Posted April 2024 Marianne Gray is a freelance film journalist and author. She is from South Africa but has been a Londoner from the late 60s. She was president of the British Critics Circle and is a director of Peckhamplex, an independent multiplex cinema. We chatted on the phone about her connections with the Everyman. […]

Posted March 2024 Michael Brooke is a writer, editor and DVD/Blue-Ray producer who specialises in British and Central and East European cinema. We met for this interview at the BFI South Bank bar before a screening of Green Border by Agnieszka Holland the opening night film of the annual Kinoteka Polish Film Festival. Although Michael […]

Posted March 2024 One wet February morning, Michael and I met over coffee in the Everyman’s plush lounge, so different from the shabby cinema of our memories. Once a civil servant, now an academic and writer, Michael recalls with pleasure his experiences at the Everyman Cinema which played such a vital part in Hampstead’s vibrant […]

The Everyman: a film education A native North Londoner and senior manager at the University of the Arts, Paul has been a passionate cinephile all his life. To this day he never misses the London Film Festival when he averages at least fourteen films a week. His memories of the Everyman in the late 1980s […]

Pete Bell was a projectionist at three legendary arthouse cinemas; the Everyman, the Electric and the NFT (now BFI South Bank) where he still works part time and where, over coffee and croissants, he reminisced about his working life. His career in projection started at the Electric in 1978. The iconic cinema on Portobello Road […]

This blog consists of some anecdotes about Corinne Gilson’s time as a projectionist at the Everymanfor about 15 years from 1986. They were sent to me by her husband, Gilles Mulette, in April 2023,following his discovery of the Everyman website. Sadly, she had died two years previously but he waskeen to tell her story as […]

Posted 8 June 2023 In 1933, when the Everyman Cinema was opened by James Fairfax-Jones, he shared the premises with Consuelo de Reyes, Hilary’s mother, who was a community theatre director and playwright. This arrangement lasted until 1948 when Consuelo died but the working relationship between the two families continued, as Fairfax-Jones took over the […]

Posted 28th April 2023 A walk through the Everyman today shows all the trademark features which have made the Everyman chain, with its emphasis on the hospitality and service side of film exhibition, so successful. The Hampstead Everyman now boasts two screens, one in the original main auditorium and one in the basement, each with […]

This blog has made copious use of a set of Everyman programmes which are on this website in the programmes section. Many thanks to Nick Davey who kindly scanned his precious collection to make these available. The Everyman Cinema Theatre first opened its doors to the public on Boxing Day 1933 with René Clair’s Le […]

By 1959 Ingmar Bergman had become the most popular arthouse director in London with no fewerthan ten films screening across the capital. The appeal of this remarkably prolific Swedish filmmaker,whose international reputation was forged at the festivals of Cannes and Venice, rested on hisdistinctive directorial style and the tackling of fundamental themes of love, death […]

Special thanks to Oliver Hylton for the extracts from the wartime logbook Britain’s declaration of war in September 1939 caused the temporary closure of all cinemas for two weeks. The Everyman re-opened on Monday 25 September with the British-produced film Stolen Life (1939) followed by a series of French films including Hotel du Nord (1938), […]

Posted May 2022 Hassanah Alice (hereafter Alice), was born in 1946, the youngest of the four children of James andTess Fairfax-Jones who had run the Everyman since 1933. Her memories of the cinema in the 1950sand 60s are accompanied by fond recollections of her parents and of growing up in Hampstead. Afteran adventurous life of […]

Posted March 2022 I met Caroline Iliffe, oldest child of Everyman founders Jim and Tess Fairfax-Jones over coffee in her Camden Town home. Born in 1936 Caroline became an architect, as well as a wife and mother to three daughters. Still active and vibrant, she started an art degree in her seventies and graduated in […]

Margaret O’Brien posted December 2021 This blog is based on a most enjoyable conversation with Peter Howden in the bar of the National Film Theatre (now called BFI South Bank), in November 2021. We talked about his time as manager and programmer of the Everyman, a position which lasted from 1981 to 1998.  I first […]

Margaret O’Brien posted August 2021 Going to the pictures In the 1930s, when cinema was central to everyday life, meant first run Hollywood or British films at one of the big circuit cinemas like Odeon, ABC, or Gaumont, or maybe a visit to a local independent which showed second run or older films. The Everyman […]