Juliette Lewis
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Juliette Lewis Makes Stage Debut in London Fool

As previously tipped (See The Goss, 10 Apr 2006), Lindsay Posner will direct a revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 play Fool for Love at the West End’s Apollo Theatre, where Hollywood actress and rocker Juliette Lewis (pictured) is now confirmed to make her stage acting debut in the production, which opens on 13 June 2006 (previews from 7 June).

The 90-minute piece recounts a painful love story. In a seedy motel room in southern California, May and Eddie go back beyond their adult lives, back to the legacy of their parents and their parents before. As they challenge each other's versions of events, what emerges through broken images and scraps of remembered colours is a childhood which defines the rest of their lives.

Lewis, who plays May, has never acted on stage professionally. She’s best known for her roles in a string of edgy Hollywood films in the 1990s, including Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (for which she was nominated for an Oscar, opposite Robert DeNiro), What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Kalifornia, Strange Days, Romeo Is Bleeding, The Basketball Diaries and, most notoriously, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, in which she and another recent import to the West End, Woody Harrelson, played serial killers on a rampage.

In more recent years, Lewis has concentrated on a second career in rock music. In 2003, she founded her band Juliette and the Licks, for which she writes all the music and lyrics and acts as lead singer. The band released its full-length debut album, You’re Speaking My Language, last year. While in London for Fool for Love, Lewis will take a break from her schedule at the Apollo to appear with the band in a Hyde Park concert, supporting the Foo Fighters and Motorhead, on Sunday 17 June 2006.

Shepard, himself an accomplished film and stage actor, has written more than 45 plays to date, including True West, A Lie of the Mind and Buried Child. Over the past six months, two of his most recent plays - The God of Hell and The Late Henry Moss - have received their UK premieres, at the Donmar Warehouse and Almeida Theatre, respectively.

Fool for Love is presented in the West End by Clare Lawrence and Anna Waterhouse for Out of the Blue Productions. No further casting or creative details have yet been announced. Currently at the Apollo, Anthony Page’s acclaimed Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, is due to finish its limited season on 13 May 2006.

- by Terri Paddock

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