High-flying Anutin delivers with heart - quite literally
WITH PARTY POLITICS pretty much in limbo these days, Bhumjaithai Party leader Anutin Charnvirakul put his passion for flying to excellent use on Monday, doing the sort of good deed that loves to light up the social networks.
The initial revelation was cheerful but vague, a post by Dr Pat Ongcharit, a surgeon at Chulalongkorn Hospital. “To Udon and back for heart donor retrieval, flown by big-heart pilot Anutin Charnvirakul.”
It soon emerged that a person in Udon Thani who’d been left brain-dead had earlier signed the form to donate his (or her) heart, and Pat had to get there in a hurry to bring the heart back to Bangkok, where there was urgent need. When Pat was unable to secure a flight late at night, his friend Anutin volunteered to fly him there in his private jet. Matichon picked up the story from there, explaining that the heart had to be transplanted into its waiting recipient within six hours.
Hero-of-the-moment Anutin inherited both the Bhumjaithai Party and the sprawling firm Sino-Thai Engineering and Construction from his father, Chavarat Charnvirakul, the party’s former leader and the founder of the company.
Been through the ringer
Actress Ratha “Ying” Pho-ngam certainly has her ups and downs, and that’s before we even start talking about her experiences deep down in the water.
Lately she’s particularly delighted to have finally paid off the Bt10-million debt accrued over a long period by her mother, the actress-comedian Noi Pho-ngam. Much of Ying’s career earnings went toward that.
And she’s still hard at work, but her latest film posed yet another challenge to her greatest dread – being underwater. As a child Ying had a close call in the water and almost drowned, so it took some doing four years ago to get her submerged again for a TV drama series. And it didn’t help that the script required her to “sing underwater”. It was another near-disaster. “I saw it as my second time drowning,” she says.
Come next Wednesday, Christmas Eve, her new movie, “Game Plook Phee” (“Ghost Coins”), hits the screens – and there she is in the water again!
Ying only agreed to the role because the wet scene was supposed to be shot in a pool with the water just three metres deep, and director Tiwa Methaisong assured her that all she had to do was stand there.
On the day of the shoot, though, the water turned out to be six metres deep and the scene involved a car sinking into it. There was no “standing”, just more of that dreadful, barely controlled floating underwater. “It’s like you always get what you hate,” she sighs.
As you can imagine, Ying struggled with the task a bit, and the crew finally had to secure her legs to keep her in place, but that only made her feel like some horrible creature was pulling her down to the bottom!
The job got done, though, and Ying earned hearty pats on her wet back from all the crew. In fact she’s well known for her professionalism, and that’s helped her garner roles overseas.
Following her turn in Hollywood’s “Only God Forgives”, she’s been working on “The Mechanic: Resurrection”, an imaginatively titled sequel to “The Mechanic” that again stars British tough guy Jason Statham standing in for Charles Bronson as a tricky assassin. He and American actress Jessica Alba were shooting in Thailand last month.
