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Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke bring everyone’s favourite angst-ridden teenagers to the big screen
Heat Harry Enfield has been fitted with an electronic penis for his role as Kevin the teenager in Kevin And Perry – The Movie, currently shooting in London and Ibiza. Enfield has described the film variously as an “English Wayne’s World” or “A rites-of-passage story, in an international setting.” It sees Enfield and co-star Kathy Burke as the alienated, virginal teenage 16-year-olds flying to the Balearic dance capital to get laid and become “top mixmaster DJs”. Rhys Ifans. Spike from Notting Hill, plays the pair’s DJ hero, the rabidly egotistical Eyeball Paul. A key prop in the movie is the electronic device which simulates the erections that constantly pop up…
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Burke’s peerage
The Times The perfect connections: Gary Oldman, Harry Enfield, Meryl Streep. The perfect credentials: best actress gong, Time Out award, adoring public. Yet Kathy Burke is a lady unafraid to act unladylike. Two weeks ago, Kathy Burke was shopping in Waitrose on London’s Holloway Road. As she nudged her trolley along the aisles of fresh fruit, pet food and microwave dinners, she was stopped by a series of strangers. Some told the 34-year-old actress how much they laughed at her sex starved, wig-wearing harridan in Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, the sitcom which has just finished its successful run on BBC2; others, including one slightly stiff middle-aged man, congratulated Burke on her recent portrayal of…
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Marey, who cleans airports and sings with a band
Preview Online Marey is the only one of the seven characters to have been born and bred in Camden: a working-class Londoner with a dead-end job cleaning Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Four, but whose main source of pleasure is singing with a band in a pub. Marey meets Danny when he turns up at Terminal Four with a spare ticket to Jamaica (his former other half’s honeymoon treat) and offers it to her. But he’s too drunk to be allowed on the plane, so they end up drinking some more and going to bed together. It doesn’t last. Nor does Marey’s fling with Cameron or her liaison with Liam. But she…
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Kathy comes home
The Irish Post London-Irish actress Kathy Burke has popped up again on our TV screens, this time in the form of an orange-bewigged flatmate nightmare hunting for a man. Joe Crilly reports. Gimme Gimme Gimme is an odd couple scenario scripted by acclaimed playwright Jonathan Harvey. Kathy Burke plays down-at-heel Linda, who is hungry for love and passion. She shares a flat with her gay friend, Tom, played by James Dreyfus, who also hankers after the ideal mate, like the lyrics of the Abba song, ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight’. In last week’s first episode Linda, discovering a strange man in their flat after a night on the town,…
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The gay, the sad and the ugly
Kathy Burke says she knows her place when it comes to casting. And it’s not among the beautiful people. The Independent If you thought that Waynetta was a slob, Linda, the character Kathy Burke plays in a new BBC2 sitcom, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, is even more gross than the shell-suited, chain-smoking wife of Wayne she inhabits for Harry Enfield and Chums. Life for Linda and her gay flatmate Tom (James Dreyfus from The Thin Blue Line) is one long sex, drugs and rock’n’roll perma-bender. Done up in a ginger fright-wig and white-rimmed clown glasses, Linda gets so out of it her only way of knowing whether she ended the blinder…
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Bold as brass, that’s our Kathy
The Evening Standard ‘I think if I was a bloke I’d be quite f***ed up because I’ve got a lot of male in me. It’s because I’m a bird that I’m not. Which is just as well, really.’ Kathy Burke lights another ciggie and looks across Old Compton Street to the door of a prominent sex shop. She’s people watching – one of her favourite pastimes – from her usual table in a Soho café. ‘We sometimes catch the eye of some bloke coming out. They always look embarrassed.’ Burke has been described as a ‘national treasure’. And ‘the best British character actress of her generation’. And ‘Rita the Rottweiler’.…
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Meet the romantic lead in the new Merchant-Ivory film. (Just kidding)
The Observer Common sense and Equity unemployment statistics prove acting is a madly competitive business. Yet the way actors tell it, this same profession breeds nothing but solidarity, tolerance and mutual admiration among its members. Only occasionally does someone break rank. In a letter to the London magazine Time Out last October, replying to comments made in an interview by Helena Bonham Carter, the actress Kathy Burke wrote: ‘As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes, I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter (wholly pledged member of the very pretty upper-middle classes): shut up you stupid c-.’ But The Observer has enough scruples about printing the f-word, let alone the c-word.…
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With most television stars, their small-screen personas are larger than life. With Kathy Burke, it’s the other way round
The Independent On the front door of Kathy Burke’s house, there is a sticker of a slavering bull terrier. Perhaps for fear that this should give too menacing an impression, there are a couple of stickers of guinea-pigs as well. Inside the airy Islington council maisonette, a sly glance at the bookshelves of the best British character actress of her generation reveals – among other impressive tomes – Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, a slang thesaurus and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In brazen contravention of the international actor’s bookshelf charter, these have the look of having been read. If I was a star of stage and screen, currently directing the…
