No Business like Show Business
Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland
The subtitle to this delicious book is ‘A Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship’, and it would indeed be difficult to imagine two more unlikely companions than its author and his subject, the 80-year-old gay Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst. Christopher Robbins was young, green and broke when he was first introduced to Hurst as a possible scriptwriter for a forthcoming film: a great religious epic covering ‘the events leading up to the birth of Christ’. As he struggled to get his head round this fantastic commission for which he knew he was spectacularly ill-suited, Robbins began to realize that he had indeed entered a fantasy world. The film was never made of course, Robbins was never paid and the script was never finished. But in The Empress of Ireland he produced a comic masterpiece, a picture of a particular kind of gay life in the 1970s, and of a wickedly unapologetic old rogue it’s impossible not to like.
Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me
During the 1950s an unusual event took place at Pinewood Studios: the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl, a light comedy starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe as the two leads. This unlikely combination proved to be a disaster – Marilyn failed to turn up on time and could barely act or remember her lines, while Sir Laurence was completely out of his depth with her and her very un-British entourage. The film appeared and sank without trace, but fortunately Colin Clark, a cheeky young man working on set as a general dogsbody, was there to record the agonies of its making in this sharp and hilarious diary.
Shall I Be Me?
In the summer of 1953, briefly in London during the Coronation celebrations, I took myself to the Phoenix theatre (Upper Circle, 6s.) to see The Sleeping Prince, with the two glittering stars of the...
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