Tag Archives: Gladys Cooper

Biographies by Sheridan Morley

 

 

Robert Morley flashed by on the TV yesterday and I remembered how much I loved him. Does anyone remember him in Who´s Killing The Great Chefs of Europe? Since I had a rare day with no other commitments I went on to read Sheridan Morley´s biography of him, very funny and well-written. You certainly get to know more about him but you don´t get to know him any better. After I read Morley´s biography of his father, I went on to read that of his grandmother, Gladys Cooper. And the same thing. It´s like eating brioche, satisfying and delicious but without much substance.

John Lehr is a contemporary of Sheridan Morley´s and he also wrote a biography of his father Bert, which makes for an interesting comparison, both as works of biography but also about cultural differences. John´s bio is all about finding interiority, psychological complexity, motive. Sheridan´s is all about jokes, attitudes, ways of being. Very enjoyable reading nonetheless.

james mason

I carried on with Sheridan Morley´s book on James Mason, and cumulatively the biographies led me to reflect that there once was a market for light, brief books, written by someone seemingly in the know, on film stars. This book is on James Mason but like most of his others it´s a bare outline of a life and career; very well-written but critically deficient; peppered with interesting anecdotes from people who knew the subject and who were willing to contribute to a portrait the subject would be happy with. ´Research´in Morleyland is having tea or cocktails with interesting people willing to share a piquant story that doesn´t cross the boundary into potential embarrassment. This one, like the others, provides 250 odds pages that make an afternoon disappear in a vague haze of pleasure and leaves no residue, rather like afternoon tv now. No wonder they could be churned out annually at considerable profit.

José Arroyo

Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, USA, 1942)

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Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, USA, 1942) is one of the most famous ‘women’s films’ of all time and Bette Davis’ greatest box office hit when she was ‘Queen of the Lot’ at Warner Brothers. The story is one of transformation: Charlotte Vale, an old maid bullied by her mother and put-upon by her family goes away from home and transforms herself into a glamorous and sophisticated woman. It’s a story of survival and metamorphosis: the ugly duckling becomes a swan, the nervous wreck becomes confident, the one who hides and is hidden in a closet….; Now, Voyager is a film that had, and continues to have, great resonance with LGBT audiences: Charlotte Vale gets ‘caught’ with a boy, she’s bullied and made fun for being who she is, she’s nervous about how to behave in public, she’s got to practice the persona she performs in public, she has secret trysts, she has to figure a dialogic way of communicating in public so that her loved one hears one thing, strangers another; she’s got to figure out another way to be happy that doesn’t involve the nuclear family or indeed maybe romance: ‘Why ask for the moon when we have the stars’.  Bette Davis wears a fabulous wardrobe by Orry-Kelly; It’s the film where Paul Henreid famously lights his & her cigarettes; and it has one of the most memorable closing scenes in the history of cinema. It’s not a great film; it’s too choppy and somewhat crude. But it’s a film that still continues to involve audiences today. Every time one shows it, it’s once again a hit. It was Bette Davis’ greatest hit of all time.

Also with great performances from Gladys Cooper as the mother and Claude Rains as the psychiatrist who puts Davis on the right path.

José Arroyo