1. Page 32 Daily RecordThursday,January 5,2012
Pals tell of violence
KILLER
CABBIE
FEARS
By Jeremy Armstrong
reporters@dailyrecord.co.uk
FRIENDS of the cabbie who
shot dead three women have
claimed he should never have
been allowed to keep guns.
Michael Atherton, 42,
murdered partner Sue
McGoldrick, her sister Alison
Turnbull, 44, and niece Tanya
Turnbull, 24, before turning
the gun on himself.
But it emerged yesterday
he was granted licences for
six weapons despite a history
of violence against Sue, 47.
A close friend of Sue said:
“He should never, ever have
been granted a licence
because of the history of
domestic violence.
“He was known to the
police as a result of their
relationship and that should
have been considered when
he applied.
“I know that there was
physical violence and threats
of violence.”
Yesterday, the killer’s
family spoke of their shock
at the slaughter in Horden,
Co Durham. Atherton’s son
Michael, 17, said: “We are
truly devastated. Me and my
sister have lost the best
mother in the world.
“We don’t understand why
my dad would do anything
like this as he was such a
good man.”
Durham police confirmed
weapons were taken from
Atherton in 2008 over mental
health fears but returned.
WIFE-BEATERJ Atherton
Preshascancerop
Argentina’s president Cristina
Fernandez de Kirchner, 58,
had surgery for thyroid
cancer yesterday. Supporters
rallied at the hospital where
she is being treated.
‘Igotmy
firstbig
break
standing
infor
Laurence
Olivierat
Kingsin
Edinburgh’
SIR ANTHONY HOPKINS ADDS NEW
HISTORYJ
Sir Anthony stood
in for Laurence
Olivier, right, in
The Dance of Death
at the Kings Theatre,
left
Page 33Daily RecordThursday,January 5,2012
By John Dingwall
j.dingwall@dailyrecord.co.uk
SCOTLAND has played host to
many of the greats before they
went on to become stage and
screen legends.
In the 1970s, Pierce Brosnan
appeared at Glasgow’s Citizens
Theatre, while Rupert Everett
claimed to have “got his equity
card” there and described it as
“one of Europe’s great theatres”.
Gary Oldman said his time there,
“saved me from hooliganism”.
Ciaran Hinds’ first job was the
back end of a panto horse at the
theatre, while Mike Myers learned
his trade at Edinburgh Festival.
And comedy great Stan Laurel
made his first professional stage
appearance in Glasgow.
Scottish steps for
our familiar faces
EARLY DAYSJ Everett and Oldman
W STRING TO HIS BOW WITH CLASSICAL ALBUM
Chopin’s Military Polonaise. Hopkins
said: “I was an only child and my
mother had much more faith in me
than my father did.
“He was a hardworking baker and a
bit cynical about my piano playing.
“I had some very complicated pieces
to practice.
“I was about 15 and my father used
to say, ‘For God’s sake, can’t you play
something lighter than that?’ So my
music career was abandoned.
“I didn’t have the technique for a
musician, nor the attention span.
“I was a bit all over the place
academically so I stumbled into the
acting profession, which is where I
have been for the last 50 years.”
He added: “Richard Burton was
already a big noise in Port Talbot when
I was a kid. He was pretty impressive.
“I remember when I asked him for
his autograph I thought I would like to
be like that. It’s how I stumbled into the
acting business.”
Hopkins realised his music might be
worth revisiting when one composition
was performed by Dutch violinist,
conductor and composer, Andre Rieu.
The actor said: “I had been
composing since I was a kid, doodling
around on the piano.
“I used to go into theatres three hours
before rehearsals, which has been my
habit all my life.
“If the rehearsals were at ten in the
morning, I would be in at seven.
“I’d go and and learn my lines for
rehearsal and play the piano.
“About two years ago, Stella and I
were watching television and a concert
of Andre in Vienna had been on.
“I mentioned that I wondered
whether I should send him a waltz that
I wrote and Stella contacted him.
“I got a message back to say he was
really keen and liked it.
“Then I was in Mexico City and he
sent me a recording on my phone of a
rehearsal with his orchestra. I put it
onto my iPad and it was beautiful.
“Last July it was played by Andre in
Vienna. He had adapted it for his
orchestra; a compilation of music I had
doodled around with since the Fifties.
“We went to Vienna and then I went
to Maastricht in Holland where he lives
and he played it there to 8000 people.
He added: “Things happen in life. I
had no idea I was going to be an actor.
“I thought I was going to end up in
the steelworks in Port Talbot.
“Things happen in a way and they
connect with something else. That’s the
way music happened for me.
“I had been writing music for years
and then I came out to California to
live and I have a piano out here.
“I played more than I have ever
played, for the pure pleasure of it.”
Hopkins, recently voted the greatest
living British actor ahead of Sir Sean
Connery and Sir Michael Caine, may
play down his achievements on stage
and screen, but his fans will be
delighted to hear he has no plans to
retire from films.
A diverse actor, his credits include
Remains Of The Day and playing
real-life characters Richard Nixon and
Pablo Picasso.
His next project is Alfred
Hitchock in a film about the
legendary director’s making of
classic thriller Psycho.
He’ll also play novelist Ernest
Hemingway in Hemingway &
Fuentes, in which Andy Garcia
co-stars and directs.
“That Alfred Hitchcock film
will be about the making of
Psycho and Hitchcock’s
psychological life,” Hopkins
revealed.
And on his new music venture,
he added: “I’m very pleased I’ve
found an extra string to my
fiddle.”
Anthony Hopkins – Composer is
released on January 16 and is
available through Amazon, HMV,
Play.com and iTunes. For more info
go to www.classicfm.com/
anthonyhopkins.
claim to fame, I guess, that I worked
with Laurence Olivier.”
This month the actor, best known for
his Oscar-winning role as cannibalistic
serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Silence
Of The Lambs, turns composer as he
releases an album of orchestral music
on January 16.
Titled Anthony Hopkins – Composer,
the album features an aria dedicated to
his third wife, Colombian-born Stella
Arroyave, who he credits as having
inspired the album.
Hopkins said: “Stella heard me
doodling around on the piano
about three years ago and said,
‘What is that? It’s a beautiful
piece of music’.
“I told her, ‘I don’t know. I’m
just making it up’. But she said
I couldn’t just dismiss it like
that and to write it down. So I
wrote out a score.
“The melody for the aria
came to me in a few
minutes. I got the guitar
sound on a synthesiser.
“I called it the Stella
Aria and I got all this
material together and
started shaping it.”
Hopkins’s love of
music began when he
was a six-year-old
student to a piano
teacher called Mrs
Jeffreys in Port Talbot,
South Wales.
But his father soon
grew tired of hearing the
teenager struggle through
SIR Anthony Hopkins has told of
his early stage career in Scotland,
where he got an early break as
understudy to Laurence Olivier,
widely regarded as the greatest
actor of the 20th century.
In the 1960s the 74-year-old
Welshman toured as a young unknown
with the Royal National Theatre,
making do as a sentry in Strindberg’s
The Dance Of Death, until Olivier was
struck down with appendicitis.
Speaking exclusively to The
Record, Hopkins recalled: “I used to
go on tours with the National
Theatre in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
“I love Glasgow, and Edinburgh is
a beautiful city.
“It was 40-odd years ago and it
seems like hundreds of years.
“We did Othello with Laurence
Olivier and Albert Finney.
“A year later I went back with
the National Theatre to the
Kings in Edinburgh and
Laurence Olivier was taken ill.
“I thought they would cancel,
but I had to go on for him.
“They say I was pretty good. I
was too young for the part and
very shaky, but I got on with it.
“I gave it full welly. The
audience seemed to like it.”
He added: “They gave me
an ovation. Maybe they
were just being kind.
“I did four
performances
while he was
ill and that
was my
DIVERSEZ As
Macbeth in 1972,
and at Sir Anthony
Hopkins in Concert
with Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra
in Cardiff last July