The most frustrating type of fandom is to be an American fan of a British stage actress. If she's really good at what she does, she will spend her career doing plays at the West End, or the odd TV-movie for Channel Four, and never feel the need to go Hollywood or do anything that will make its way to my small corner of the world. While less-talented performers will come over to this country, become stars, and fade away into obscurity after their fortieth birthday, she'll be perfecting her craft, playing for the long haul.

Thus, the bittersweet discovery this week that the woman pictured at the top right corner of my website, Phoebe Nicholls, is set to appear in a play opening at the Hampstead Theatre in London, commencing in mid-June. No movies, no TV, as far as I can tell, just a performance in the one medium I have absolutely no access to, thousands of miles away. Any true fanatical interest in the work of an actor or director, whether great or mediocre, compels a desire to be a completist, to see anything and everything he's done, in order to gain a more detailed perspective of his career, to compare performances, but mainly just to indulge some idiosyncratic weirdness in oneself. Yet with Mrs. Sturridge, I can't see the one avenue in which she has most excelled; its almost like having access only to Shakespeare's sonnets, and not his plays. Sigh.

Lord, I'm pathetic....