All posts tagged: Maggie

Maggie Baird Hosts Billie Eilish, Finneas, More at Support+Feed Event

Maggie Baird Hosts Billie Eilish, Finneas, More at Support+Feed Event

Published by Daniella Wilson

Environmental advocate Maggie Baird, mother to Grammy Award-winning singers Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, hosted a star-studded pickleball event over the weekend to combat food insecurity. Support+Feed, the nonprofit founded by Baird, hosted its inaugural Pickleball Invitational and Game Night Fundraiser on Saturday at PIKL L.A. The game night brought together celebrities, community partners and supporters to raise awareness for a cause that Baird has been vocal about for several years. Several notable guests attended the event, including her children, Eilish and O’Connell; Angelina Jolie and her son, Pax Jolie-Pitt; Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard; and former Spice Girls singer Melanie C. “Our work in L.A. has taken on even greater urgency since the fires last year,” Baird exclusively told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s extremely moving to see our community come together to support our neighbors.” Attendees were treated to plant-based meals from Support+Feed partner Cena Vegan and Strong Roots, who also in part sponsored the event. Both companies have previously worked with the nonprofit in distributing meals. Live Nation served as the presenting sponsor …

Karlovy Vary to Honor Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jesse Eisenberg

Karlovy Vary to Honor Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jesse Eisenberg

Published by Daniella Wilson

Karlovy Vary is rolling out the red carpet for Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter, Secretary, The Honourable Woman) and Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, A Real Pain, When You Finish Saving the World) this year. At its 60th anniversary edition next month, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will present its President’s Award to the “two distinctive personalities who have significantly shaped contemporary world cinema,” organizers said on Monday. “In their work, director, screenwriter and actress Maggie Gyllenhaal and the multifaceted actor, director, screenwriter and author Jesse Eisenberg transition smoothly between charismatic performances and bold auteur filmmaking.” Said KVIFF executive director Kryštof Mucha: “We at the festival are glad to be able to welcome two creative individuals whose work as actors, screenwriters, and directors is representative of contemporary trends in cinema and whose films are an intense experience for audiences.” Jesse Eisenberg Courtesy of KVIFF Gyllenhaal will receive her honor during the opening ceremony of the 60th edition of KVIFF on Friday, July 3. At the fest, she will also present her film The Bride!, …

Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Land’ Is a Joyful Tearjerker

Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Land’ Is a Joyful Tearjerker

Published by Daniella Wilson

Last fall, while leaving a critic’s screening of the film Hamnet, I was confronted just outside the door by the production company’s chirpy PR handler. “How was it?” she asked, as if the rivers of mascara streaming down my cheeks weren’t a clear enough signal. “Oh God,” I blurted out, before turning heel toward the bathroom. How to properly describe the garment-rending despair I’d felt in those 125 minutes? I had known what I was in for. The Maggie O’Farrell novel on which the movie was based had left me in a similar state both times I’d read it. The allure of the literary tearjerker wasn’t new to me either. When I was about 12 and my older sister recalled sobbing in front of her college library over Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, I raced to read it. (I was not deterred when my mother fretted about its “dead babies and dead dreams.”) I wanted the raw emotion, and the release, that my sister had reported. And I would seek it out again and again: …

Land by Maggie O’Farrell – Book Review by The Bookish Elf

Land by Maggie O’Farrell – Book Review by The Bookish Elf

Published by Jenni Sidey

There is a moment near the start of the new novel where a ten-year-old boy stands on a windswept hillock holding a surveying chain in hands gone scarlet from cold, while his father waves at him from the other end of a measuring line. Liam can barely make out his father in the wet Atlantic mist. That image of a small child and a stubborn adult, separated by chain and weather and several centuries of grief, more or less tells you what Land by Maggie O’Farrell is going to do to you over the next four hundred pages. A country still in mourning The year is 1865. The Great Hunger is recent enough that the bones are still settling in the ditches and that everyone over the age of twenty has lost someone. Tomás, the map-maker, has been sent by the British Ordnance Survey to record a peninsula on the westernmost tip of Ireland. His task is technical, but his motive is private. He wants the maps to bear witness. And he wants the names …

Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland | Fiction

Land by Maggie O’Farrell review – an ambitious story of mapmaking in Ireland | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on a rainswept Irish peninsula and takes us to Dublin, Rome, Quebec and Kerala as it tells the story of two generations and gestures backwards and forwards at two more. The opening line came to O’Farrell on a train journey from Belfast to Dublin, and became the way in to a story based in part on that of her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland not long after the great hunger. “What, I wondered, would it have been like to be revising the maps at that time,” she writes in a short introductory note; “to be recording and setting down the devastation that had occurred?” In bitter weather, Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam are mapping a peninsula – perhaps Dunmore Head in County Kerry, though O’Farrell doesn’t specify – using surveying poles and measuring chains. Tomás is in the pay …

Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell reveals she turned down an OBE for two reasons

Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell reveals she turned down an OBE for two reasons

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell has spoken about her reasons for turning down an OBE. The author of several acclaimed bestsellers, including her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, has found herself in the spotlight more than ever after her 2020 novel, about the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal this year. In a new interview with The Irish Times, O’Farrell spoke about her Irish background and why of all the prizes she has received, she felt compelled to reject the OBE. O’Farrell, 54, was born in Ireland in 1972 and moved with her family aged two to Wales before settling in Scotland. She currently lives in Edinburgh. Speaking about her forthcoming novel Land, which is set in the west of Ireland in 1865, O’Farrell …

Toby Stephens: What my mum Maggie Smith taught me about acting

Toby Stephens: What my mum Maggie Smith taught me about acting

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter In the early Noughties, Toby Stephens was a leading man with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Then came his breakthrough screen role: a North Korean general transmogrified into a swashbuckling insomniac English billionaire with a union jack parachute. Maybe not the most likely choice for today’s aspiring thespians – and as Stephens admits, it felt eccentric at the time. Imagine casting a Bond villain like that now. “You’d never get away with that, would you?” he says of Die Another Day’s race-swap conceit. The son of acting royalty Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, he wasn’t even top of MGM’s list; that was Sean Penn. But eventually he landed the role of Gustav Graves, having initially been led into an oak-panelled room at EON’s Piccadilly offices and handed a page of dialogue. “Right,” he remembers asking. “Do you want me to do it …

Coronation Street star drops bombshell over Maggie Driscoll death

Coronation Street star drops bombshell over Maggie Driscoll death

Published by Sam Flores

Coronation Street spoilers follow. Coronation Street star Pauline McLynn has dropped the biggest hint yet that her character Maggie Driscoll could be this week’s mystery death. The ITV soap is about to explore what could be Maggie’s final moments, as she goes head-to-head with Megan Walsh in a dangerous showdown on the balcony at the Weatherfield Precinct. Tensions between the two women have been building for weeks following the revelation that Maggie’s teenage grandson Will was groomed by Megan. But when another clash threatens to turn violent, could Maggie fall to her death? ITV Related: Coronation Street star names most dangerous Megan death suspect Maggie and Megan are two of five villains who are in the frame to die this week – and Pauline couldn’t be happier to be in the mix… Speaking in a new interview, she laughed: “It’s nearly the biggest compliment I’ve been paid for a long time! I’m not interested in nice people. I far prefer to be a villain.” Hinting that Maggie’s demise could have been on the cards for …

Coronation Street airs major stumble for Maggie Driscoll in early ITVX release

Coronation Street airs major stumble for Maggie Driscoll in early ITVX release

Published by Daniella Wilson

*Warning: Spoilers for Friday 3 April 2026’s episode of Coronation Street, available now on ITVX and YouTube.* Coronation Street aired a major stumbling block for scheming Maggie Driscoll (Pauline McLynn) on Friday. The ITV soap has already revealed to viewers that Rovers Return landlord Ben Driscoll (Aaron McCusker) is actually the secret son of the late cobbles icon Jim McDonald (Charlie Lawson) after he had a brief liaison with Maggie years prior. This also means that Ben is actually the half-brother of his new close friend Steve McDonald (Simon Gregson). However, Ben has always believed that his dad, Alan Driscoll (Aidan O’Callaghan), was his biological father. Fans also know from a special flashback episode that Maggie was also responsible for Alan’s death. During Friday’s episode, Maggie attempted to get through to her grandson Will Driscoll (Lucas Hodgson-Wale) following his suffering at the abusive hands of his teacher, Megan Walsh (Beth Nixon). However, a brainwashed Will would not betray Megan – even though Maggie came close to getting her grandson to open up to her. Want …

Tim Peake, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock say Artemis II launch is “stepping stone to Mars”

Tim Peake, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock say Artemis II launch is “stepping stone to Mars”

Published by Daniella Wilson

The prospect of a permanent lunar base comes one step closer today, with NASA launching the first manned Moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. For Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock – a self-confessed ‘lunatic’ born a year before Neil Armstrong made history – Artemis II’s voyage to the far side of the Moon can’t come soon enough. “My retirement plan is to have an optical telescope on the lunar surface,” says the space scientist and Sky at Night presenter. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and now there’s talk of a lunar gateway, the capability of refuelling vessels in orbit around the Moon; it feels as if it’s coming together.” British astronaut Tim Peake is similarly excited: “This is the start of the human journey to spend extended periods of time on another celestial body, and a stepping stone to Mars.” The pair, with US journalist Kristin Fisher, are tracking Artemis II’s ten-day mission in live daily dispatches of their BBC World Service space history podcast 13 Days. The latest series, which kicked …