me…

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My dad has a massive vegetable garden and it is his life. Whenever I ask how things are going, he tells me about the garden. Periodically he will text me a picture of the things he's harvested and ask when I'm coming to pick them up. And for a while, the biggest bit of garden gossip has been his nemesis, the gopher. This gopher was consistently ruining his day by pilfering the best of everything just before my dad could harvest it. Anytime I talked to him, all he had to tell me about was "that damned gopher." He dreamt about killing the gopher, his truest enemy. He tried to train the dog to hunt the gopher, but the dog is a pacifist. He led some of the barn cats to the holes, but the barn cats have unionized and refused his offered rate. He then laid no-kill traps (can't risk having poison near the crops) with eventual gophercide in mind, but then suddenly he was faced with a cute and terrified animal and didn't have the heart. He released it. "He was so scared, he'll never come back." The gopher was back the next day, with a vengeance. That was some weeks ago. Today, my dad sent me pictures of his garden, and I saw a squash gently laid by the gopher's hole, like a package left on the doorstep. I said "Dad, what's that squash doing there by the gopher hole?" He said "Oh, he likes squash best." In an effort to appease the gopher, my father now gives him a little squash everyday, like leaving an offering for a garden spirit. This apparently works well as a compromise; the gopher has stopped stealing, content to have his meals delivered to his door.

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miss-ute
- “You mean can’t as in it’s impossible, or can’t like that’s not allowed?” - “It’s neither of those things. If that is how you feel, I respect that.”
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kayla47

Can we take a moment to congratulate Alice, April & Ned on their performances in tonight’s episode. They all had lines and delivered them well. This scene felt very natural, well done 💕💕

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I will always remember Christopher Lee as that horrifying moment in the LOTR commentaries where Peter Jackson says he started to direct him on how to act like he’d been stabbed and Christopher Lee goes “no no peter dear, when someone is stabbed like this, THIS is how they look, they don’t make a sound, air just leaves them all at once” and peter jackson remembers in that moment that lee was in the secret service and just slowly backs away.

Y’all… Christopher Lee was literally James Bond. He and Ian Fleming were cousins, he was one of the real life sources of inspiration for James Bond, and was Fleming’s first choice to play Bond in the movies. Saying that he was in the secret service doesn’t do it justice. His unit was informally referred to as “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and his service records are still sealed. When an interviewer asked him about his service, he asked “Can you keep a secret?” the interviewer of course said yes, so he leaned in, lowered his voice, and said “So can I.” He also performed for a metal album in his 80′s. Christopher Lee was one of the most awesome humans ever to walk the Earth.

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valarhalla

To quote my favourite article about his life, written before his passing:

“Christopher Lee is a 6'5" tall world champion fencer, speaks six languages, does all of his own stunts, has participated in more on-screen sword fights than any actor in history, served for five years defending democracy from global fascism as a British Commando blowing the shit out of Nazi asses in World War II, and became the oldest person to ever record lead vocals on a heavy metal track when, at the age of 88, he wrote, performed on, and released a progressive symphonic power metal EP about the life of Charlemagne (because why the fuck not?). 

The most prolific actor in motion picture history, Christopher Lee was born somewhere in England in 1922. His mother was an Italian Countess who was actually descended from the line of Charlemagne, and she was so important that she was allowed to wear the royal seal of Frederich Barbarossa and so MILF-y she had her portrait painted by something like a half-dozen famous Italian artists. One of Lee’s ancestors on that side was the Papal Secretary of State who refused to attend the coronation of Napoleon and is buried in the Pantheon in Rome next to Raphael (the painter not the ninja turtle), which seems like kind of a big deal. Lee’s father, meanwhile, was a distant relative of Robert E. Lee and was multi-decorated war hero who’d served as a Colonel in the 60th King’s Royal Rifle Corps during World War I and the Boer War. Growing up, Lee studied Classics at Wellington College, where he was also a champion squash player, a ridiculously-badass fencer, and spent his spare time playing on the school hockey and rugby.

Shit got real in 1939 when Christopher Lee quit his day job, caught a boat to Finland, and decided to enlist in the Finnish Army to help them fight off the Soviet invasion of Finland. Lee got geared up to kick some commie asses up and down the frozen wastes of mid-Winter Finland, but didn’t see much action, returning home in 1940 to deal with a much bigger and more England-centric problem: Nazis. Christopher Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in cracking German ciphers and skulls and any other Nazi bullshit he came in contact with. In North Africa he was attached to the Long Range Desert Patrol, the forerunner of the SAS, where he would jump in a badass fucking four-wheel-drive jeep with a gigantic machine gun mounted in the back, drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, survive the scorching heat of the Sahara Desert, then sneak-attack Luftwaffe airfields by rolling up on them at sixty miles an hour with his .50-caliber machine guns blazing out curtains of white-hot Nazi-smiting justice, planting dynamite on their airplanes, then peeling ass out of there leaving nothing but bullet-riddled corpses and gigantic explosions in his wake. After working with the LRDP, Lee was assigned to the Special Operations Executive – better known as Winston Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – a group that did shit like lead a twelve-man assault that destroyed the German top secret nuclear weapons development facility in Norway and assist brave Eastern European partisans and rebels sabotage Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements up to fight the Soviets. His service records are sealed and Lee doesn’t talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, “Can you keep a secret?”. When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, “So can I.”), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he’d been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.

In addition to his iconic, definitive role as Dracula, Christopher Lee has also portrayed some of the most memorable villains of all time. Sure, everyone knows him as Sauroman the White from Lord of the Hobbits: Return to Fellowship Towers and Darth Tyranus from those otherwise-terrible Star Wars prequels…  he played the ultimate Bond Villain in The Man with The Golden Gun – a role he got thanks in no small part to the fact that Bond creator Ian Fleming was not only Lee’s cousin, but the two men had fought together in the SOE during WWII. So Lee was basically part of the team that inspired James Bond, then he went on to play a fucking Bond Villain

I won’t get too much into it, but Christopher Lee has basically been in every movie ever, from billion-dollar Academy Award winners to the sort of shit that Elvira pimps on Channel 875 at four in the morning on a Tuesday. He’s almost always the villain, and as such has probably died on camera more times than anyone ever. He’s been Fu Manchu five times. He was the definitive Count de Rochefort in a couple Three Musketeers movies. He’s been The Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, Willy Wonka’s Dad, the Emperor of China, the Grim Reaper, Lucifer, Grigory Rasputin, Charles Marlow, Ramses, Tiresias the Blind Prophet of Thebes, Vlad the Impaler, one role where he’s simply credited as “Ship’s Vampire”, and another where he’s “Resurrection Joe.” He’s hosted SNL and been in Police Academy, the Last Unicorn, Charlie’s Angels, Season of the Witch, Gremlins II, a Polish Tales from the Crypt-style TV series and a softcore porn based on the works of Marquis de Sade, but he was also in Lord of the Rings, Shaka Zulu, A Tale of Two Cities, The Wicker Man, Moby-Dick and the Hamlet with Lawrence Olivier. He’s worked with Peter Cushing, Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston, Errol Flynn, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Spielberg, Orson Welles, Vincent Price, Christopher Walken, Sam Eliot, Jeff Bridges and Jayne Mansfield, but also Nicholas Cage, Heather Graham, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tom Arnold, Casper Van Dien and Armand Assante, and he once appeared in a movie called “Howling II: Werewolf Bitch” with the dude from Space Mutiny.

He’s the only person to play both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (he was also Sir Henry Baskerville). His characters have executed both Charles the First of England and Louis the Sixteenth of France (and, as a badass side note, Lee is so into the idea of public executions that in real life he can recite every official executioner in England since the 15th century). He’s portrayed Englishmen, Egyptians, Spaniards, Transylvanians, Frenchmen, Greeks, Poles, Chinese, Indians, Italians, Wallachians, Romans, Germans, Arabs, Gypsies, and Russians, played the lead role in the biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, speaks English, German, Russian, Swedish, Italian, and French, can do any English accent he wants, and sings everything from opera and death metal in a hardcore bass voice. IMDB credits him with 274 acting roles, Guiness says he’s appeared in more films than anyone ever, and the Oracle of Bacon lists him as the Center of the Hollywood Universe because anyone in history links to him in 2.59 steps (he links to Bacon in 1). If that’s not enough, Lee’s movies have grossed more than any actor ever – his top five alone grossed $4.4B (number two is Harrison ford with $3B) and that doesn’t even include the new Hobbit stuff

Lee also belongs to three stuntman unions, does all of his own stunts, once busted his face smashing head-first through an actual plate glass window for a scene, injured himself falling into an open grave while portraying Dracula, and once had his hand slashed open during a drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of swordfights, Lee has appeared in more on-screen sword duels than any other actor ever. A masterful fencer, he’s been in everything from cutlass fights on the decks of waterlogged pirate ships to rapier duels in seventeenth-century France to taking on a couple guys one-third of his age with a lightsabers and a fistful of force lightning on the deck of whatever the fuck they called Imperial Star Destroyers in the prequel movies.

A classically trained singer, Christopher Lee also released a heavy metal hardcore symphonic power metal concept album about Charlemagne when he was 88 years old. He’s played with Rhapsody and Manowar, and on his 90th birthday he released a metal single called “Let Legend Mark Me as the King” with music written by some of the guys from Judas Priest.

He is [was] still acting at ninety years old.”

Wow

I feel unaccomplished

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pedro-pascal

MAMMA MIA! (2008) + tags about Colin Firth

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hedwig-dordt

does anyone have that gif set handy where an interviewer asks Colin Firth “so when you meet the Creator at the pearly gates when you die - what do you hope he’ll say?” and Colin Firth replies: “I thought you were quite good in Mamma Mia.”

Colin Firth understood the assignment.

I have never seen mama mia. I know nothing of the plot. I have no idea what's going on here. But this post makes me want to watch it.

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The voice actors for the animated sitcom 'The Flintstones', circa 1962. Left to right: Alan Reed as Fred Flintstone, Jean Vander Pyl as Wilma, Bea Benaderet as Betty, and Mel Blanc as Barney.

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One of my favorite images of all time.

When Gracie Allen retired she took a sip of champagne from a paper cup, hugged her friend and co-star Bea Benaderet, and said “Okay, that’s it”.

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alexdrakes
“There had been romantic couples before, but Loy and Powell were something new and original. They actually made marital comedy palatable. I remember Bill Powell when he started out as a melodramatic actor. Then, by some alchemy, he suddenly became comic. But Myrna gave the wit to the whole thing. They hit that wonderful note because he always did a wee bit too much and she underdid it, creating grace, a charm, a chemistry.”

George Cukor

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