Britain's Royal Mail celebrates Monty Python with stamps featuring iconic sketches and characters

This week’s new entertainment releases include albums from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams and a Stephen Sondheim tribute from Betty Buckley, Ryan Reynolds starring as a time-traveling pilot in Netflix’s “The Adam Project” and a small-town murder case gets some big-star wattage in NBC’s “The Thing About Pam” with Renée Zellweger.

A representative for the Directors Guild of America said his family informed the organization that he passed Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)Michael Apted, the acclaimed British director of the “Up” documentary series and films as diverse as the Loretta Lynn biopic “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and the James Bond film “The World Is Not Enough,” has died. A representative for the Directors Guild of America said his family informed the organization that he passed Thursday night. Apted served as a researcher on the first film and took over as director seven years later, continuing to check in with the subjects every seven years. “The series was an attempt to do a long view of English society,” Apted told Slant Magazine in 2019.

LONDON – Herbert Kretzmer, the journalist and lyricist best known for his English-language adaptation of the musical Les Miserables, has died. Tributes poured in from giants of the London stage, including theatrical producer Cameron Mackintosh, singer Elaine Paige and lyricist Tim Rice. Les Miserables producer Mackintosh said Kretzmer was instrumental in bringing Victor Hugo's classic tale of defiance and redemption in early 19th century France to the stage in English in October 1985, five years after it had opened in Paris. Until a young British producer by the name of Cameron Mackintosh invited Kretzmer to tea in June 1984 and his life changed. Though the expanded English version of Les Miserables — it was never Les Mis for Kretzmer — had mixed reviews at the start, it would soon become one of the biggest successes of 20th century theater.

1939: Actor John Cleese, a founding member of the comedy group Monty Python, is born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England. Cleese is also known for the British sitcom "Fawlty Towers" and for movies such as "A Fish Called Wanda," "Fierce