Posted May 2024 Simon James was brought up in Hampstead and read Philosophy at Sheffield University, where he helped the University cinema. He now lives near Swansea and has a passion for writing. You could say that my education in film and world cinema started quite by accident. This is the story of that happy […]
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 February 2024. John is a retired railwayman and cinephile who has been a Hampstead resident since 1966. He was a weekly patron of The Everyman until the new chain took over. I first discovered the charm of Hampstead as a teenager on a bike, and resolved to live there as soon as I could […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Posted July 2022. Adam Yamey is a retired dentist and an active author whose book, Beneath a Wide Sky: Hampstead and its Environs was published in 2022. It was at the Everyman that I went to the cinema for the first time in my life. My parents, who were not regular cinemagoers, decided that the […]
Posted March 2022. These cinephile friends kept a record of the films they saw at the Everyman In the early 1970s, despite the closures of many local cinemas in London, there was still a wide choice of cinemas showing a variety of programmes. As well as the circuit cinemas (ABC/Odeon/ Classic etc.) there was a […]
Posted by Kevin Brownlow January 2022 Eminent film maker and historian Kevin Brownlow has worked in film from the mid 1950s. His memories, from inside the world of film making, evoke the power of the cinematic image and the importance of the Everyman as ‘a course in cinema history’. The Everyman is probably […]
Posted by Michael Darvell January 2022 I have always been an avid filmgoer, even from a young age. I suppose as a child I was taken to the pictures by my parents, as the cinema was the only form of public entertainment available to most families. In the 1940s and ’50s cinema tickets were cheap, […]
Posted by Adrian Turner, January 2022 Adrian worked at the Everyman from 1971 to 1977, initially as Assistant Manager, and when Fairfax Jones died in in 1973, as Programmer. A full account of his time at the cinema can be found in Guest Blogs. The Everyman’s reputation lay in its programming of mostly foreign language […]