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He devised The Boy With Wings as a superhero story “because when I was young, there weren’t any who looked like me”.
Lenny Henry Lenny Henry
At home in Oxfordshire he keeps a copy of The Sopranos scripts on his bedside table, to help him sharpen his showrunning work on an imminent ITV drama about the Windrush generation. He’s about to drive away from the British Library in a taxi that will take this knight of the realm – he became Sir Lenny in 2015 – to an afternoon engagement. He says that one acquaintance who read Rising to the Surface reported back that it contained too much whingeing. Luckily, they have Wilma, the Wizard's Wife, and Zack, the wisecracking Zebracorn, to help them on their journey.However, stories are magical things – and it is not long before the pair discover that the Nine Dominions are of course real. Though Henry has patches of grey in his hair and beard, and walks with a slight stoop, he could pass without much difficulty for a fortysomething. They’re sat in their pants, eating Hobnobs and looking at their computers, slagging off anything different. My partner Lisa [Makin, a theatre producer] thinks I’ve got to figure out a way to be more choosy,” says Henry, who recently turned 64. Recently, with the broadcast of The Rings of Power, there has been some bleak and predictable criticism about the casting of actors who look like Henry as hobbits, elves, dwarves and such.
The Book of Legends by Sir Lenny Henry - Pan Macmillan
In a Netflix adaptation of Sandman that debuted this year, Death is played by a British woman of colour, Kirby Howell-Baptiste. In Rising to the Surface, which tracks the story of his life up to the turn of the millennium, Henry acknowledges he sometimes let the starrier side of his life take over. When he was a boy, he continues, he was given the same piece of advice by his mum that a lot of black parents give to children.
Following the mysterious disappearance four years ago of their father, twelve-year-old twins Bran and Fran are living with their mum in a small Midlands town.
Book of Legends | BookTrust The Book of Legends | BookTrust
The twins travel from their home through mystical lands, facing many adversaries from wicked fairies to Viking warriors, and meet lots of new friends along the way, such as the fabulous Zebracorn. Fran and Bran end up on a quest looking for their parents who have disappeared - taken by hooked lightening. Awards are a litmus test for what’s happening, for what’s in the air, which talents are being elevated, what shows are being lionised, what films are being slept on. His formative years were spent in working men's clubs, where his act was as a young black man impersonating white characters such as the Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em character Frank Spencer (whom he impersonated on New Faces).The children find themselves left with eccentric local bookseller Madge as a guardian and their mother’s book of fantastical tales for comfort, unsure what to do next.
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