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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Hamlet’s goodbye, the last of Leigh, Birmingham blues and a vampire in Vienna: 12 great films at the London film festival

Andrew Scott, in a leather jacket, stands in profile looking upward inside an empty theatre
Final bows … Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson in Elsinore. Photograph: Anthony Dickenson/Focus Features

Elsinore

This film puts Andrew Scott in line to become the first out gay man to win the best actor Oscar. He plays Ian Charleson, who became a star in Chariots of Fire and in 1989 took on the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre when Daniel Day-Lewis withdrew, despite being desperately ill with Aids, knowing that the strain would accelerate his illness. For Charleson, the play’s themes of life and death, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, were all too real.

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