The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden is looking for a new part-time Archive Assistant:
Do you want to gain wide-ranging experience of working in an archive while helping people discover more about Roald Dahl and his stories? Do you want to be part of a dynamic and evolving Museum Team? If the answer is ‘yes’, you could be our new Archive Assistant.
What an amazing opportunity for a Dahl fan!
Remember the child stars from Matilda? They all look very different now – This is a fun article with “then vs now” photos of the child cast of Matilda. I think Bruce Bogtrotter is definitely the most surprising. Maybe the Trunchbull’s chocolate cake put him off sweets for life? 😂
Awww, very cool story. A student noticed that one of the Dahl books in his school library was signed by the man himself. Now the school has it framed and displayed in pride of place in their recently refurbished library!
Variety has published an exclusive report that Hugh Bonneville (from Downton Abbey) is set to star as Roald Dahl in an untitled biopic about the author and his wife, Patricia Neal, from Goldcrest Films.
A bittersweet, comedic story focusing on Dahl’s marriage to actress Patricia Neal, the story moves between New York, England and Los Angeles in the early 1960s, a time when Dahl struggled to write some of his most famous works and Neal returned to acting with “Hud,” for which she won the best actress Oscar.
The early 60’s should mean that we see Dahl writing James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which should be fun.
What do you think about Bonneville’s casting? I’m a little disappointed. I’m sure he’s a good enough actor, but he really doesn’t look very much like Dahl. There’s no word yet on who will play Patricia Neal or the other famous people sure to crop up in the story. (I can’t help but imagine Sophie Dahl playing her own grandmother!)
This is one of the strangest things I’ve seen. It’s interesting though, and I can’t imagine the practice it took to get it right!
Why 1990’s ‘The Witches’ is the Scariest Children’s Horror Film Ever Made – Bloody Disgusting!
Great blog post about The Witches and what made it so scary to its young audience. The film has the distinction of being the last film that Jim Henson worked on before his death. Personally, I’d rank it up there with The Dark Crystal as one of the scariest films aimed at children. What do you think?
Roald Dahl is in the news as British foreign secretary Boris Johnson calls Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn a “mutton-headed, old mugwump.” The press had a field day with it, trying to figure out what in the world he meant!
When questioned, Johnson said he thought the word was from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “I think Willy Wonka says it either to the parents of Violet Beauregarde or Augustus Gloop.” Of course, true Dahl fans know that isn’t quite the case! The word actually appears in the book’s sequel Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. And in The Twits, Dahl used a form of the word as the name of Muggle-wump the Monkey.
EW has a preview of the new Broadway production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with lots of great photos!
The official Dahl site has an interesting blog post about first-draft Charlie material that was later cut before publication. For example:
‘The Warming Candy Room’ [was] described as ‘like the engine room of a gigantic old-fashioned ship’, created red sweets that will ‘warm your entire body even on the coldest of days’
I also loved the idea of “enormous snow-white polar bears made out of white chocolate”!
There are photographs of Dahl’s original hand-written manuscripts as well. If you’re a Wonka fan, you should definitely check it out.
Many thanks to Dahl fan Adam Holownia, who sent us a link to a video he’d created. He said:
To commemorate “Roald Dahl Day” earlier this week celebrating 100 years since his birth, I’ve just created an animation on his life based on the authorised biography “Storyteller“.
