He made Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter fart, left Judi Dench unable to control herself and told a fry-up fantasy about Helen Mirren. A new biography details the star’s mischief

Jasper Rees’s authorised biography of Michael Gambon, published three years after the great actor’s death, has nuanced accounts of his performances in Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter as well as The Singing Detective and the Harry Potter films. There are even chapters devoted to his hands (“the biggest you’ve ever seen on anybody” – Brian Cox) and similarly enormous feet. But, Gambon being Gambon, there are also dozens of accounts of tomfoolery on and off stage …

An American fighter pilot teams up with a retired KGB officer for hijinks and hilarity in Soviet Russia

Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh star in this goofy but entertaining action-comedy bromance set in the cold war 80s, when it seemed every red-blooded young guy in America adored Top Gun and wanted to be a US Navy fighter pilot. It’s got some outrageous close-quarter fight scenes – and who knew Branagh could bust out martial arts moves? Is he going to follow Bob Odenkirk into an unexpected action movie career? The final sequences of automotive mayhem in and around Moscow might remind you of the heady days of Roger Moore as James Bond.

Reynolds is Troy Kelly (callsign “Assassin”), a supercool fighter pilot in 1987, who is always doing brave and brilliant stuff that isn’t in the rulebook, and cracking wise in the accepted Reynolds manner. But when his spy plane is shot down deep inside snowy and forested Soviet territory, Troy awakens from his coma to find himself in the log cabin of retired KGB man Nikolai Ustinov, cheerfully played by Branagh, who is a secret fan of all things American and obsessively rewatches Top Gun on samizdat VHS. He suggests to the stunned Troy that he simply stays in his cabin, watching the film with him, until the cold war is over.

The formidable actor talks about the challenge of finding meaty characters, tough times in the US – and co-starring with her dad’s hero Kenneth Branagh in The Cherry Orchard

It’s lunchtime in Stratford-upon-Avon and Helen Hunt has 30 minutes to spare. She’s preparing for her Royal Shakespeare Company debut and is taking time out to speak to me via Zoom, just her head and shoulders, with what looks like a sleek-surfaced kitchen in the backdrop. Hunt is all sleek surfaces herself: polite smiles, even tones and an inscrutability so strained it makes me wonder what might be bubbling underneath.

Hunt is starring alongside Kenneth Branagh and Bill Pullman in a new version of The Cherry Orchard. She plays Madame Ranevskaya, the Russian aristocrat and matriarch who returns home to find her family estate in jeopardy. The play, like so many of Chekhov’s, is about the apathy of the elite class in the dying days of the Russian empire. So why this play, for her, and why now?

Helen Hunt and Kristin Scott Thomas are leading revivals of the Russian classic whose blend of comedy and tragedy is baked into our own dramatic heritage

What kind of play is The Cherry Orchard? As a new production starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh beckons in Stratford, I am reminded that it is a question people have been asking since the play’s inception. Chekhov himself wrote that what had emerged in his play was “not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce”. Stanislavski, who directed the Moscow premiere in 1904, violently disagreed. “It is a tragedy,” he told Chekhov, “whatever prospect of a better life you hold out in the last act.”

While the debate continues, I hope we shall not be told by anyone involved in the new RSC production that they are at long last restoring the play’s comedy. It is a critical cliche that the British sentimentalise the play and treat it as a lament for the decline and fall of a pseudo-Edwardian aristocracy. In my experience of the play – and I have seen about 20 productions – this is simply untrue. We generally do The Cherry Orchard very well because its blend of styles and moods is something baked into our own dramatic heritage. Eschewing the academic formality of the French, for whom tragedy and comedy are rigidly defined genres, we are used to a glorious impurity in drama: a culture that can produce Twelfth Night should have no problem in comprehending The Cherry Orchard.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Prospero is reimagined as a conductor in this superbly orchestrated version of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy

Kenneth Branagh is said to have played 35 Shakespearean parts, albeit back in the day. Seeing him speaking in verse these days is something of an event, all the more so when he is making a return to the Royal Shakespeare Company after more than 30 years to take on, for the first time, Shakespeare’s magician, deposed duke and tyrant occupier. Even the king turned up for it some days ago.

Branagh’s Prospero initially follows in the vein of his fast and feverish King Lear, performed in the West End in 2023. He seems to be speeding through the part rather than inhabiting it, too puckish, almost larky, rather underwhelming. It is the show itself that casts its spell through its enchanting sights, sounds and ensemble accomplishments. Richard Eyre, directing his first Shakespeare play at Stratford, does a stupendous job of bringing an overt sense of performance to the production.

Promo for the much-anticipated sequel, in which Streep is reunited with Stanley Tucci, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, clocks up 2.5m views in eight hours

The first full-length trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 has been released, and given more details on David Frankel’s hotly anticipated follow-up. In the promo, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly and her right-hand man Nigel, played by Stanley Tucci, are seen reuniting with Anne Hathaway’s Andy and, later, Emily Blunt’s Emily.

Priestly remembers neither, nor even her habit of referring to all her fashion magazine assistants as Emily – presumably on account of her withering alpha-editor status rather than, say, dementia.

Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner unite for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Michael Sheen launches Welsh National Theatre and Bridget Christie revs up for a return to the stage