Stage Spy: Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins reunite for The Dresser

Sir Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser to be remade by the BBC starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Sir Ian McKellen

The Telegraph reports today that the BBC is planning a big new dramatisation of Ronald Harwood’s award-winning 1980 play The Dresser.

Directed by Sir Richard Eyre, the production will see the two Sirs reunited after working with each other way back in the Sixties at Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company at the Old Vic.

McKellen will play the dresser Norman, with Hopkins as the actor-manager “Sir”, believed to have been based on the great West End actor Sir Donald Wolfit.

The Dresser was famously turned into a 1983 movie directed by Peter Yates and starring Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay which garnered five Oscar nominations.

The play started life at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in 1980, transferring to the Queen’s Theatre and starring Freddie Jones as “Sir” and Tom Courtenay as Norman.

Ian McKellen has just completed a Broadway run alongside Patrick Stewart in a double bill of Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land.

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