Robert Stephens

The story of Henry Purcell.

This is a dramatisation of the true story of Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, a solicitor and magistrate's clerk who lived in the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. In 1921 he was arrested and charged with poisoning his domineering wife, Catherine, and later attempting to poison a business rival, Oswald Martin, by administering arsenic to them. At his trial, Armstrong claimed that he had bought the arsenic simply to kill the dandelions on his lawn. However he was convicted of murder and executed in 1922.

Upon her father's death, a woman comes into emotional and psychological conflict with her young lover, her overbearing sister and her alcoholic stepmother.

Turn-of-the-century love story centered around a young doctor and the emergence of modern science.

Rich and languorous, this adaptation of George Eliot's classic tale perfectly evokes rural England in the 18th Century. But beneath the tranquil surface of this pastoral idyll run deep passions and the bitter gall of betrayal.

A young writer in 1939 Warsaw faces the conflict of acting his age or relapsing into childhood during the brink of World War II. Based on the famous novel Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz.

A less-than-qualified and far-from-perfect priest is mistakenly named the new pope. As the pontiff, he must deal with Vatican corruption, the Mob and the reappearance of his old lover.

Rose Sellars is a middle-aged woman who falls in love with a widower. However, his children believe that their father is too old to start a new relationship.

A famous movie actor claims that he has written a book. As result, a real author, not a very well known writer, vengefully kills him but then dies as a result of an accident. Next, they both find themselves in after-life, where souls of all famous people are gathered.

A feisty 17th-century Scotswoman falls in love with a despised landowner, to the dismay of her father.

Jamie Graham, a privileged English boy, is living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners into prison camps. Jamie is captured with an American sailor, who looks out for him while they are in the camp together. Even though he is separated from his parents and in a hostile environment, Jamie maintains his dignity and youthful spirits, providing a beacon of hope for the others held captive with him.

On the isle of Rhodes, Katherine, an expatriate English photographer, lives with her daughter. A young local wants to encourage tourism, so he commissions a sculpture of the Unknown Tourist for the town square; the sculptor he brings to Rhodes is Kate's ex-husband. Also there to see Kate is Sharp, an aging antiquarian and her dear friend. He has something important to tell her. As Kate, her ex, and Sharp sort out things that go back years, two English tourists bumble about, one thinking he's fallen in love with Kate, his wife thinking she's found her own lover. A rare vase, a spy, old friendships, the statue's unveiling, and off-hand English sorting-out play into the resolution.

The story of "The Tolpuddle Martyrs". A group of 19th century English farm labourers who formed one of the first trade unions and started a campaign to receive fair wages.

Fortunes of War is a 1987 BBC television adaptation of Olivia Manning's cycle of novels Fortunes of War. It stars Kenneth Branagh as Guy Pringle, lecturer in English Literature in Bucharest during the early part of the Second World War, and Emma Thompson as his wife Harriet. Other cast members included Ronald Pickup, Robert Stephens, Alan Bennett, Philip Madoc and Rupert Graves. The series stays relatively faithful to the original novels, with no notable departures from their plot.

The adventure begins when Kay Harker, returning home for the school holidays, meets two clergymen on his train, who subsequently pick his pocket. He then happens to meet an old Punch and Judy man at the station.

The story of the last two years the inhabitants of the islands of St Kilda (far off the west coast of Scotland) spent there, before being evacuated at their own request. This film, originally shown at the London Film Festival, marked the screen debut of writer and director Bill Bryden, who made his theatre reputation directing at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre and the National Theatre. In persuasive style.

A new teacher at a highly problematic comprehensive school feels that corporal punishment may just be inflaming the problems, and so begins to campaign against it.

In this eerie, atmospheric tale, a young woman is on a train when she sees some people she thinks she knows from her childhood. On arriving home, her husband tells her that a certain countess has died. At that point, the film cuts to a scene of the countess singing in a mausoleum while the visual image of the graveyard's many tombstones passes before one's eyes. Back home, the husband -- also a "father-figure" -- is looking over his collection of wooden angels. Some time elapses, and he surreptitiously sees a thief come down through the chimney, steal some things, and then leave. To combat any recurrence, he builds an iron, escape-proof cage around the fireplace, and then goes away on a trip. When he comes back, he finds the thief dead in the cage. Thus far, the camera has only shown the husband in profile or from the back. Then there is another story about a young girl, with a spiteful, nasty mother, who is trying to cope with her own attraction to a man.

King Leontes of Bohemia suspects his wife, Hermione, and his friend, Polixenes, of betraying him. When he forces Polixenes to flee for his life, Leontes sets in motion a chain of events that lead to death, a ferocious bear, an infant left in the snow, young love, and a statue coming to life.

Jan and Meg Citron are on holiday in Germany. Their car is stopped by the police. A simple traffic offence? But their seemingly innocent past is ripped open and life will never be the same again.

Alan Bennett's play about the mid-life crisis of an estate agent.

Berlin, Germany, 1935. The day Karl Weiss, a Jewish painter, and Inga Helms, a Christian woman, marry, is the one in which both of them and the entire Weiss family are caught up in the maelstrom of the Nazi regime, the storms of World War II and the horrors of the criminal Final Solution, the Holocaust, the Shoah; while Erik Dorf, an ambitious lawyer, undertakes his fall into hell at the hands of the sinister Reinhard Heydrich.

Playwright Charles Watson entertains his niece Lily by telling her about the adventures of Philibert.Both these people have something to do with Philibert.

A physician sues a novelist for publishing statements implicating the doctor in Nazi war crimes.

At his mother's funeral, stuffy bank clerk Henry Pulling meets his Aunt Augusta, an elderly eccentric with more-than-shady dealings who pulls him along on a whirlwind adventure as she attempts to rescue an old lover.

Hugo is a brilliant turn-of-the-century scientist, loved and respected by his family and friends, admired by his colleagues. But he is a man quickly becoming obsessed with a curious and frightening question... what is the mysterious apparition found in the photographs of his dying subjects?

The play by William Shakespeare.

A film of the National Theatre's presentation of the Shakespeare play.

An epic presentation of the turbulent days leading to the Russian Revolution. Based on the classic work by John Reed, this important documentary makes use of rare footage and little-known information, stirringly narrated by Orson Welles.

Morgan, an aggressive and self-admitted dreamer, a fantasist who uses his flights of fancy as refuge from external reality, where his unconventional behavior lands him in a divorce from his wife, Leonie, trouble with the police and, ultimately, incarceration in a lunatic asylum.

The compère of a seedy strip club struggles to keep one step ahead of the bookies to whom he owes money.

At the end of WW2, a compassionate Dutch policeman helps smuggle a Jewish woman into British Palestine.

After a lengthy voyage, Capt. Bart (Ken Scott) docks his ship in a London harbor and is given a new mission by British Admiralty: capture the notorious Henry Morgan (Robert Stephens), a pirate who has been wreaking havoc throughout the Caribbean. After recruiting some former shipmates for his crew, Capt. Bart sets sail in search of the infamous buccaneer, and is joined by a beautiful female stowaway in the process.

A young female designer is on the brink of an affair with a married male executive at the company where she works. The film tells the story of their illicit lunch hour rendezvous.

Captains John Fellows and Henry Wynne-Walton finish their Army training at Sandhurst Military Academy and are sent to the Middle-East. John is to lead a parachute battalion while Henry is put in charge of a platoon of armoured cars of the Household Cavalry. John is constantly being told by his father, an ex-Guards officer that he is not as good as his brother who was killed during the war.

Unbeknownst to him, a soldier is sent on a doomed mission because of the high likelihood of him divulging secrets if captured and tortured.

Hell's Bells is a British television comedy series made by BBC Television starring Derek Nimmo as Dean "Selwyn" Makepeace which first broadcast in 1986. Only one series was made.