50 Actors

It sometimes seems that there are only about 50 British actors working at any given time, and I am always spotting someone familiar from one context in another:

Oh look, the murderer is the woman who first played Inspector Linley's wife. (I hated her then, I hate her now.)

Hey, that's the same woman who was killed on the last episode of Midsomer Murders I watched.

And the cast of the series Rome shows up everywhere. The most recent sighting: two nights ago, Robert and I caught a quick glimpse on Longitude of the actor who played Brutus. I still have not come across the actors who were Antony or Atia's daughter, but really, it seems only a matter of time. (Yes, I could google them, but where's the fun in that.)

Today, I watched the 1945 movie version of the Agatha Christie story And Then There Were None. While this film was nothing special, I was basically overjoyed to find the actor who is the voice of the Caterpillar from Disney's Alice in Wonderland in the role of the butler. That nasal, pompous, comical, oddly compelling voice he used as the Caterpillar? He sounded exactly (or should I say, "exacitilly") the same in this movie and was hence immediately recognizable. I think I liked the movie better than I otherwise would have simply because of the Caterpillar association. (Move over, Joe Camel. Nobody else makes smoking look this cool. It's probably a good thing that smoking a hookah is not any kind of common practice in the US.)

The word "caterpillar" starts looking implausible about the second time you type it in a short period of time.