His first Broadway play, "Five Finger Exercise," was a 1950s domestic drama about a British family with culturally mismatched parents and the emotional fissures that are unwittingly exposed by a young German tutor brought into their household.
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He has also made guest appearances in Doctors, Casualty and Lark Rise to Candleford. Dimsdale is the co-founder and co-Artistic Director of Filter Theatre. His theatre work includes Great Expectations, The Changeling, Five Finger Exercise and The Tempest.
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Shaffer's first play, The Salt Land (1955), was presented on ITV on 8 November 1955. Encouraged by this success, Shaffer continued to write and established his reputation as a playwright in 1958, with the production of Five Finger Exercise, which opened in London under the direction of John Gielgud and won the Evening Standard Drama Award. When Five Finger Exercise moved to New York City in 1959, it was equally well received and landed Shaffer the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. Shaffer's next piece was a double bill, The Private Ear/The Public Eye, two plays each containing three characters and concerning aspects of love.
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205 The law was not revoked until 1968, but in the late 1950s there was a loosening of conditions in theatre censorship, the club was dissolved and Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise premièred to a public audience.The Harold Pinter Theatre history accessed 8 September 2011. The theatre was Grade II listed by English Heritage in June 1972.
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545 Gielgud continued to try, without much success, to find new plays that suited him as an actor, but his direction of Peter Shaffer's first play, Five Finger Exercise (1958), received acclaim.Morley, pp. 302–303 While in the US for the Shaffer play, Gielgud revived Much Ado About Nothing, this time with Margaret Leighton as his Beatrice.
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In 1960 he appeared in Five Finger Exercise at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. He was nominated for the 1966 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for Ivanov. In 1974 he played the irascible Duke of Omnium and Gatherum in the popular BBC adaptation of 'The Pallisers'. He lost half a lung to tuberculosis.
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Five Finger Exercise is a 1962 American drama film made by Columbia Pictures, directed by Daniel Mann and produced by Frederick Brisson from a screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, based on the play by Peter Shaffer. The film stars Rosalind Russell, Jack Hawkins, Richard Beymer, Maximilian Schell, and Annette Gorman, with an early screen appearance from Lana Wood, the sister of Natalie Wood.
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Most plays were typical summer escapist fare, such as comedies by Noël Coward (Hay Fever) and George S. Kaufman (George Washington Slept Here) and light mysteries by Agatha Christie (Ten Little Indians). In the 1950s and '60s, Belfry occasionally attempted more serious fare by Arthur Miller (All My Sons), Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie), and Peter Shaffer (Five Finger Exercise). Musicals (Babes in Arms, The Boy Friend) were added in the early 1960s.Program, p.
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Alice Mary Cadeau was born in Burlington, Ontario, the youngest child and only daughter of a once-aspiring actress from Hamilton and a French-Canadian from Penetanguishene. Her father died when she was 6 years old. She attended Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill School for girls in Greenfield, Massachusetts; Edenhall Convent of the Sacred Heart in Philadelphia; and Havergal College in Toronto. Cadeau appeared as Elizabeth Rex at age 10 with the Hamilton Players Guild, and when 13 in Terrence Rattigan's Five Finger Exercise.
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Shaffer received the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre in 1992. Two years later he was appointed Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University. In 1993 he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) by the University of Bath. Shaffer's play, Five Finger Exercise won the Evening Standard Drama Award when it premiered in London and then won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play when it moved to New York City.
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Juliet Maryon Mills (born 21 November 1941) is a British-American actress of film, stage, and television.Certificate of Naturalization as a United States Citizen #10116847, filed U.S. District Court, Los Angeles, California (date: 10 October 1975), ancestry.com. She is the daughter of actor Sir John Mills and Mary Hayley Bell and the eldest of three siblings; her younger siblings are actress Hayley Mills and director Jonathan Mills. Mills began her career as a child actress and was nominated at age eighteen for a Tony Award for her stage performance in Five Finger Exercise in 1960.
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Several of Shaffer's plays have been adapted to film, including Five Finger Exercise (1962), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), The Public Eye (1962), from which he adapted the 1972 film Follow Me! (1972), Equus (1977), and Amadeus (1984), which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture. Shaffer received two Academy Award nominations for adapting his plays Equus and Amadeus for the big screen. For writing the screenplay for Equus, he was nominated for the 1977 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar but the award went to Alvin Sargent, who wrote the screenplay for Julia.
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Wood joined an acting troupe after university, and by 1955 he was running the Oxford Playhouse. The following year, he became resident director at the London Arts Theatre, working alongside Peter Hall During the late 1950s, Wood directed plays at Edinburgh festival and the Old Vic before travelling to Broadway to direct Five Finger Exercise. He returned to England to direct plays at Old Vic, Globe Theatre and Theatre Royal Haymarket in the 1960s. Amongst his early stage work was direction of Harold Pinter's debut work, The Birthday Party at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and later Joe Orton's Loot.
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A five-finger exercise is a musical composition designed primarily to exercise all five fingers of the hand. A typical example is Hanon's The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises.Five finger exercise on the Piano-play-it website Chopin wrote a number of études (studies) that are widely regarded as musical compositions to train musical ability and dexterity of the fingers, with his Op.10 and Op.25. Another example of an exercise to develop musical skills may be Für Elise,Für Elise as a piano exercise it has been suggested that it was written as an exercise to practice skills on the piano.
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In 1962, Brian Hyland, who often performed Udell's and Geld's material, covered the song. Hyland recalls Geld saying the song was "based on, but not totally based on, a Bach finger exercise." (See Five-finger exercise.) Hyland's single began its run on June 9, 1962, and became a top 3 hit, reaching No. 3 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart. The personnel on the original Brian Hyland recording included Mundell Lowe, Al Caiola on guitar, Gary Geld on piano, George Duvivier on bass, Blackie Shackner on harmonica, Gary Chester on drums, and Sticks Evans and Al Rogers on percussion.
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As a child, Mills appeared as an extra in various films, including a role as Freda's 11-week-old baby in the 1942 film In Which We Serve, starring her father. Her first major role came in 1958, when she was 16, in the Peter Shaffer play Five Finger Exercise, as "Pamela Harrington". The show ran one year in London, and then moved to the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. In 1960, Mills was nominated for a Tony Award as "Best Featured Actress" for her performance as Pamela. Her role as a stowaway dressed as a man, but daughter of a ship's gunner, in episode 2 of "Sir Francis Drake" was one of her first TV appearances (1961) and was echoed by an almost identical role in the 1964 film Carry on Jack.
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Zerifa Wahid is the first heroine of Assamese Cinema to have launched her own production house; "Zerifa Wahid Productions". Being very intimately associated with the theatre movement in Assam with powerful performances in several stage plays and who loves to call herself a "Theatre Worker", Zerifa has successfully acted and produced well-known Stage Plays like Girish Karnad's The Fire And The Rain, the Assamese version of which was named Agnibrishti, British dramatist's Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise, the Assamese Adaptation of which was named Pancharatna, Girish Karnad's "Nagamandala" etc. Nagamandala was selected in the "Mahrindra Excellence in Theatre Awards 2012" with ten nominations and was staged in Delhi on 5 March 2012. Purush, a play by Padmashree Arun Sharma was staged in 2012 under the banner of her production.
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