Words to live by

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

[More about this magnificent film here]

Very Important Person

It is, sadly, three years since the death of the eternally radiant Dame Elizabeth Taylor. Such a loss.

Here, by way of a tribute, is another enthusiastically camp panegyric by Steve Hayes (Tired Old Queen at the Movies) on one of her classic films - The VIPs!

Tired Old Queen at the Movies - The V.I.P.s

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE (27th February 1932 – 23rd March 2011)

Art imitating life imitating art imitating life

Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter are to play Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a one-off 90-minute BBC4 drama (to be shown "later this year" - no broadcast date has yet been confirmed).

From an article by Anna Pukas in The Express:

In 1983 the hottest ticket in town was Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on stage together for the first time. The play was Noel Coward’s Private Lives but the billboards might as well have read The Liz and Dick Show.

After all Private Lives is about a couple, divorced after a stormy marriage, who meet up again while honeymooning with their new spouses and realise they are still in love with each other. Remind you of anyone? If ever there were a case of art imitating life, this was it. The second wife was even called Sybil, like the first wife Burton had left for Taylor.

Taylor and Burton had divorced for the second time six years earlier. They had both made ill-advised new marriages – she to Virginia senator John Warner, he to model Suzy Hunt, ex-wife of racing driver James Hunt – which had also ended in divorce. It was no wonder that audiences thought Private Lives was about their lives.

But rather than a triumph the next year was to be a watershed. For the first time Taylor – a consummate film actress but with virtually no theatre experience – seemed out of her depth and for the first time in the tempestuous 20 years he had known her, Burton found her irritating and boring. Most poignantly they were to be the last months they ever spent together for Burton died the following year.

Now the story of that last turbulent year has been made into a TV film starring Dominic West and Helena Bonham Carter in a BBC project that might be described as art imitating life imitating art imitating life.

Unfortunately, according to The Guardian, this will be the last of the brilliant real-life documentaries that have made BBC4 such a compelling and watchable channel since it was launched in 2002...

The drama, written by William Ivory and directed by Richard Laxton, is something of a swansong for BBC4, the last in a successful series of biopics about public figures including Margaret Thatcher, Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd and Barbara Cartland.

BBC4's budget was cut last year as part of the corporation's "Delivering Quality First" cost-saving initiative. As a result, the channel is commissioning less original drama.

Such a shame.

BBC4

Enter the Queen(s)

On this day of pageant, as Her Majesty heads a flotilla of hundreds of boats down the Thames in honour of the Diamond Jubilee (which I shall be watching from the dry comfort of Dolores Delargo Towers rather than brave the torrential rain and millions of wet onlookers), here are a couple of appropriate pieces, methinks...

Enter the Queens: Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Jones, Freddie Mercury and more

And on a more subtle note (although it probably wasn't at the time!):

Handel - Music for the Royal Fireworks

Gawd Bless Ya, Ma'am(s)!

Diamond Jubilee on the BBC

Old Broads

Just back from a fabulosa weekend in sunny Brighton (via Halfway to Heaven of course), but two things come to mind - firstly, despite interruptions of service, it is still Tacky Music Monday. Secondly, today would have been Dame Elizabeth Taylor's 80th birthday!

I am aware that Miss Taylor did not sing (despite her efforts in the movie version of A Little Night Music), so let us today feature a magnificent number from one of the last movies in which she appeared, albeit as an observer to the main number as performed by three other magnificent divas Miss Shirley MacLaine, Miss Debbie Reynolds and Miss Joan Collins!

These Old Broads

How much more camp can you get?!

These Old Broads - the movie

The Novak-McGuire conundrum

It's been a while since I played the "connections" game!

So what possible connection could there be between today's birthday girls the fantabulosa Miss Kim Novak (79 today) and Dorothy McGuire of the wonderful McGuire Sisters (84 today)?

Miss Novak, ultra-cool and glamorous screen presence that she was (and is), played the ditzy chorus girl in Pal Joey, the dual-role mysterious blonde in Hitchcock's Vertigo, the witch in Bell, Book and Candle, and many other movie roles before her star faded. She later played upon her position as a cult camp icon by hamming it up in one of my favourite roles of hers, in The Mirror Crack'd, and indeed she is a new "exhibit" in the Dolores Delargo Towers - Museum of Camp for very good reason:

Elizabeth Taylor vs Kim Novak - The Mirror Cracked

The McGuire Sisters (all three of them still alive) were the darlings of the American variety show circuit in the 1950s - as well as their numerous live performances for presidents and dignitaries, they appeared on the Ed Sullivan, Dean Martin, Danny Kaye, Milton Berle, Andy Williams, Perry Como and Red Skelton shows. They officially retired in 1968, and their own "cult" status was thus assured. Here's one of their classic TV moments:

McGuire Sisters & Steve Allen - Banana Split

And the connection? One of the McGuire Sisters' biggest hits was the theme song of the movie that catapulted Miss Novak to fame, Picnic. Given this sultry scene (opposite a very gorgeous William Holden), I am not surprised people sat up and took notice of her:

William Holden and Kim Novak - Picnic

And here's the song that completes the circle:

McGuire Sisters - Theme from Picnic

Phew!

Mine, all mine!

Dame Liz Taylor's entire jewellery collection of 300 pieces, valued at $30million (£18.8million), will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York in December 2011 in support of the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.

Christie's to auction Elizabeth Taylor's jewels

Please, Santa Baby, please!

Read more about the auction on The Telegraph website

In pictures: Elizabeth Taylor jewel collection

My blog about the collection from April this year

Sparkling

“You can’t cry on a diamond’s shoulder, and diamonds won’t keep you warm at night, but they are sure fun when the sun shines” - Eizabeth Taylor


The Taylor-Burton diamond

Actress Elizabeth Taylor's prized jewellery collection is to be sold at auction, Christie's has said.


The Krupp Diamond

The collection, which includes some of the world's most expensive stones, will be sold along with pieces from the star's art collection, some of her clothing and other memorabilia.

Read more on the BBC


La Pelegrina Pearl

As well as the famed Krupp diamond and the 69-carat Taylor-Burton diamond — a stone so awesome that it was almost a celebrity in its own right — her vault included the Grand Duchess Vladimir Suite, the La Pelegrina Pearl and rare artefacts from houses including Boucheron, Bulgari, Cartier, Chopard, Garrard, Van Cleef & Arpels, Ruser, Tiffany, Schlumberger and more.


The Grand Duchess Vladimir Suite

I want some!!!

If you don't already have the magnificent book Elizabeth Taylor - My Love Affair With Jewellery in pride of place on your bookshelf, it is available from Amazon

Oh, Big Daddy...

One hundred years ago today the gay dramatist and writer, author of many of Elizabeth Taylor's finest screen roles, Tennessee Williams was born.

Over at the Dolores Delargo Museum of Camp, he is our latest exhibit...

As befits a centenary year, Tennessee Williams revivals are popping up on stages across this country (as well as the US) - not least two of his previously never staged works I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays and A Cavalier For Milady, both at the tiny Cock Tavern Theatre pub in Kilburn, of all the unlikely places.

Read more in the Evening Standard

It is probably too much to expect a new big London staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, nor Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - and I am not sure the West End is ready for either after Debbie Allen's last attempt at the latter closed prematurely - but we can live in hope!

Marlon Brando - A Streetcar Named Desire

Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Yonder

This poem was read at Dame Elizabeth Taylor's funeral today. A beautiful choice.

The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo (Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well):

The Leaden Echo
How to keep — is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep,
Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

The Golden Echo
Spare!
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace —
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. —
Yonder. — What high as that! We follow, now we follow. — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Just when I'd stopped opening doors

Mr Stephen Sondheim celebrated his 81st birthday on Tuesday.

Dame Liz Taylor died yesterday.

Here's a little tribute to them both...

Elizabeth Taylor - Send in the Clowns

Dame Elizabeth Taylor RIP

The most beautiful, the most glamorous, the greatest star the world ever knew is no more. I am very sad.



Dame Elizabeth Taylor obituary on the BBC

Total war, Martha? Total!

Who knew that Edward Albee was still alive? Celebrating his birthday today, at 81 Albee has certainly earned his title of "America's greatest living playwright".



Adopted by a high society couple as a child, Albee ran away from his constrictive upbringing to join the literary set of New York's Greenwich Village in the 1950s. And his phenomenal legacy began there, with critically-acclaimed works such as Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women, and continued to produce award-winning plays over five decades, including The American Dream, and most recently with the 2002 hit Broadway and West End play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?.

"I'm loud, and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house 'cos God knows, somebody has to! But I'm not a monster, I'm not!!"

But it of course for his masterwork Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? that he is (rightly) most admired and remembered. This tortuous dissection of a stifling relationship between two headstrong (and drunken) characters is held up today as a classic of world drama. It caused massive controversy in the straight-laced early 60s for its uncompromising use of vulgar language and uncomfortable scenes of verbal humiliation and implicit "sexual decadence".

The 1966 film adaptation was a massive success, featuring possibly the very best cinematic performances of all the leading players' careers - Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sandy Dennis and George Segal. All four were nominated for Oscars (the film itself having been nominated in all thirteen eligible categories, unprecedented at the time), and Miss Taylor and Miss Dennis won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively.

In the hands of these masters, the movie is a brilliantly disturbing and engrossing example of modern film noir, as the viewer "eavesdrops" on the agonies of Martha and George's spiteful attacks on each other, and experiences the stifling discomfort of their humiliated guests.

The film, as the play before it, caused uproar in an age when cinema censorship was still rife, and apparently Jack Warner chose to pay a fine of $5,000 in order that it would remain as faithful to the play (with its profanity) as possible. His faith in the project certainly paid off.

Here are just a couple of clips from this, one of my and Madame Acarti's favourite films ever:

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - "Getting angry, Baby?"

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - "I am NOT a Monster!"

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on IMDB

Swimming with sharks

Many commentators may observe that the grande dame of cinema Dame Elizabeth Taylor has been doing just that for years, but at the age of 74, Liz recently went swimming with sharks!

Read the amazing story

Pictured at the recent launch of the Elizabeth Taylor jewellery line, she looks fabulous despite all her problems.