Four decades of roles on stage and screen range from Petunia Dursley in Harry Potter to Richard II, via My Left Foot, Fleabag and Super Mario Bros. Now she’s ready to discuss her career with you

You might associate Fiona Shaw with the theatre, and perhaps rightly so – she has won a stack of awards and wall to wall acclaim for many stage performances stretching back to the start of her acting career in the 1980s. These include the original RSC production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, Machinal in 1993 and (somewhat outrageously at the time), as Shakespeare’s Richard II in 1995.

But a talent as fine as this is not going to be left alone for long by the film and TV industries, and Shaw has been in demand on screen for decades. Her first biggish film role was as Christy Brown’s doctor in My Left Foot, and she went on to do a wild variety of things, some you might expect (Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, The Butcher Boy) and some you definitely wouldn’t – Three Men and a Little Lady, The Avengers (not that one, the other one ) and the legendarily bad Super Mario Bros.

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‘We broadcast live from nightclubs. So we’d tell the audience, “If you’re here with someone else’s wife, stand apart”’

Stock Aitken Waterman were flying. We’d had one of the biggest records in the world – Never Gonna Give You Up with Rick Astley. Rick’s manager rang and said: would I like to go for lunch with Granada TV? We had a very pleasant lunch with David Liddiment, head of light entertainment, but I didn’t really understand why he wanted to meet me.

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Study of the fate of undocumented children brought to the US, now grown up and paying taxes, yet under constant threat of deportation and removal

For undocumented immigrants, life is a state of perpetual limbo; the present is fraught with unexpected dangers, while the future is as ephemeral as a mirage. Shot in lyrical black and white, Stéphanie Barbey and Luc Peter’s documentary astutely conveys these feelings of anxiety and isolation. The film centres on the so-called Dreamers , migrants who were brought to the US as children without papers. Carlos, the main subject, is one such case: originally from Mexico, he crossed the border at the age of nine with his three brothers and his parents. Now in his late 30s, Carlos has spent all of his adult life in America, yet there is no legal pathway for him to citizenship.

A tragedy looms large. Jorge, one of Carlos’s siblings, was deported to Mexico after a minor driving offence, leaving behind his partner and his son. The enforced separation haunts every intimate gathering; scenes of festivities are intercut with Carlos’s various phone calls to Jorge, emotional conversations punctuated with loaded pauses and lulls. Not only has this family been torn apart, but those who remain in the US are also on unsteady ground. Fears of arrest, detention and deportation are always at the back of Carlos’s mind, rendering ordinary day-to-day activities mentally taxing.

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There’s been a dramatic increase in actors of pensionable age playing starring roles in movies – but why are the three Fs the only personalities they get to play?

A decade and a half ago, in 2009, I watched over 300 films , and I counted only three featuring senior citizens in significant roles. But the times they are a-changing, because leading characters of pensionable age are all over the place nowadays, whether solving crimes in The Thursday Murder Club ; turning the tables on swindlers in Thelma or The G ; wrestling with unreliable memories in The Father or Familiar Touch; or preying on other inmates or staff in The Home or The Rule of Jenny Pen .

Not long ago, the screen was monopolised by smooth-skinned teens and twentysomethings, but now it has been infiltrated by creased faces imbued with the sort of personality that can only be accrued over decades of experience and with minimal recourse to cosmetic surgery. And not just as non-player characters but in starring or pivotal roles in the narrative; no longer to be condescended to and patted on the head simply for lasting the course, but as people just like the rest of us. Real people!

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From TV so controversial the Foreign Office tried to ban it … to Emmerdale Farm. As the broadcaster hits 70, we look back on the highlights – and lowlights

For more than two decades, the BBC Television Service was the only option for UK viewers. Until 22 September 1955, when a commercial rival, Independent Television, started at 7.15pm with fanfares and speeches from a launch jamboree at London’s Guildhall, continuing with playlets from Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, then a middleweight boxing bout.

Over the subsequent seven decades, ITV has screened shows that are unforgettable, wrongly and rightly forgotten and, in some cases, now-unforgivable. Here, as a 70th birthday card, are the most significant shows from each year, reflecting the shift from regional franchises to a single ITV Studios with dozens of independent production companies.

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Two strangers with their own individual demons share a Christmas Eve in London, but a cliche-ridden script and uninspired filming remove the spark

As well as its mellow walk-and-talk premise, the enduring magic of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise hinges its tightly constructed script and the singular chemistry between its two idiosyncratic leads. Like other film-makers inspired by this indie classic, Liam Calvert regrettably falls into the trap of focusing solely on the all-in-one-night conceit at the expense of other narrative components with his directorial debut.

A Night Like This follows Lukas and Oliver, two strangers who share a nocturnal adventure on Christmas Eve in London. Each is saddled with his own demons. Lukas (Jack Brett Anderson), a gay man from Germany, struggles with his acting career, while Oliver (Alexander Lincoln) juggles singing aspirations and a failing nightclub. Such life baggage ought to be the glue that binds these two lost souls together but this attempt at intimacy is built primarily through stilted, expository dialogue, riddled with cliches about failures and familial traumas.

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The next in our series of writers celebrating their most rewatched comfort films is an ode to the scrappy 2004 music documentary

The year is 2001. Thrash pioneers and stadium mainstays Metallica have been in the doldrums for half a decade; the grungey, hard rock gristle of their last two records, Load and Reload, and reconfiguration as short-haired, eyeliner-wearing Anton Corbijn muses have alienated them from their headbanger OG fans; inter-band relations are at a low ebb and longtime bassist Jason Newsted has jumped. Meanwhile, the tectonics of the heavy music landscape are shifting around them – the solipsistic dirge of nu-metal now energising the disenfranchised youth of America. It’s time for a rebirth.

Regrouping in San Francisco, singer and guitarist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and determinatively named producer Bob Rock hole up in a makeshift studio in the Presidio and set to relocating the old garage-band spark that gave birth to albums as seismic as Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets.

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A representative for the band – who have not played together since 2019 – says it is ‘not in the realm of true’ that they will play at the author’s Bond-themed celebration

Fleetwood Mac have denied a report in the Daily Mail that they are to reunite to play at JK Rowling’s 60th birthday party.

A representative told Rolling Stone that the story was “categorically false” and “not in the realm of true”.

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This intense follow-up to My Sister, the Serial Killer is a haunting story of heartbreak, grief and intergenerational trauma

Repeat a family story often enough, and it becomes a kind of legend – or a curse. The Faloduns at the centre of Cursed Daughters share tales of heartbroken women across the generations who just can’t seem to hold on to a man. There’s Fikayo, whose husband left after he tired of tending to her chronic illness; Afoke, who seduced her younger sister’s boyfriend; Feranmi, the matriarch of the family, who got pregnant by a married man and received the curse from the man’s first wife. Again and again, the narrative is interrupted by these tales about grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers; eventually, it feels almost as if the novel is haunted by the stories themselves.

Nigerian-British novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite splashed on to the literary scene in 2018 with My Sister, the Serial Killer , a taut debut about sisterhood, jealousy and murder. Cursed Daughters, her second novel, swaps true crime for a more atmospheric spookiness, but it shares a lingering fascination with the dark secrets that might bind the women of a family together. The Falodun curse forms an ominous, ever-hovering presence for the three main characters – Monife, Ebun and Eniiyi – as they grow up, fall in love, and attempt to defy the supernatural forces that seem to hold their family in thrall.

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