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Crazy Eights

Crazy Eights is a shedding-type card game for two to seven players and the best known American member of the Eights Group which also includes Pig and Spoons. The object of the game is to be the first player to discard all of their cards. The game is similar to Switch, Mau Mau or Whot!.

Originally this was played primarily by children with the left over cards not used in Euchre. Now a standard 52-card deck is used when there are five or fewer players. When there are more than five players, two decks are shuffled together and all 104 cards are used.

Origins
The game first appeared as Eights in the 1930s, and the name Crazy Eights dates to the 1940s, derived from the United States military designation for discharge of mentally unstable soldiers, Section 8. It may have derived from the German game of Mau-Mau.

There are many variations of the basic game, under names including Craits, Last Card, Switch, and Black Jack. Bartok, Mao, Taki, and Uno add further elements to the game.

David Parlett describes Crazy Eights as "not so much a game as a basic pattern of play on which a wide variety of changes can be rung," noting that players can easily invent and explore new rules.

Basic play
Five cards are dealt to each player (or seven in a two-player game). The remaining cards of the deck are placed face down at the center of the table as the stock pile. The top card is then turned face up to start the game as the first card in the discard pile.

Players discard by matching rank or suit with the top card of the discard pile, starting with the player left of the dealer. They can also play any 8 at any time, which allows them to declare the suit that the next player is to play; that player must then follow the named suit or play another 8. If a player is unable to play, that player draws cards from the stock pile until a play can be made, or until the stock pile is exhausted. If the player cannot play when the stock pile is exhausted, that player must pass the turn to the player on the left. Other variations have players limit the maximum number of cards drawn. A player may draw from the stock pile at any time, even when holding one or more playable cards.

As an example: If the top card on the discard pile is, the next player can:
 * 1) play any 6 (i.e., or )
 * 2) play any club
 * 3) play any 8, then declare a new suit
 * 4) draw from the stockpile until a play can be made

If the stock pile runs out, all played cards except for the top one are reshuffled to form a new stock.

The game ends as soon as one player has emptied their hand. That player collects a payment from each opponent equal to the point score of the cards remaining in that opponent's hand. 8s score 50, court cards 10 and all other cards face value. If the players run out of cards in the deck, the player with the lowest point score in their hand scores the difference between that hand and each opponent's hand.

The winner of the game is the first player to reach a specific number of points. The number of points needed to win is calculated by multiplying the number of players by 50. So, for two players it is 100 points, three players 150, four 200, five 250, six 300 and for seven players 350.

Variations
Card game historian John McLeod describes Crazy Eights as "one of the easiest games to modify by adding variations", and many variant rules exist. Common rules applied to cards include:

 * Queens skip: Playing a Queen causes the next player to miss their turn.
 * Aces reverse direction: Playing an Ace reverses the direction of play.
 * Draw 2: Playing a two forces the next player to draw two cards, unless they can play another two. Multiple twos "stack"; if a two is played in response to a two, the next player must draw four.

If the game ends on a special card, that card's rule is not applied.

A popular variant of the game in the United States is Crazy Eights Countdown, where players start with a score of 8. A player's score determines how many cards they are dealt at the start of each round, and which rank of card is wild for them. (So initially, all players are dealt eight cards and 8s are wild for everyone; after one round, one player will be dealt seven cards and 7s will be wild for them, but 8s will be wild for everyone else.) The first player to reduce their score to zero wins the game.

title: Crazy Eights


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Chicory

Common chicory (Cichorium intybus) is a somewhat woody, perennial herbaceous plant of the family Asteraceae, usually with bright blue flowers, rarely white or pink. Native to Europe, it has been introduced to the Americas and Australia.

Many varieties are cultivated for salad leaves, chicons (blanched buds), or roots (var. sativum), which are baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute and food additive. In the 21st century, inulin, an extract from chicory root, has been used in food manufacturing as a sweetener and source of dietary fiber. Chicory is also grown as a forage crop for livestock.

Description
When flowering, chicory has a tough, grooved, and more or less hairy stem. It can grow to 1.5 m tall. The leaves are stalked, lanceolate and unlobed; they range from 7.5-32 cm in length (smallest near the top) and 2-8 cm wide. The flower heads are 3-5 cm wide, and usually light blue or lavender; it has also rarely been described as white or pink. Of the two rows of involucral bracts, the inner is longer and erect, the outer is shorter and spreading. It flowers from March until October. The seed has small scales at the tip.

Chemistry
Substances which contribute to the plant's bitterness are primarily the two sesquiterpene lactones, lactucin and lactucopicrin. Other components are aesculetin, aesculin, cichoriin, umbelliferone, scopoletin, 6,7-dihydrocoumarin, and further sesquiterpene lactones and their glycosides. Around 1970, it was discovered that the root contains up to 20% inulin, a polysaccharide similar to starch.

Names
Common chicory is also known as blue daisy, blue dandelion, blue sailors, blue weed, bunk, coffeeweed, cornflower, hendibeh, horseweed, ragged sailors, succory, wild bachelor's buttons, and wild endive. ("Cornflower" is also commonly applied to Centaurea cyanus.) Common names for varieties of var. foliosum include endive, radicchio, radichetta, Belgian endive, French endive, red endive, sugarloaf, and witloof (or witlof).

Distribution and habitat
Chicory is native to western Asia, North Africa, and Europe. It lives as a wild plant on roadsides in Europe. The plant was brought to North America by early European colonists. It is also common in China, and Australia, where it has become widely naturalized.

It is more common in areas with abundant rain.

Ecology
Chicory is both a cultivated crop and a weedy plant with a cosmopolitan distribution. Analysis of introduced weedy populations in North America has revealed that naturalized weedy chicory is partially descended from domesticated cultivars.

Chicory grows in roadsides, waste places, and other disturbed areas, and can survive in lawns due to its ability to resprout from its low basal rosette of leaves. It typically does not enter undisturbed natural areas. It most prefers limestone soils, but tolerates an array of conditions. Bees, butterflies, and flies feed upon it. Chicory is classified as a drought tolerant plant.

Culinary
The entire plant is edible.

Raw chicory leaves are 92% water, 5% carbohydrates, 2% protein, and contain negligible fat (table). In a 100-gram (3½ oz) reference amount, raw chicory leaves provide 23 cal and significant amounts (more than 20% of the Daily Value) of vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C, some B vitamins, and manganese. Vitamin E and calcium are present in moderate amounts. Raw endive is 94% water and has low nutrient content.

Root chicory
Root chicory (Cichorium intybus var. sativum) has long been cultivated in Europe as a coffee substitute. The roots are baked, roasted, ground, and used as an additive, especially in the Mediterranean region (where the plant is native). As a coffee additive, it is also mixed in Indian filter coffee and in parts of Southeast Asia, South Africa, and the southern United States, particularly in New Orleans. In France, a mixture of 60% chicory and 40% coffee is sold under the trade name Ricoré. It has been more widely used during economic crises such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and during World War II in Continental Europe. Chicory, with sugar beet and rye, was used as an ingredient of the East German Mischkaffee (mixed coffee), introduced during the "East German coffee crisis" of 1976–1979. It is also added to coffee in Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian cuisines.

Some beer brewers use roasted chicory to add flavor to stouts (commonly expected to have a coffee-like flavor). Others have added it to strong blond Belgian-style ales, to augment the hops, making a witloofbier, from the Dutch name for the plant.

The roots can also be cooked like parsnips.

Wild
While edible raw, wild chicory leaves usually have a bitter taste, especially the older leaves. The flavor is appreciated in certain cuisines, such as in the Ligurian and Apulian regions of Italy and also in the southern part of India. In Ligurian cuisine, wild chicory leaves are an ingredient of preboggion and in the Apulian region, wild chicory leaves are combined with fava bean puree in the traditional local dish fave e cicorie selvatiche. In Albania, the leaves are used as a spinach substitute, mainly served simmered and marinated in olive oil, or as ingredient for fillings of byrek. In Greece a variety of wild chicory found in Crete and known as stamnagathi (spiny chicory) is used as a salad served with olive oil and lemon juice.

By cooking and discarding the water, the bitterness is reduced, after which the chicory leaves may be sautéed with garlic, anchovies, and other ingredients. In this form, the resulting greens might be combined with pasta or accompany meat dishes.

Cultivated
Chicory may be cultivated for its leaves, usually eaten raw as salad leaves. Cultivated chicory is generally divided into three types, of which there are many varieties:

 * Radicchio usually has variegated red or red and green leaves. Some only refer to the white-veined red-leaved type as radicchio, also known as red endive and red chicory. It has a bitter and spicy taste, which mellows when it is grilled or roasted. It can also be used to add color and zest to salads. It is largely used in Italy in different varieties, the most famous being the ones from Treviso (known as radicchio rosso di Treviso), from Verona (radicchio di Verona), and Chioggia (radicchio di Chioggia), which are classified as an IGP.  It is also common in Greece, where it is known as radiki and mainly boiled in salads, and is used in pies.

 * Belgian endive is known in Dutch as witloof or witlof ("white leaf"), indivia in Italy, endivias in Spain, chicory in the UK, as witlof in Australia, endive in France and Canada, and chicon in parts of northern France, in Wallonia and (in French) in Luxembourg. It has a small head of cream-colored, bitter leaves. The harvested root is allowed to sprout indoors in the absence of sunlight, which prevents the leaves from turning green and opening up (etiolation). It is often sold wrapped in blue paper to protect it from light, so as to preserve its pale color and delicate flavor. The smooth, creamy white leaves may be served stuffed, baked, boiled, cut, or cooked in a milk sauce, or simply cut raw. The tender leaves are slightly bitter; the whiter the leaf, the less bitter the taste. The harder inner part of the stem at the bottom of the head can be cut out before cooking to prevent bitterness. Belgium exports chicon/witloof to over 40 countries. The technique for growing these blanched endives was accidentally discovered in the 1850s at the Botanical Garden of Brussels in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, Belgium. Today France is the largest producer of endive.

 * Catalogna chicory (Cichorium intybus var. foliosum), also known as puntarelle, includes a whole subfamily (some varieties from Belgian endive and some from radicchio) of chicory and is used throughout Italy.

Although leaf chicory is often called "endive", true endive (Cichorium endivia) is a different species in the same genus, distinct from Belgian endive.

Chicory root and inulin
Inulin is mainly found in the plant family Asteraceae as a storage carbohydrate (for example Jerusalem artichoke, dahlia, yacon, etc.). It is used as a sweetener in the food industry, with 10% of the sweetening power of sucrose and is sometimes added to yogurts as a 'prebiotic'.

Fresh chicory root may contain 13–23% inulin as a percentage of its total carbohydrate content.

Traditional use
Chicory root contains essential oils similar to those found in plants in the related genus Tanacetum. In alternative medicine, chicory has been listed as one of the 38 plants used to prepare Bach flower remedies.

Forage
Chicory is highly digestible for ruminants and has a low fiber concentration. Chicory roots were once considered an "excellent substitute for oats" for horses due to their protein and fat content. Chicory contains a low quantity of reduced tannins that may increase protein utilization efficiency in ruminants.

Some tannins reduce intestinal parasites. Dietary chicory may be toxic to internal parasites, with studies of ingesting chicory by farm animals having lower worm burdens, leading to its use as a forage supplement. Although chicory might have originated in France, Italy and India, much development of chicory for use with livestock has been undertaken in New Zealand.

Forage varieties

 * 'Puna' ('Grasslands Puna'): Developed in New Zealand, Grasslands Puna is well adapted to different climates, being grown from Alberta, Canada, New Mexico, Florida to Australia. It is resistant to bolting, which leads to high nutrient levels in the leaves in spring. It also is able to quickly come back after grazing.

 * 'Forage Feast': A variety from France used for human consumption and also for wildlife plots, where animals such as deer might graze. It is resistant to bolting. It is very cold-hardy, and being lower in tannins than other forage varieties, is suitable for human consumption.
 * 'Choice': has been bred for high winter and early-spring growth activity, and lower amounts of lactucin and lactone, which are believed to taint milk. It is also use for seeding deer wildlife plots.
 * 'Oasis': was bred for increased lactone rates for the forage industry, and for higher resistance to fungal diseases such as Sclerotinia (mainly s. minor and S. sclerotiorum. )
 * 'Puna II': This variety is more winter-active than most others, which leads to greater persistence and longevity.
 * 'Grouse': A New Zealand variety, it is used as a planting companion for forage brassicas. More prone to early flowering than other varieties, it has higher crowns more susceptible to overbrowsing.
 * 'Six Point': A United States variety, winter hardy and resistant to bolting. It is very similar to Puna.

Others varieties known include; 'Chico', 'Ceres Grouse', 'Good Hunt', 'El Nino' and 'Lacerta'.

History
The plant has a history reaching back to ancient Egypt. In ancient Rome, a dish called puntarelle was made with chicory sprouts. It was mentioned by Horace in reference to his own diet, which he describes as very simple: Me pascunt olivae, me cichorea levesque malvae ("As for me, olives, endives, and light mallows provide sustenance"). Chicory was first described as a cultivated plant in the 17th century. When coffee was introduced to Europe, the Dutch thought that chicory made a lively addition to the bean drink.

In 1766, Frederick the Great banned the importation of coffee into Prussia, leading to the development of a coffee substitute by Brunswick innkeeper Christian Gottlieb Förster (died 1801), who gained a concession in 1769–70 to manufacture it in Brunswick and Berlin. By 1795, 22 to 24 factories of this type were in Brunswick. Lord Monboddo describes the plant in 1779 as the "chicoree", which the French cultivated as a pot herb. In Napoleonic Era France, chicory frequently appeared as an adulterant in coffee, or as a coffee substitute. Chicory was also adopted as a coffee substitute by Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, and has become common in the United States. It was also used in the United Kingdom during the Second World War, where Camp Coffee, a coffee and chicory essence, has been on sale since 1885.

In the U.S., chicory root has long been used as a coffee substitute in prisons. By the 1840s, the port of New Orleans was the second-largest importer of coffee (after New York). Louisianans began to add chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades during the American Civil War cut off the port of New Orleans, thereby creating a long-standing tradition.

In culture
Chicory is mentioned in certain ancient Chinese texts about silk production. Amongst traditional recommendations the primary caretaker of the silkworms, the "silkworm mother", should not eat or even touch it.

The chicory flower is often seen as inspiration for the Romantic concept of the Blue Flower (e.g. in German language Blauwarte ≈ blue lookout by the wayside). Similar to the springwort and moonwort, it could open locked doors, according to European folklore. However, the plant must be gathered at noon or midnight on St. James's Day and cut with gold while being silent, or else one would die afterwards.

Chicory was also believed to grant its possessor invisibility.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Chicory


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Michael Gambon

Sir Michael John Gambon (19 October 1940 – 27 September 2023) was an Irish-English  actor. Gambon started his acting career with Laurence Olivier as one of the original members of the Royal National Theatre. Over his six-decade-long career, he received three Olivier Awards and four BAFTA TV Awards. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama.

Gambon appeared in many productions of works by William Shakespeare such as Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and Coriolanus. Gambon was nominated for thirteen Olivier Awards, winning three times for A Chorus of Disapproval (1985), A View from the Bridge (1987), and Man of the Moment (1990). In 1997, Gambon made his Broadway debut in David Hare's Skylight, earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination.

Gambon made his film debut in Othello (1965). His other notable films include The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), The Wings of the Dove (1997), The Insider (1999), Gosford Park (2001), Amazing Grace (2006), The King's Speech (2010), Quartet (2012), and Victoria & Abdul (2017). He also acted in the Wes Anderson films The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). He gained wider recognition through his role of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter film series from 2004 to 2011, replacing Richard Harris following his death in 2002.

For his work on television, he received four BAFTA Awards for The Singing Detective (1986), Wives and Daughters (1999), Longitude (2000), and Perfect Strangers (2001). He also received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Path to War (2002) and Emma (2009). Gambon's other notable projects include Cranford (2007) and The Casual Vacancy (2015). In 2017, he received the Irish Film & Television Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, he was listed at No. 28 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

Early life
Michael John Gambon was born in the Cabra suburb of Dublin on 19 October 1940. His mother, Mary (née Hoare), was a seamstress, while his father, Edward Gambon, was an engineering operative during World War II. His father decided to seek work in the rebuilding of London, and moved the family to Mornington Crescent in London's Camden borough when Gambon was six. His father arranged for him to be registered as a British subject, a decision that would later allow him to receive a substantive (rather than honorary) knighthood. Brought up as a strict Roman Catholic, Gambon attended St Aloysius Boys' School in Somers Town and served at the altar. He went on from there to St Aloysius' College in Highgate, whose former pupils include the actor Peter Sellers. The family later moved to North End, Kent, where he attended Crayford Secondary School but left with no qualifications at the age of 15.

After leaving school, at the age of 16 Gambon then gained an apprenticeship as a toolmaker with Vickers-Armstrongs. By the time he was 21, he was a qualified engineering technician and kept the job for a further year. He acquired a lifelong passion for collecting antique guns, clocks, watches and classic cars.

1960–1979: Stage debut and National Theatre
At age 24, Gambon wrote a letter to Micheál Mac Liammóir, the Irish theatre impresario who ran Dublin's Gate Theatre, accompanied by a CV describing a rich and wholly imaginary theatre career: he was taken on. Gambon made his professional stage debut in the Gate Theatre's 1962 production of Othello, playing "Second Gentleman", followed by a European tour. A year later, auditioning with the opening soliloquy from Richard III, he caught the eye of Laurence Olivier who was recruiting promising actors for his new National Theatre Company. Gambon, along with Robert Stephens, Derek Jacobi and Frank Finlay, was hired as one of the "to be renowned" and played any number of small roles, appearing on cast lists as "Mike Gambon". The company initially performed at the Old Vic, their first production being Hamlet, directed by Olivier and starring Peter O'Toole. Gambon played for four years in many NT productions, including named roles in The Recruiting Officer and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, working with directors William Gaskill and John Dexter.

Gambon made his film debut in Laurence Olivier's Othello alongside Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi in 1965. After three years at the Old Vic, Olivier advised Gambon to gain experience in provincial rep. In 1967, he left the National Theatre for the Birmingham Repertory Company, which was to give him his first crack at the title roles in Othello (his favourite), Macbeth and Coriolanus. In 1967, he made his television debut in the BBC television adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing as Watchman No. 4. He also appeared in British programmes such as Softly, Softly (1967), and Public Eye (1968). From 1968 to 1970, he featured in the BBC historical series The Borderers as Gavin Kerr. He also had a recurring role in the Canadian series The Challengers (1972). He also appeared in drama anthology series including Play for Today, Play of the Month, and ITV Playhouse.

In 1974, Eric Thompson cast him as the melancholy vet in Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests at Greenwich. A speedy transfer to the West End established him as a comic actor, squatting at a crowded dining table on a tiny chair and agonising over a choice between black or white coffee. Back at the National, now on the South Bank, his next turning point was Peter Hall's premiere staging of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, a performance marked by subtlety – a production photograph shows him embracing Penelope Wilton with sensitive hands and long slim fingers (the touch of a master clock-maker). He is also one of the few actors to have mastered the demands of the vast Olivier Theatre. As Simon Callow once said: "Gambon's iron lungs and overwhelming charisma are able to command a sort of operatic full-throatedness which triumphs over hard walls and long distances". After his film debut, Gambon was asked by James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli to audition for the role in 1970, to replace George Lazenby. He acted in the British horror films Nothing But the Night (1973) and The Beast Must Die (1974).

1980–1994: The Singing Detective and accolades
Gambon's powerful voice and presence were to serve him in good stead in John Dexter's masterly staging of The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht at the National Theatre in 1980, the first Brecht play to become a popular success. Hall called him "unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful," and The Sunday Times called his performance "a decisive step in the direction of great tragedy... great acting," while fellow actors paid him the rare compliment of applauding him in the dressing room on the first night. In 1985, he appeared in the British drama film Turtle Diary directed by John Irvin with a screenplay adapted by Harold Pinter. The film starred Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley.

His craggy looks soon made him into a character actor, a term which Gambon disputed. For his first major lead role in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective (1986) he won his first British Academy Television Award for Best Actor. He starred as detective Inspector Jules Maigret in an ITV adaptation of twelve of Georges Simenon's books. The National Theatre staged a revival of A View from the Bridge in 1987 at the Cottesloe Theatre. It was directed by Alan Ayckbourn, and Gambon gave an acclaimed performance as Eddie. The Guardian said, "In the first place it shows Michael Gambon shaking hands with greatness." In 1989, Gambon starred in the Peter Greenaway's crime drama The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, which also starred Helen Mirren, Tim Roth, and Ciarán Hinds. Gambon played Albert Spica, "The Thief", a violent gangster. The film premiered at the 1989 Toronto International Film Festival. Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the performances writing, "Mirren and Gambon are among the most distinguished actors in Britain-they've played many of the principal roles in Shakespeare -- and here they find the resources to not only strip themselves of all their defenses, but to do so convincingly."

In 1990, he played Jerry in Harold Pinter's Betrayal for BBC Radio 3. In 1991, he starred as Tommy Hanbury in an episode of the ITV series Minder called "Look Who's Coming To Pinner". Ralph Richardson dubbed him The Great Gambon, an accolade which stuck, although Gambon dismissed it as a circus slogan. But as Sheridan Morley perceptively remarked in 2000, when reviewing Nicholas Wright's Cressida: "Gambon's eccentricity on stage now begins to rival that of his great mentor Richardson". Also like Richardson, interviews were rarely given and raised more questions than they answered. Gambon was a very private person, a "non-starry star" as Ayckbourn called him. Off-stage he preferred to stay out of the limelight. He won screen acclaim, whilst his ravaged King Lear at Stratford, while he was still in his early forties, formed a double act with a red-nosed Antony Sher as the Fool sitting on his master's knee like a ventriloquist's doll.

1995–2003: Broadway debut and film roles
There were also appearances in Harold Pinter's Old Times at the Haymarket Theatre and Ben Jonson's Volpone and the brutal sergeant in Pinter's Mountain Language. In 1995, Gambon starred in David Hare's Skylight, with Lia Williams, which opened to rave reviews at the National Theatre. The play transferred first to Wyndham's Theatre and then on to Broadway at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre for a four-month run which left him in a state of advanced exhaustion. "Skylight was ten times as hard to play as anything I've ever done" he told Michael Owen in the Evening Standard. "I had a great time in New York, but wanted to return." Variety wrote of his performance, "Gambon, an Irishman revered on the London stage, gives his rough-hewn character a grace that goes beyond the physical". For this performance Gambon received his only Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play.

He later starred as Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the Hungarian director Károly Makk's film The Gambler (1997) about the writing of Dostoyevsky's novella The Gambler. In the 1990s he appeared in films such as, Barry Levinson's fantasy comedy Toys (1992), the period drama Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), the action film Plunkett & Macleane (1998), Michael Mann's political drama The Insider (1999), and Tim Burton's gothic horror film Sleepy Hollow (1999). He also appeared in the BBC serial Wives and Daughters (1999) based on the Victorian novel by the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell. He portrayed Squire Hamley and received his second BAFTA Award nomination and win for Best Actor. The New York Times described Gambon's performance as 'Gruff on the outside, with a huge sentimental streak, the country squire is a familiar type, but he makes him seem endearing and fresh.'

During the 2000s, Gambon appeared in several films including Robert Altman's murder mystery ensemble Gosford Park (2001) where he acted alongside Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kelly Macdonald, Emily Watson, and Stephen Fry. Gambon portrays Sir William McCordle, the imperious master of Gosford Park who has invited distinguished company for a weekend shooting party before a murder throws everything into chaos. Empire declared the film, "Altman's best movie in years - an astute exploration of British culture that can stand proudly with his satires of American life. Atmospheric, absorbing, amusing and really fun." The film earned the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film as well as nominations for six Academy Award including Best Picture. In 2003, he appeared with Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner, playing the principal villain in the Western film Open Range. Gambon was not among the actors to grace Yasmina Reza's Art at Wyndham's. But together with Simon Russell Beale and Alan Bates, he gave a droll radio account of the role of Marc. And for the RSC he shared Reza's two-hander The Unexpected Man with Eileen Atkins, first at The Pit in the Barbican and then at the Duchess Theatre, a production also intended for New York, but finally delayed by other commitments.

In 2001, he played what he described as "'a physically repulsive" Davies in Patrick Marber's revival of Pinter's The Caretaker, but he found the rehearsal period an unhappy experience, and felt that he had let down the author. A year later, playing opposite Daniel Craig, he portrayed the father of a series of cloned sons in Caryl Churchill's A Number at the Royal Court, remembered for a recumbent moment when he smoked a cigarette, the brightly lit spiral of smoke rising against a black backdrop, an effect which he dreamt up during rehearsals. Gambon starred in a made-for-TV adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Endgame (2001) and Perfect Strangers (2001) which together revealed his talent for comedy. Gambon played President Lyndon B. Johnson in the television film Path to War. About his performance The Washington Post said: "Gambon is entirely up to the task of making a larger-than-life icon seem painfully – and in the end, helplessly – human. It is a performance of fire and brimstone". He was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Mini-series or Movie and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television.

2004–2011: Harry Potter and acclaim
He played Albus Dumbledore, Hogwarts' headmaster in the third instalment of J. K. Rowling's franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), taking over the role after the death of Richard Harris in 2002; Harris had also played Maigret on television four years before Gambon took that role. Gambon reprised the role of Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), which was released in November 2005 in the United Kingdom and the United States. He returned to the role again in the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), and the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009). He appeared in the final two films of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011). Gambon told an interviewer that, when playing Dumbledore, he did not "have to play anyone really. I just stick on a beard and play me, so it's no great feat. I never ease into a role – every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. I'm not really a character actor at all."

In 2004, he appeared in five films, including Wes Anderson's cult comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; the British gangster film Layer Cake; and theatrical drama Being Julia. In 2004, Gambon played the lead role (Hamm) in Samuel Beckett's post-apocalyptic play Endgame at the Albery Theatre, London. In 2005, he finally achieved a lifelong ambition to play Falstaff, in Nicholas Hytner's National production of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, co-starring with Matthew Macfadyen as Prince Hal. Michael Billington in The Guardian wrote that Gambon's Falstaff "conveyed a growing sense of age, decrepitude and melancholy". In 2006, Gambon performed voiceover for a series of Guinness advertisements featuring penguins. Also in 2006, he performed as Joe in Beckett's Eh Joe, giving two performances a night at the Duke of York's Theatre in London. That same year, he played Henry in Stephen Rea's play about Samuel Beckett's Embers for Radio 3. In 2007, he was Sam in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming for Radio 3.

In 2007, Gambon portrayed Lord Charles Fox in Michael Apted's historical drama Amazing Grace alongside Ioan Gruffudd, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Albert Finney, and Rufus Sewell. The film focuses on William Wilberforce, who led the campaign against the slave trade in the British Empire. The film is highly rated according to Rotten Tomatoes with critics’ consensus describing it as "your quintessential historical biopic: stately, noble, and with plenty of electrifying performances". That same year, he played major roles in the acclaimed BBC five-part adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford novels alongside Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton, and in Stephen Poliakoff's Joe's Palace. In 2008, Gambon appeared in the role of Hirst in No Man's Land by Harold Pinter in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, opposite David Bradley as Spooner, in a production directed by Rupert Goold, which transferred to the London West End's Duke of York's Theatre, for which both roles each received nominations for the 2009 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. After Pinter's death on 24 December 2008, Gambon read Hirst's monologue selected by the playwright for Gambon to read at his funeral, held on 31 December 2008, during the cast's memorial remarks from the stage as well as at the funeral and also in Words and Music, transmitted on the BBC Radio 3 on 22 February 2009. In late 2009, Gambon had to withdraw from his role of W. H. Auden in The Habit of Art (being replaced by Richard Griffiths) because of ill health.

In April 2010, Gambon returned once again to the Gate Theatre Dublin to appear in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, which transferred to London's Duchess Theatre in October 2010. In 2009, he appeared in a television adaptation of Jane Austen's famously irrepressible Emma, a four-hour miniseries that premiered on BBC One in October 2009, co-starring Romola Garai. He played Mr Woodhouse, for which he received a 2010 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie nomination for his performance. In 2010, Gambon took a supporting role in Tom Hooper's historical drama The King's Speech where he portrayed an ailing King George V. He acted alongside Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, and Guy Pearce. In 2011, the film received 12 Academy Awards nominations, more than any other film in that year. The film won four Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay. Gambon appeared in the 2010 Christmas Special of Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol". During the 2010s, he was also known for his voice work. He appeared as the Narrator in the British version of Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire. In 2013, Gambon provided the voice for The Prophet, a character in the MMORPG video game The Elder Scrolls Online.

2012–2019: Television projects and final roles
In 2012, he starred with Eileen Atkins in an adaptation of Beckett's radio play, All That Fall. The director, Trevor Nunn, staged the performance as a studio recording of a radio play so that the cast performed with script in hand. Its premiere was at the Jermyn Street Theatre and it later transferred to the Arts Theatre. In November 2013 the production transferred to 59E59 Theaters in New York. Also 2012, Gambon reunited with Dustin Hoffman in the HBO horse-racing drama Luck, which was cancelled in March 2012 after three horses died on set. Gambon participated in the live event, National Theatre Live: 50 Years On Stage (2013), a production that was a part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Theatre. The presentation included live performances, interspersed with documentary footage, and archival footage of live performances of original productions from the National Theatre. Gambon joined Derek Jacobi in a live performance from No Man's Land by Harold Pinter. In 2012, he played a role in Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut with Quartet, based on the same-titled play by Ronald Harwood and starring Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins. The film premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival to favourable reviews. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported an 80% approval rating with the consensus reading, "It's sweet, gentle, and predictable to a fault, but Dustin Hoffman's affectionate direction and the talented cast's amiable charm make Quartet too difficult to resist." The following year, he was cast in the role of Howard Mollison in the adaptation of the best-selling book The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling. The BBC One miniseries, produced in association with HBO, consists of three one-hour parts. Production began 7 July 2014 in South West England.

In early 2015, Gambon announced that due to the increasing length of time it was taking him to memorise his lines, he was giving up stage work. He had previously tried using an earpiece and being given prompts by theatre staff, but found this unsatisfactory. In 2015 and 2018, Gambon starred as Henry Tyson in the first and third series of Sky Atlantic's Fortitude. In 2016, Gambon was the narrator for the Coen Brothers' Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar!, which satirised the 1950s Hollywood film industry and featured an ensemble cast including Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum. The film was well received by critics, earning an approval rating of 86% on Rotten Tomatoes with the consensus being, "Packed with period detail and perfectly cast, Hail, Caesar! finds the Coen brothers delivering an agreeably lightweight love letter to post-war Hollywood." The film also received an Academy Award nomination for its Production Design. Gambon then appeared in comedy film Dad's Army playing the iconic Private Godfrey, based on Arnold Ridley, who had played the character in the original classic BBC series of the same name. Gambon also provided voice-overs as Uncle Pastuzo in the Paddington films (2014, 2017). In March 2018, it was announced that Gambon would star in the comedy series Breeders. However, in April 2019, it was reported that Gambon left the series as he was having trouble memorising lines due to his issues with memory loss. In 2019, he appeared in the biographical film Judy, about Judy Garland, starring Renée Zellweger, Rufus Sewell, Finn Wittrock and Jessie Buckley. That same year Gambon appeared in his final film role in Adrian Shergold's period thriller Cordelia, acting alongside Johnny Flynn and Catherine McCormack.

Personal life and death
Gambon married mathematician Anne Miller in 1962. Known for being protective of his privacy, he once responded to an interviewer's question about his wife by asking, "What wife?". The couple had homes in Gravesend, Kent, and Aldeburgh, Suffolk. They had one son, Fergus, who later became a ceramics expert on the BBC series Antiques Roadshow.

Gambon brought Philippa Hart, a woman 25 years his junior, to the set while filming the 2001 film Gosford Park and introduced her to his co-stars as his girlfriend. When their affair was publicly revealed in 2002, he moved out of the home he shared with his wife, though they later reconciled. He was with Hart, a set designer, from 2000, when they worked together on Channel 4 series Longitude. In February 2007, it was revealed that Hart was pregnant with Gambon's child and gave birth to a son. The couple had a second son in 2009. They owned a home in West London.

In the New Year Honours 1998, Gambon was appointed a Knight Bachelor for services to drama. On 17 July 1998, he was invested by Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.

Gambon was a qualified private pilot. His love of cars led to his appearance on the BBC series Top Gear. He raced the Suzuki Liana so aggressively that it went around the last corner of his lap on two wheels. The final corner of the Top Gear test track has been named "Gambon Corner" or simply "Gambon" in his honour. He appeared on the programme again in 2006 and set a time in the Chevrolet Lacetti of 1:50.3, a significant improvement on his previous time of 1:55. He clipped his namesake corner the second time, and when asked why by Jeremy Clarkson, replied, "I don't know, I just don't like it."

Gambon died in Witham on 27 September 2023, aged 82, with his wife Anne and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia. Gambon made headlines in March 2024 when it was revealed that Philippa Hart, his long-term girlfriend and mother of two of his sons, had been left nothing in the actor’s will. Almost all of Gambon’s fortune was passed to Lady Gambon, his wife of 61 years.

title: Michael Gambon


text:
Casino Royale

Casino Royale may refer to:
 * Casino Royale (novel), the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming
 * "Casino Royale" (Climax!), a 1954 television adaptation of Fleming's novel for the series Climax!
 * Casino Royale (1967 film), a James Bond film parody starring David Niven and Peter Sellers
 * Casino Royale (2006 film), a James Bond film starring Daniel Craig
 * Casino Royale (2006 soundtrack), the soundtrack of the 2006 film
 * Casino Royale, casino brand at Hotel Splendid in Montenegro
 * Casino Royale Goa, a casino in Goa, India
 * Casino Royale Hotel & Casino, a hotel and casino on the strip in Las Vegas, United States
 * Casino Royale, site of the 2011 Monterrey casino attack, a massacre that killed 52 in Mexico

title: Casino Royale


text:
John Hume

John Hume (18 January 1937 –3 August 2020) was an Irish nationalist politician in Northern Ireland and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A founder and leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Hume served in the Northern Ireland Parliament; the Northern Ireland Assembly including, in 1974, its first power-sharing executive; the European Parliament and the United Kingdom Parliament. Seeking an accommodation between Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism, and soliciting American support, he was both critical of British government policy in Northern Ireland and opposed to the republican embrace of "armed struggle". In their 1998 citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised Hume as an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. For himself, Hume wished to be remembered as having been, in his earlier years, a pioneer of the credit union movement.

Early life and education
Hume was born in 1937 into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, the eldest of seven children of Anne "Annie" (née Doherty), a seamstress, and Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker. He had a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derived from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal.

Hume was among the first to benefit from the 1947 Education Act. which in Northern Ireland "revolutionised access to secondary and further education". It provided him with scholarships, first to attend St Columb's College, a fee-paying grammar school, and then St Patrick's College, Maynooth. This was the leading Catholic seminary in Ireland and a recognised college of the National University of Ireland. Among his teachers was Tomás Ó Fiaich.

Ó Fiaich's colleague, Monsignor Brendan Devlin recalls that the future cardinal and Primate of All Ireland turned his student (with whom he spoke in Irish) towards the local history of Ulster. Devlin believes that, being a Derry man Hume "didn't need much pushing". "You begin to ask questions ... how did this come around. I grew up in a city surrounded by battlements. Everything inside the battlement was Protestant and everything in the slums was Catholic. Is this normal in the city? Is this a normal city? And if you have any brains at all you begin to find out it is not. You know, it's not normal and the government of the city is gerrymandered. My crowd is getting no show at all. There must be a reason for this. And, of course, John got into all that."Hume did not complete his clerical studies but graduated in 1958 with a degree in French and history. In 1958, he returned home to his native Derry, where he became a teacher at his Alma mater, St Columb's College, later, in 1964, earning an MA from Maynooth with a thesis exploring the conditions that drove Derry's principal export in the 19th century, emigrants.

Credit-union movement
In 1960, aged 23, Hume helped establish the Derry Credit Union, the first cooperative community bank in Northern Ireland. Pooling their resources, working people were able to create a low-interest alternative to moneylenders and pawn shops. Such was the success of this exercise in what he represented as "practical Christianity" (and as "Catholic in origin"), that within four years Hume had become the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions, a role in which he served until 1968. He was later to remark that of all the things he contributed to in his life, he was proudest of his engagement with credit unions, no movement having done "more good for the people of Ireland, north and south".

The "Third Force"
In 1963, drawing on his Maynooth thesis research, Hume wrote a script for a television documentary on Derry, "A City Solitary", that was broadcast on both the BBC and RTÉ. It persuaded The Irish Times to open its pages to the "first considered statement" of Hume's political views

In "The Northern Catholic" (18 and 19 May 1964), Hume wrote of an emerging "third force": a "generation of younger Catholics in the North" frustrated with the nationalist policy of non-recognition and abstention. Determined to engage the great social problems of housing, unemployment and emigration, they were willing to accept "the Protestant tradition in the North as legitimate" and that Irish unity should be achieved only "by the will of the Northern majority."

"Normal politics" would not emerge in Northern Ireland from Catholic engagement alone. Much would depend on the responsiveness of the northern government whose "skilful placing" of investment was contributing to exceptionally high Catholic unemployment and emigration. If the governing unionists failed to respond to "repeated statements of Catholic willingness to get together", he warned that there would be a hardening of opinion and further polarisation.

Hume first test of the possibilities for change was as chair in 1965 of the University for Derry Committee. Accompanied by the city's Unionist mayor, Albert Anderson, and its Stormont MP, the leader of the Nationalist party, Eddie McAteer, Hume led a 25,000-strong protest on the steps of Stormont, convinced that the case for developing Derry's Magee College as Northern Ireland's second university was "unanswerable". When the city lost out to Coleraine, and when later the same year Derry again lost to Lurgan and Portadown for a new urban-industrial development, Hume sensed a wider conspiracy. Addressing a meeting in London of the Labour Party ginger group, Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, he suggested that "the plan" was "to cause a migration from West to East Ulster, redistributing and scattering the minority to that the Unionist Party will not only maintain but strengthen its position".

Involved in voluntary housing movement in his home city, Hume argued that (notwithstanding "excellent assistance" form the Ministry of Development), he battled the same sectarian-political logic within Derry itself. A unionist minority secured majority control of the city council through gerrymandering which involved restricting planning permission for potential Catholic homes.

Duke Street march, October 1968
On 5 October 1968, the Derry Labour Party and Derry Housing Action Committee proceeded with a march in the city, originally sponsored by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), in defiance of a last-minute order by the government alarmed at the prospect of a clash with parading Apprentice Boys. Hume, had had no part in the organisation. He had refused an invitation to set up a NICRA branch in his home city. He was wary of the association's infiltration by left-wing activists such as Derry socialist Eamon McCann. McCann later conceded that "conscious, if unspoken strategy", of the march organisers, "was to provoke the police into overreaction and thus spark off mass reaction against the authorities". Hume appeared on the day but, in the recollection of McCann, walked on the pavement alongside the march, "half there and half not".

A later official inquiry found that all that had been required for police to begin "using their batons indiscriminately" against the 400 protesters (among them Belfast Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt, hit twice on the head and hospitalised)  was defiance of the initial order to disperse. The Duke Street march sparked two days of street fighting as protesters and residents resisted the entry of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) into the Catholic Bogside. Hume, elected vice-chair of a new Citizens’ Action Committee (CAC), called for a sit-down protest at the Guildhall two weeks later. A further peaceful demonstration organised and stewarded by CAC on 16 November attracted 15,000. With the government appearing to respond, both Hume's committee and NICRA called for a suspension of further protests.

Enters electoral politics
In response to the events in Derry, the Unionist government announced that the city's corporation would be replaced by an independent development commission. It also committed to a needs-based points system for public housing, an ombudsman to investigate citizen grievances, the abolition of the rates-based franchise in council elections, and a review of the broad security provisions of the Special Powers Act. When these reforms were placed in jeopardy by the internal unionist dissension, and a snap election was called by Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, Hume decided to enter electoral politics.

In the February 1969 poll, he secured 55 percent of the vote in his home Foyle constituency against 33 percent for the standing MP and long-time leader of the Nationalist Party, Eddie McAteer, and 12 percent for McCann of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. Notwithstanding their contest, six months later, on 12 August 1969, Hume linked arms with McAteer in an attempt to hold back his constituents in a further confrontation with the police, recalled as the Battle of the Bogside.

In the election Hume had presented himself as an independent, but his immediate objective was the formation of a broad-based party that could advance the wider reform he believed necessary.

Joins in the formation of the SDLP
In August 1970, Hume became deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) which he formed with five other Stormont MPs: Gerry Fitt, Republican Labour Party; Austin Currie, Nationalist Party; Paddy Devlin, Northern Ireland Labour Party; and independents, NICRA activists Ivan Cooper and Paddy O’Hanlon.

According to Devlin, this formation had not been Hume's first choice. In June 1970, Hume had broken with others in the group in supporting Eddie McAteer, as the Westminster challenger to the Unionist for Londonderry. The others were of the view that the civil-rights campaigner Claude Wilton was the more credible candidate. They believed a Protestant, who, as an Ulster Liberal, had taken more than a third of the vote in the constituency the year before, had "just the sort of cross-community support" they were aiming to attract "as the bedrock" of their new party. Hume had been meeting with McAteer's Nationalists and with Gerry Quigley's National Democratic Party, and was pulled back to the Stormont group only when they announced that they were going ahead with a new party under the leadership of Fitt. Hume proposed that it be called the "Social Democratic Party", but Fitt and Devlin had insisted that without "Labour" in its title, the party would not be acceptable to their working-class voters in Belfast.

Not embraced in the new party was Bernadette Devlin. Devlin had made international headlines, aged 21, as the youngest MP to enter the British House of Commons following her victory in April 1969 as the "Unity" candidate in a Mid Ulster by-election, and again in December when given a six-months sentence for her role in the defence of the Bogside. Viewing her as having gone "wholly over to the International Socialists in Britain", Hume described her as a "disaster".

Neither did the new party extend to those, previously pro-O'Neill unionists, nationalists and rights activists, who in April 1970 formed the Alliance Party. They had courted Hume, but he refused the invitation to join their cross-community grouping. With his colleagues, Hume insisted that, like Alliance, they would prioritise the socio-economic above the constitutional question. While they were committed to "eventual" Irish unification—to a new all-Ireland constitution that would provide "the framework for the emergence of a just, egalitarian and secular society" —this would be on the basis of "the consent of the majority of the people in the North and in the South". As a further token of their cross-community bona fides, Hume cited the fact that Cooper, among other founding members, was Protestant, evidence, he suggested, that "the important issue" for the party was "human rights not religion".

In June 1971, while he appeared to join his colleagues in responding positively to the offer of Prime Minister Brian Faulkner to more fully engage them in parliament through committees, Hume suggested to party activists that it was time to consider scrapping the Government of Ireland Act 1920. With Fitt, Devlin was wary of what he called "the old nationalist knee-jerk of abstention", and of appearing to give the "gunmen" a mandate. But when in July the Unionist government refused to authorise a public inquiry into the fatal shooting by the British Army of two men in Derry, Hume carried the day and led the SDLP out of Stormont, declaring it unreformable.

Response to the onset of the Provisional campaign and to internment
Responding to the developing campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Hume proposed that armed republicans could best serve the cause of Irish unity by disbanding: "violence and the threat of it only strengthens unionism, it only deepens and heightens sectarian divisions which represent the real border in our country". Taking issue with the essential premise of PIRA's "drive-out-the-Brits" strategy, he argued:"[T]he struggle against partition is not, as the struggle for independence was, a struggle against a foreign and occupying power. It is a struggle to bring together two sections of the Irish people, and how can anyone imagine ... that violence by one section against the other can unite them. Reform and reconciliation are the only way ...."In relation to those "who have no respect for human life and seem to think that human lives are expendable as a means of achieving political ends," there should be no "fence-sitting."

At the same time, Hume expressed outrage at the government's resort in August 1971 to a policy of internment that saw large numbers of Catholics detained and sometimes brutally interrogated. On 22 January 1972, he led protesters toward the perimeter of the Magilligan internment camp along Benone beach (reassured those who might wish to throw stones would have only sand underfoot). They were driven back with baton charges and canisters of CS gas. Fearing the consequences ("if they stopped a march on the beach, what were they going to do in the city"), a week later Hume sat out a NICRA organised march in Derry. At the end the day, Sunday 30 January 1972, the Parachute Regiment had shot 26 unarmed civilians, killing 14. Faced with a choice between "repression or change of system", it was evident to Hume that the British as choosing repression. He compared the killings to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. Yet in the wake of Bloody Sunday, he continued to insist on a non-violent response. In August 1972, his party initiated a campaign of civil disobedience that by October had 16,000 households withholding council house rent and rates.

Signatory to Sunningdale
In March 1972, the London government prorogued the Northern Ireland Parliament and imposed direct rule "not merely to restore order but to reshape the Province's system of government". In the interim, Hume, together with Paddy Devlin, had his first experience of mediating between the Provisional IRA and the British government: 18 days of cease-fire assisted contacts that PIRA decisively broke off with Bloody Friday. On 21 July, PIRA set off 21 bombs across Belfast killing 9 and injuring 130.

In October 1972, the government brought out a Green Paper, The Future of Northern Ireland, which seemed to embrace much of Hume's analysis. While Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as that is the wish of a majority of the people, the government would take into account the "Irish Dimension" of the unfolding crisis. It would seek to accommodate the legitimate interests both of the minority in Northern Ireland that saw themselves as "simply part of the wider Irish community", and of the Republic of Ireland to whom it committed to make any new arrangements "as far as possible acceptable".

On this basis, and following an election in June 1973 of a new Northern Ireland Assembly in which the SDLP emerged as the sole representatives of the nationalist community, Hume and his colleagues reached an agreement to enter into "power-sharing" executive with Unionists under their former Prime Minister Brian Faulkner as chief executive. SDLP leader Gerry Fitt was to be Faulkner's deputy, and Hume Minister of Commerce. The parties signed their coalition agreement at Sunningdale in England on 9 December and took up office on 1 January 1974.

Hume had acted in direct defiance of PIRA intimidation. At the time of the agreement they had botched an attempt to kidnap his daughter Aine. In a case of mistaken identity, a schoolmate was bundled into a car and driven across the border.

Presses for Council of Ireland
From the outset of the negotiations, Hume had been under pressure to demonstrate that there was a prospective path to ending partition. There was a need to respond to the general "unificationist feeling" among nationalists that had followed the closure of Stormont,  and at the same time to fend off the challenge from PIRA who were continuing to draw on public outrage over Bloody Sunday and the slow winding down of internment.

Hume highlighted the agreement's return to an original feature of the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the Council of Ireland. He described the cross border ministerial and parliamentary forum as "a continuing conference table" at which "Catholic, Protestant, Planter and Gael" could explore the bases for unity. But more than a talking shop, it was to have real responsibilities: he proposed, for example, that the Council have control of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland. In retrospect, Hume's party colleague, Social Services minister, Paddy Devlin regretted the SDLP had not "adopted a two stage approach, by allowing power sharing at Stormont to establish itself". He recalls all other considerations being overridden by the drive to get Council established in the hope of producing "the dynamic that would lead ultimately to an agreed united Ireland".

Already in February, a surprise Westminster election had left Faulkner's pro-Assembly grouping with just 13% of the unionist vote. Arguing that they had deprived Faulkner of any semblance of a mandate, the victorious United Ulster Unionist Coalition called for new Assembly elections. When these were refused, a loyalist coalition, the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC), called a general strike. Within two weeks the UWC, supported by the loyalist paramilitaries, had an effective stranglehold on energy supplies. Arguing with what Faulkner regarded as "exasperating dogmatism", Hume would neither delay the Council, nor accept the condition now sought for its introduction by pro-executive unionists: the repeal of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution claiming Northern Ireland as the Republic's national territory. Instead, Hume pressed for a British Army enforced fuel-oil plan and for resistance to "a fascist takeover".

On 28 May, finding the new Northern Ireland Secretary, Mervyn Rees, willing neither to reopen political negotiations nor to confront the strikers, Faulkner resigned. Conceding that there was no longer any constitutional basis for the Executive, Rees dissolved the Assembly. Hume continued to insist that the executive might have survived had Rees taken a tougher stand. His Unionist colleague on the executive, Basil McIvor, argued rather that it was Hume who had blown "out the light at the end of the tunnel", that for the survival power sharing Hume's "grim and unbending" insistence on the Council had been "disaster".

Caution on integrated education
During his brief career in government, there was an issue on which Hume was reportedly at odds, not only with his Unionist colleagues, but also with those in own party, including Devlin. As Minister of Education, McIvor had proposed a third type of school. In addition to the existing (Catholic) Maintained Schools and the (non-Catholic) Controlled Schools, there should be "shared schools", "available to Catholic and Protestant parents alike who wished to have their children educated together". Disregarding a message from Cardinal William Conway "not to interfere with the schools", McIvor brought the proposal to the Executive where he recalls it being welcomed by all, save Hume. Hume was "less than enthusiastic".

In 1989, the year in which Westminster created a statutory framework for what was now called integrated education, Sinn Féin made its position clear. The "main purpose" of the new schools sector was "propagandistic". It was to "promote the British government's presentation internationally of the problem in the six counties as a religious one and deliberately to mislead people about the real sources of the problem". While this appeared to go to the heart of the Provisionals' disagreement with Hume, and while integrationists broadly shared Hume's view of sectarian division as "the real border", Hume remained ambivalent. He allowed that "insofar as it shows a determination to avoid sectarian conditioning", integrated schools were to be "welcomed". But under his leadership the SDLP did not commit to promote the new schools (and was to "surprise" Catholic clerics when it eventually did so in 2016).

Party leader
In defending the Sunningdale agreement, Hume suggested that it had been "purely on the basis of [their] agreed economic and social policies that members of the executive had come together", and that to consider the case for state intervention, worker democracy and a radical approach to poverty they would do so again. Paddy Devlin was not convinced: arguing that the SDLP “was being stripped of its socialism and being taken over by unadulterated nationalists”, he resigned from the party in 1977. When, in May 1979, Fitt likewise suggested that the SDLP, in prioritising the "Irish Dimension" over the trust required for power sharing,  had gone "too green", that it had become simply a "Catholic nationalist party", Hume replaced him as party leader.

The changeover failed to quell dissention within the party: some members complained of Hume's style as autocratic and self promoting. While he admired Hume as an "original thinker", Austin Currie recalls that he was "extremely good at picking up points made by others and presenting them as his own". (In his personal memoirs, Hume passes over Currie and other of his one-time fellow SDLP MPs with single references, including Seamus Mallon who served 22 years beside him in the party as deputy leader).

Member of the European Parliament
In June 1979, Hume was elected (with 24.6% of first preference votes) as one of Northern Ireland's three Members of the European Parliament. He was to hold his seat in Strasbourg for five terms, until his retirement in 2004. He joined the Socialist Group in the Parliament, and for almost all his time as an MEP was a member of the group's bureau.

In Europe, Hume found sufficient evidence that a "divided society [need not] be a violent one". He cited the accommodations between French and Flemish speakers in Belgium; between Madrid and Catalonia in Spain; and between Catholics, Protestants arid Socialists in the Netherlands, arguing: "The one thing all these successful attempts at conflict resolution have in common is that these divided communities recognised the legitimacy of the position of their counterparts and set up structures that, by guaranteeing equality for all citizens, permitted the existence of a common citizenship. The essential element of their success has been to replace the concept of division with that of diversity."He saw the then European Community as, itself, an example of reconciliation through the construction of shared political and social institutions. Championing as an MEP protections for minority languages, Hume emphasised the "diversity" that could be accommodated.

Lobbyist in the United States
Hume also saw the European project as an opportunity for representatives of the rival domestic traditions to cooperate in a context free of local prejudices and history. In lobbying for special economic development assistance for Northern Ireland, he gave practical demonstration of this by working closely with his two unionist MEP colleagues. This included the man regarded at home as his nemesis, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley. In September 1983, Hume went on a nine-day investment promotion tour of North America in the company of Paisley to whom, six months before, the U.S. State Department had denied a visa citing a "record of inflammatory actions and statements ... contrary to the interest of the United States in the achievement of a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland".

In the United States, Hume had developed close relations with U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, U.S. Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan, and New York Governor Hugh Carey (the "Four Horsemen"). With their support, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a statement promising U.S. assistance in the event of Northern Ireland reaching a new cross-party agreement. They were also supported Hume in his efforts to dissuade Irish Americans from funding the Provisional republican movement. He cautioned those contributing to NORAID that they were supporting a "vicious parody" of Irish republicanism that, as first set forth by the United Irishmen, properly rests on the "brotherhood" of Catholic and Protestant.

Stands SDLP aside in Hunger Strike elections
When in March 1981, Sinn Féin put forward PIRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands as the Anti H-Block candidate for a Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election, Hume prevented his party colleague, Austin Currie, from entering the contest. In what he regarded as "a no-win situation", Hume also deferred to Sinn Féin's nominated successor for the seat, Owen Carron, when a month after his election Sands died. "Sometimes", Hume later commented, "in politics you are faced with two wrong choices". Papers reveal that Irish ministers and officials regarded this at the time as a mistake and as "a major triumph for the IRA". Together with the continued swelling of support in Ireland and internationally as nine further hunger strikers died, by standing aside the SDLP is seen as having accommodated the first steps of the Provisional republican movement on the political path that would ultimately see Sinn Féin in 2007 supplant the party as the principal representative of nationalism.

In the Westminster general election of June 1983, Hume saw off a challenge from Derry's sometime PIRA commander Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness in the newly created Westminster constituency of Foyle. But the same election saw Gerry Fitt, now and Independent, lose Belfast West to the new Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.

First Adams talks
In January 1988, Hume and Adams were brought together at the Clonard Monastery in west Belfast by the Redemptorist priest Alec Reid. Through Reid, they exchanged documents outlining each party's position on ways to end the conflict. Hume again tackled Adams on the central premises of the PIRA campaign. It was not enough, he argued, to suggest that the British presence was the cause of all the violence in Ireland. The question was whether the provisional republican movement would take responsibility for the suffering and loss caused by the choices it had made in responding to that presence, and whether it would accept that the "armed struggle" had not advanced the agreement needed for the divided country to exercise its right to sovereignty.

When Adams and Sinn Féin leadership refused to accept the need for an end to the PIRA campaign, when it was clear that their strategy would remain that of "the ballot box and the armalite", Hume publicly restated his moral and political rejection of their methods. "Their decision ... to use guns and bombs to 'persuade' their Protestant fellow Irishmen is not only an example of an extreme lack of faith in their own beliefs or in the credibility of them, it is an attitude of extreme moral cowardice and a deeply partitionist attitude. For its real effect is to deepen the essential divisions among the Irish people"He proposed that if he were "to lead a civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland today", it would be against the IRA."It is they [the IRA] who carry out the greatest infringements of human and civil rights, whether it is their murders, their executions without trial, their kneecappings and punishment shootings, their bombing of jobs and people. The most fundamental right is the right to life. Who in Northern Ireland takes most human lives in a situation where there is not one single injustice that justifies the taking of human life?"The statistics, he observed, were "devastating": "people describing themselves as Irish republicans" had killed "six times as many human beings as the British army, thirty times as many as the RUC, and 250 times as many as the UDR" and, as for being "defenders" of their community, they had killed twice as many Catholics as the security forces and in the previous ten years more than the loyalists.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement
In the New Ireland Forum, an SDLP conference with the southern parties Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Labour, Hume affirmed the principle that a new Ireland could be achieved only with unionist agreement and support: "we seek a solution, not a victory". Yet a month later, in June 1983, Hume in his maiden speech in the British House of Commons, and in subsequent debates, called on the government to reconsider its consistent policy--"that there will be no change in the constitutional position of the Northern Ireland without the majority's consent". This might seem democratic but, given the "majority that is being guaranteed was created artificially by a sectarian headcount", he argued that it sustained a "solidified sectarianism".

In November 1985, the government appeared to relent. Disregarding universal unionist opposition, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signed an agreement with the Irish Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald that for the first time gave the Republic a direct role in the government of Northern Ireland. An Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, with a locally based secretariat, would invite the Irish government to "put forward views on proposals" for major legislation concerning Northern Ireland. Proposals, however, would only be on matters that are "not the responsibility of a devolved administration in Northern Ireland". The implication for unionists was that if they wished to limit Dublin's influence, they would have to climb down from insistence on majority rule and think again as to how nationalists might be accommodated.

Party colleague Seamus Mallon credited Hume for the perceived breakthrough. His leader had spent so much time and effort cultivating ties in Washington, New York and Boston because, with Britain reluctant to challenge the unionist veto, "the only place from where that pressure could come was from the US". He recalled that Thatcher (who in the Brighton bombing the year before had only narrowly escaped IRA assassination) had said after the implementation of the Anglo-Irish agreement that "it was the American who made me do it. But her government's calculation may also been driven by the fear of Sinn Féin replacing the SDLP as the voice of northern nationalism.

However, in the wake of the Agreement, Mallon appears to have accorded the border question greater urgency than Hume. At a meeting in London (where Mallon for the first time was taking his Westminster seat for Newry and Armagh), Hume, according to their host, Irish Ambassador Noel Dorr, proposed that "the concept of [Irish] unity is more important as a factor in what he called 'the tribal conflict' than in itself". His people in Derry had closer links with Glasgow than the west of Ireland or even Dublin, and knew that "the time is not right" for unity. For Mallon, who "spoke of the desire for Irish unity as a deep motivating force North and South of the border", the Agreement was "a kind of last throw by constitutional Irish nationalism". For his leader it was "a new beginning rather than a last opportunity" and, should it fail, "another agreement" securing Dublin's advisory role would follow.

Bringing in the Provisional movement
In March 1991, the Ulster Unionists and Paisley's Democratic Unionists conceded Hume's conditions for political talks on the future of Northern Ireland. In their submission to the inter-party talks in 1992, the Ulster Unionists (then still the largest party) said they could envisage a range of cross-border bodies so long as these were under the control of the Northern Assembly, did not involve an overarching all-Ireland Council, and were not designed to be developed in the direction of joint authority.

In the course of the talks, Hume acknowledged the provisional republican movement as "the one organisation that could make the greatest contribution" to an agreed future (he also revealed to John Chilcott of the Northern Ireland Office, that he knew PIRA already had a back channel to the government through another St.Columb's old boy, Brendan Duddy). He secretly renewed contact with Adams. Again he challenged Adams and his comrades on their justifications for violence. Their "whataboutery" was unconvincing. British outrages should not be seen as providing the standards for republican behaviour.

Over British objections, in January 1994 President Clinton allowed Adams to make the journey Hume had been taking since the 1970s. Although it was on a 48-hour visa limited to New York City, Adams has described his visit to the United States as "pivotal" to the subsequent peace process. Together with the Alliance Party's John Alderdice, Hume joined Adams at an event hosted by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy at the Waldorf Astoria. Two months later the IRA declared a three-day "cessation of hostilities" and then, believing that "an opportunity to secure a just and lasting settlement has been created", in August declared its first ceasefire since 1975.

Adams acknowledged Hume's assistance "in the background" and, after their contact was exposed (in April 1993, Adams had been spotted going into Hume's house in Derry) the extent to which Hume was "pilloried, vilified and condemned" by the British government, most political parties and large sections of the media. Adams, himself, greatly intensified pressure. In October 1993, PIRA Volunteer Thomas Begley was killed carrying a bomb into a shop on Belfast's Shankill Road that took the lives of nine other people and injured sixty. Pat Hume recalls that when, days later, her husband watched television footage of Adams carrying the coffin at Begley's funeral he started to cry: “He was not able to sleep. He was not eating properly. There were all sorts of vicious letters arriving in the post, vicious phone calls coming".

Reaching a settlement
At the time of the August 1994 ceasefire, Hume and Adams issued a joint declaration. It affirmed that a lasting settlement had to be based "on the right of the Irish people as a whole to national self-determination", but conceded Hume's consistent position."The exercise of this right [to self-determination] is, of course, a matter for agreement between all the people of Ireland and we reiterate that such a new agreement is only viable if it enjoys the allegiance of the different traditions on this island by accommodating diversity and providing for national reconciliation."PIRA twice disrupted what was now referred to as the "peace process" by ending their ceasefire, which in turn reinforced the Unionists in their demand that PIRA disarm as a condition of Sinn Féin's admission to inter-party talks. Hume helped get around this by proposing an international body on arms decommissioning to be headed by President Clinton's envoy to the peace process, Senator George Mitchell. (After Trimble resigned as First Minister in 2001, bringing down the first, UUP-SDLP-led, post-Agreement executive, Mitchell's report was the basis on which PIRA finally agreed procedures to put its weaponry "beyond use", a process not completed until 2005).

In the Multi-Party Agreement signed in Belfast on Good Friday, 10 April 1998, Hume and Adams conceded the Ulster Unionist conditions for cross-border bodies, and the amendment of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution. In return, the unionists had to accept that a new power-sharing executive would not, as in 1974, be a voluntary coalition. On a principle of elective inclusion which Hume and his SDLP team had been alone in proposing, seats at the ministerial table would be allocated to Assembly parties on the proportional D'Hondt system. This meant that unionists could not avoid sitting across from, and sharing office with, those they had continued to describe as "Sinn Féin-IRA".

Recognition
When on 1 July 1998, the new Northern Ireland Assembly nominated the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble as First Minister, it was expected that Hume, as the leader of the largest nationalist party, would assume the joint office of Deputy First Minister. Instead, he handed this role to Séamus Mallon. Some political journalists cited a "reserved" relationship between Hume and Trimble, despite the two men having together received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize.

In their citation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee observed that over the thirty years of national, religious and social conflict in Northern Ireland, John Hume had been "the clearest and most consistent of Northern Ireland’s political leaders in his work for a peaceful solution. The foundations of the peace agreement signed on Good Friday 1998 reflect principles which he has stood for".

Hume has been the only person to combine the Nobel Peace Prize with two other major international peace awards, the Martin Luther Award (1999) and the Gandhi Peace Prize (2001).

In 2010, Hume topped a viewer poll by the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ as "Ireland's Greatest" ahead of Michael Collins, Mary Robinson, James Connolly, and Bono.

In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI made Hume a Knight Commander of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great.

Retirement
On 4 February 2004, Hume announced his complete retirement from politics and was succeeded by Mark Durkan as SDLP leader. He did not contest the 2004 European election (when his seat was won by Bairbre de Brún of Sinn Féin), nor did he run in the 2005 general election, in which Mark Durkan retained the Foyle constituency for the SDLP.

Hume and his wife, Pat, continued to be active in promoting European integration, issues around global poverty and the Credit Union movement. He was also a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations. In retirement, he continued to speak publicly, including a visit to Seton Hall University in New Jersey in 2005, the first Summer University of Democracy of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 10–14 July 2006), and at St Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on 18 July 2007. A building added to the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, was named after him. Hume held the position of Club President of his local football team, Derry City F.C., which he supported all his life. He was a patron of the children's charity Plan International Ireland.

Family
In 1960, Hume married Patricia "Pat" Hone (22 February 1938 –2 September 2021), a primary school teacher, whom he had first met two years earlier at a dancehall in Muff, County Donegal. The couple had five children - Thérèse, Áine, Aidan, John and Mo - as well as 16 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. The family was not always shielded from the invective and threats directed John Hume. In addition to the attempted kidnapping of Áine in 1973, Thérèse Hume recalls: “a lot of threatening letters, threatening phone calls, bullets sent in the post one time, a couple of bullets sent at different times. That kind of thing was going on for quite a while and there was an undercurrent of nastiness”.

Death and tributes
In 2015, Hume was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s. Hume died in the early hours of 3 August 2020 at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83.

On his death, former Labour leader and prime minister Tony Blair said: "John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past." The Dalai Lama said on Twitter: "John Hume's deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering... It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow."

Following the Good Friday Agreement, Hume's former Unionist ministerial colleague, Basil McIvor, allowed that Hume had been "a force in compelling Unionists, and rightly so, to engage in dialogue with their arch enemy, Sinn Féin". Hume's deputy, and successor as SDLP party leader, Seamus Mallon suggested that this was at the cost of "almost validating" what the PIRA had done over the past 30 years. But Hume, in Mallon's view, had been "no fool". If he allowed himself to be played by Gerry Adams and the Provisional movement to gain respectability, it had been in the conviction that "if it saved a single life" any sacrifice made by his own party was worth it.

John and Pat Hume Foundation
Following the death of Pat Hume in September 2020, a John and Pat Hume Foundation for Peace and Reconciliation was launched by members of the Hume family, civil rights campaigners and former political colleagues. Prominent among the patrons were President Clinton's peace envoy, former US Senator George Mitchell, former Irish President Mary McAleese and Martin Luther King III, the son of the murdered U.S. civil rights leader. Current board members include former SDLP leader Mark Durkan, former Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt, and Sara Canning, the partner of murdered journalist Lyra McKee. It describes its mission as supporting and inspiring "leadership for peaceful change", recognising that that "the most effective change-makers are often Quiet Leaders – those who may not have an official role in their local power structure".

Awards and honours

 * LL.D. (honoris causa), Boston College, 1995 (one of 44 honorary doctorates Hume was awarded)
 * LL.D. (honoris causa), University College Galway, 1996
 * Four Freedoms, Freedom of Speech Medal Recipient, 1996
 * Golden Doves for Peace Journalistic Prize, 1997
 * Nobel Prize for Peace (co-recipient), 1998
 * Officier de Légion d’Honneur, France, 1999
 * Martin Luther King Award, 1999
 * Blessed are the Peacemakers Award from Catholic Theological Union, 2000
 * International Gandhi Peace Prize, 2001
 * Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, 2002
 * Freedom of two cities; Derry City in 2000 & Cork in 2004
 * Honorary D.Litt., St. Thomas University, Fredericton, N.B., 2007
 * Honorary Patron, University Philosophical Society, Trinity College Dublin, 2007
 * Ireland's Greatest (public poll conducted by RTÉ), 2010
 * Knight of Saint Gregory, 2012

Works

 * John Hume, Derry Beyond the Walls: Social and Economic Aspects of the Growth of Derry, Ulster Historical foundation, Belfast. 2002 ISBN 978-1903688243.  1964 MA thesis for Maynooth College.
 * John Hume, A City Solitary, BBC documentary script, broadcast on BBC and RTE 1964.
 * John Hume, Personal Views, Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland, Town House, Dublin, 1996. ISBN 978-1570981104

Biographies

 * George Drower, John Hume: Peacemaker, Gollancz, 1995 ISBN 978-0575062177
 * George Drower, John Hume: Man of Peace, Vista, London, 1996 ISBN 978-0575600843
 * Denis Haughey and Sean Farren, John Hume: Irish Peacemaker, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2015 ISBN 978-1846825866
 * Sean Farren, John Hume: In His Own Words. Dublin. 2021 ISBN 978-1-84682-998-7
 * Gerard Murray, John Hume and the SDLP: Impact and Survival in Northern Ireland, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1998. ISBN 978-0716526445
 * Paul Routledge, John Hume: a Biography, Harper-Collins, London, 1997 ISBN 978-0006387398
 * Barry White, John Hume: a Statesman of the Troubles, Blackstaff, Belfast, 1984 ISBN 978-0856403170
 * Stephen Walker, John Hume, the Persuader, Gill Books, Dublin, 2023 ISBN 9780717196081

title: John Hume