There are plenty of old and foolish characters including Polonius (Hamlet), Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV), and of course Lear (King Lear), who very foolishly believes his insincere daughters rather than his one true daughter, ultimately resulting in his own degrading and tragic end.
I mean, would you be a wilfully foolish comedy character?
For another, the play exhibits an admirable complexity in its attitude toward its characters; Hankin has compassion for the people he makes fun of and isn't fearful of rendering his most sympathetic characters foolish or unhappy.
But Mr. Denby is his own best character, just foolish enough to prompt us to think we would have coped much better, but still human enough to make us suspect, late at night, that we probably wouldn't have.
He slips backstory and sidebars into the movie with an untroubled directness, and lines the soundtrack copiously with the script's zingy voice-over monologues for all of its main characters, whose self-defining, self-deluding rhetoric sheds light on the glib allure of foolish ideas for stunted characters who fall under the sway of foolish plans and put them foolishly into action.
Both of the actresses said they recognized hypocrisy in those lines of dialogue yet had to find ways to play the moments without making their characters look foolish.
But, unlike his often foolish and always sincere characters, he possesses the discipline of a great artist, who knows that in dreams lie responsibilities: to build a world, one must first fashion the bricks.
Jane Austen's keen social observations and delightfully witty, sometimes foolish and occasionally loathsome characters have made her one of our most lasting writers — this year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of her first novel, "Sense and Sensibility" — and earned her an avid fan base.
And Sahoko Sato, a mezzo-soprano, made Fidalma a sympathetic character despite her foolish crush on a younger man.
His singing captured the sneering wiles and befuddled fits of this complex character, at once foolish and dangerous.
