Hero Kay gets special Stone of Destiny film visit
AN American director will make a 3,000-mile trip to deliver a copy of his film about the Stone of Destiny raid to one of the gang who is now too frail to get to the cinema.
Vancouver-based Charles Martin Smith will personally deliver a copy of the movie – in cinemas from October 10 – to Kay Matheson, 80, who drove the getaway car.[>
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He said: “Earlier this year I drove to Altbea in Wester Ross where Kay is in a nursing home. She still has her faculties but is a bit weak. I told her about the film and we had a long chat about it.[>
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“I promised to get a copy to her and I’ll drive there to sit and watch it with her. She did this amazing thing which caught the imagination of a nation.”[>
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Kate Mara, 25, plays Matheson in the film, in which Stardust actor Charlie Cox, 26, is Ian Hamilton, another key figure in the Westminster Abbey raid. The raid made Matheson a hero after she and fellow Glasgow University students Hamilton, Alan Stuart and Gavin Vernon took the stone on Christmas Day, sparking a nationwide police hunt.[>
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Charles Martin Smith is best known for his roles as special prosecutor Thomas Dewey in The Untouchables and Terry “The Toad” Fields in American Graffiti.[>
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Stone of Destiny is his 13th film as a director – and the one he’s most nervous about. Starring Robert Carlyle, Billy Boyd, Peter Mullen and Stephen McCole, it opts for comedy sometimes verging on the farcical.[>
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“It is a feelgood movie,” said Martin. “The idea of stealing this and making so many mistakes along the way – the facts were so good they didn’t need changed. What they did was so effective and completely non-violent.[>
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“You don’t have to be Scottish to want to stand on your chair at the end of the film and cheer for those kids.”[>