LONDON – ‘Hill Street Blues’, the American cop show that was a hit for most of the Eighties, had one of the best casts in television. Of them, James B. Sikking had probably the toughest job playing jut-jawed, pipe-smokimg Howard Hunter, commander of Hill Street’s Emergency Action Team.
Sikking, who turns 90 today, understood that Hunter was a cardboard character used mostly on the show to seque from one scene to another. ‘He’s what I call a coat holder,’ he told me. ‘He’s holding somebody else’s coat while they’re doing the scene. He’s mad as a hatter but from his point of view he’s absolutely correct.’ Continue reading
Gregory Peck on Abraham Lincoln: ‘A secular saint’
By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln, who was born 215 years ago today. In 1982, he fulfilled a dream when he portrayed the U.S. president in the TV mini-series ‘The Blue and the Gray’ and his comments then reverberate in today’s political climate in America.
‘I have admired Abraham Lincoln since I was a boy,’ he told me. ‘I learned the Gettysburg Address when I was 12 and recited it in school. I first read Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” in university at Berkeley and I was totally absorbed by it.’
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