KEN'S CANDID CAMERA

Where the hell does the time go?

It seems only a few years back (at most a decade or two) that Ken Russell was the enfant terrible of the cinema.

Then, a couple of days ago, he turned 80 and there he was holding court at the Proud Gallery in London's Buckingham Street, where an impressive turn out of the great and the good were in attendance for the launch of a new exhibition of 1950s Russell photographs from the TopFoto archives.

They are, unsurprisingly, compelling!

© TopFoto and Ken Russell

Introducing myself - immediately after he had been reunited Georgina Hale (one of the Russell Repertory Company regulars) - Uncle Ken did me the great courtesy of acting as if he knew who I was. This civility was greatly appreciated by someone who charts his early obsession with movies by the films of Ken Russell.

I was 13 years old when I saw his groundbreaking film about Elgar (1961) made for the BBC’s TV arts programme, Monitor. Revolutionary, in that it included dramatized scenes with actors, Elgar, scorched itself into the memory with searing black and white images such as that of the young Elgar galloping across the Malvern Hills on a white pony.

KEN RUSSELL! It was the name to watch --- and I watched!

In 1968 I saw Song of Summer, the achingly exquisite portrait of Frederick Delius with Max Adrian as the blind, crippled composer struggling to write his final compositions through the medium of his amanuensis, Eric Fenby (Christopher Gable).

It was a sign of the television times in which we then lived that an elitist art film was viewed by enough of the population to subsequently be the subject of loving spoof on The Benny Hill Show!

With these early programmes, Russell defined a new style in filmmaking that was quickly adopted by others, notably Jonathan Miller, Lindsay Anderson and Stanley Kubrick.

Ken soon moved on from TV to cinema and I followed... watching a string of brilliantly controversial films: his adaptation of D H Lawrence’s Women in Love with Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden, Oliver Reed and Alan Bates – "Tut, tut!" went the critics in response to male nude wrestling by firelight with shocking full frontal views! – and Glenda again, on this occasion with Richard Chamberlain, in The Music Lovers which caused more tut-tutting, this time about Tchaikovsky’s much-loved music being irredeemably tainted by smutty references to homosexuality!

Next, I ran the gauntlet of local Christians picketing the Astor cinema in Bromley in order to see The Devils: Ken’s shocking take on Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudoun in which Sister Vanessa Redgrave did unforgivably naughty stuff with a convent candle!

Ken was everything I loved about 'sixties and 'seventies cinema: bold, daring, dangerous and outrageous.

There were fantastic, dazzling flights of high campery with a 'twenties-style Twiggy in The Boyfriend and Roger Daltry, Elton John & Co in the rock folly, Tommy. There were also dynamic explorations of the entanglements of art and passion in Savage Messiah and in the monstrously magnificent Mahler which starred Robert Powell and Georgina Hale and swung hysterically – but unforgettably – from the beautiful to the banal and back again. But then Russell was never afraid to fall or fail, it was all part of the risk of flying to the sun on home-made wings!

Anyway, that – and, of course, much else besides – is the Ken Russell everyone knows; what comes as a revelation is this superb collection of photographs, Ken Russell's Lost London Rediscovered: 1951-1957, on show at the Proud Gallery until 21st August; 11.00-18.00, seven days a week.

Of course, we really shouldn’t be surprised that, during his years before breaking into filmmaking, he was already demonstrating such an exceptional skill in composing and creating memorable imagery. As Russell told the Telegraph: “In a way I was making still films, I suppose…”

© TopFoto and Ken Russell

The stunning photographs, which were originally published in Picture Post and other magazines, are candid glimpses of London life in the 1950s as encountered by Russell in the streets around his then lodgings in Portobello Road such as raggedy children playing amongst rain-drenched, post-war bombsites and four-square housewives in curler-disguising turbans and wrap-around aprons.

There are elderly women sitting in graveyards or playing cellos on the steps of the National Gallery; the forgotten cult of Teddy Girls modelling their modish home-made fashions; middle-aged men confusedly contemplating the inexplicable bizarreness of modern art; and - for good measure and pure whimsical delight - eccentric images of mock duels and expeditions by penny-farthing bicycles.

© TopFoto and Ken Russell

The photographs, all of which are available as signed limited prints, were found amongst a cache of boxes that TopFoto bought from Picture Post 30 years ago, but remained overlooked - until now. Mercifully, they were not in Russell’s thatched house in Lymington when it burned down last year, taking with it all the filmmaker's scripts and papers.

These dynamic pictures are a reminder for my generation (and an introduction to a younger generation) of Ken Russell’s extraordinary and extravagant genius behind the lens of a camera…

© TopFoto and Ken Russell

[Images: Photo of Ken Russell by David Weeks; all photographs from the exhibition © TopFoto and Ken Russell]

SHORT MEASURES

Sir Michael Hordern once complained to me about the obsessive behaviour of a relatively shortish actor (and fellow knight) with whom he was working. Giving the gentleman in question a pitying look, he turned to me with a dismissive grunt and murmured, "Little man's disease!"

Not very gracious, but there is a common, if erroneous, assumption - particularly among tall people (who naturally feel easily threatened!) - that small people frequently make up for their deficiency in height by exhibiting excessive self-importance or even ruthless ambition...

For example, Napoléon Bonaparte (who featured in a recent blog) is often depicted as a midgit megolamaniac in comparison with his towering nemesis, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.


Now, as it happens, Napoléon was only 5 foot 6.5 inches in height; however, it is perhaps surprising to discover that Britain's hero of WWII, Sir Winston Churchill, was all of half an inch shorter at 5ft 6in --- as, indeed, were Tutenkhamen, Beethoven, Stalin and the Marquis de Sade; and as are Elijah Wood, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Raquel Welch and Twiggy.

To be short on inches, therefore, does not mean being short on talent or leadership ability: Lord Nelson, T E Lawrence (of Arabia) and Marilyn Monroe were each 5 foot 5-and-a-half inches; Harry Houdini was 5' 5"; Mahler, Mozart and Picasso were all 5' 4"; Gandhi, Khrushchev and Voltaire, 5' 3"; Balzac, 5' 2"; Toulouse-Lautrec, 5" 1' (some say 4' 11"!) and the British poet, Alexander (The Rape of the Lock) Pope, was just 4' 6".


Saintliness, it seems, also comes in small packages: Francis of Assis was 5' 1", while (St) Joan of Arc (who was also featured in that aforementioned blog) was only 4' 11", without her armour - an inch taller that saint-in-waiting, Mother Teressa, who never bothered with earthly armour.

Mae West was 5' 4" as are Bridgette Bardot, Michael J Fox, Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth II. Five-foot-three-inches seems to be a particularly popular height and among those who have risen to that level are Vivien Leigh, Martin Scorsese, Bo Derek and both Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney - which is probably why they made so many movies together.

The 'Little Sparrow', Edith Piaf (ditto that blog again), was 4ft 8in, just one of a whole catalogue of actors and singers whose height (or lack of it) never got in the way of stardom.

There are dozens of examples, such as Dudley More who, at 5' 2", was a full head-and-shoulders shorter than his TV sparring partner, Peter Cook.

Then there's Bette Midler, Kylie Minogue, Debbie Reynolds and daughter, Carrie Fisher, who all measure up at 5' 1"; and two irrepressibly bouncy characters, Dolly Parton and Danny De Vito, who are both a mere five-foot-nothing - the same height as Queen Victoria.

Gloria Swanson who played the Hollywood diva, Norma ("I'm ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille!") Desmond, in Billy Wilder's celebrated 1950 movie, Sunset Boulevard, was just 4 foot 11 inches tall.

Knowing which, that famous exchange between writer, Joe Gillis (Wiliam Holden), and the once radiant star of the silver screen, crackles with new potency...

Joe Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.

Norma Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

[Images: St Francis by Greg Friedman, O F M; Pete & Dud by Lewis Morley]

LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH!

Writing the other day about CLOWNS, reminded me of a meeting I once had with the master comic (a contemporary clown, indeed) Max Wall - who, I recently discovered from a blue plaque, was born just round the corner from me in Mowll Street, Kennington.



I had been to see Max - whose stage persona, as Professor Wallofski owed something to the Great Grock - in his one-man show, Aspects of Wall, and, after the show, I went backstage with a radio producer with whom I was working at the time who was planning to cast Max in a seemingly unlikely role as Charon, the Ferryman working the River Styx in Orpheus' Underworld.

As I might have expected, without the characteristic tights, tailcoat and wig, this was a very different Wall to the buffoon who held court on stage. True, the tombstone teeth were very much in evidence whenever his face cracked into a lopsided smile, but he was a small, weary man with sorrowful eyes and a voice that fell away in a sadly dying cadence. And, as he wiped away the sweat and the graesepaint, it was impossible not to notice how his hands were clawed by the crippling effects of arthritis: I could only guess at the pain that he had to break through every night simply to complete his show...

Like all great comics, Max Wall was intensely serious about the business of being funny which is undoubtedly why he was also able to plumb the dark depths of Beckett in both Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape as well give as a stuning portrayal of Osborne’s grotesque entertainer, Archie Rice.


I realised then - as I did again, on a later occasion, when encountering Frankie Howerd - that the old clichés about the melancholy man behind the clown's smile are all too true.

Which reminds me of a much quoted, and doubtless apocryphal story, about Grock and one which, apparently, had also been told a century earlier about Grimaldi.

This is how I tell it...


A man goes to see his doctor, wracked by depression and feelings of despair.

The doctor examines the patient and can find nothing wrong other than the all too obvious sickness of the soul.

“You are perfectly fit,” says the doctor, “you just need to lighten your spirits! Why not go and see the Great Grock? No one can see Grock and remain depressed and unhappy! Yes, my friend, a performance by Grock is the only medicine you require!”

“But you do not understand,” replies the patient with a sigh, “I am the Great Grock!”

CROSSING DRACULA

Shortly after the publication of my biography of Peter Jackson, I was sitting in a pub when my mobile phone rang. I answered it...

"Is that Brian Sibley?" boomed an unmistakable, stentorian voice.

"Christopher Lee!" I replied. "Nice to hear from you!"

"How did you know it was me?" the caller asked in a vaguely miffed tone, "I was disguising my voice!"

Not too successfully as it happened... I've had plenty of opportunities to get used to that distinctive voice: from the movies, of course, and from having lunched and dined with it's owner, talked with him on numerous occasions while writing my books about The Lord of the Rings movies and the Jackson biography, and having conducted most of his on-camera interviews for the Rings DVD 'extras'.

Writing, the day before yesterday, about Peter Cushing, reminded me how nervous I was when I met Christopher Lee for the first time in many years at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival preview of the sneak footage of The Fellowship of the Ring.

It was in a room in a French château, taken over for the weekend by New Line Cinema and imaginatively decked out to look like a composite set from the movie.

Christopher was going over the proofs for my The Lord of the Rings: Official Movie Guide and characteristically telling me off for too many blood-spattered references to his movie representations of Dracula!

He is tall and imposing and with a voice like that and a penetrating gaze like his, one is not apt to argue! But my fear actually arose from recalling an encounter thirty-something years earlier...

I was a passionate young film fan and my best mate and I had bought tickets for the BAFTA Awards in the days when the event was not quite the big deal that it is today.

We had hired penguin suits and had pretty good seats in the National Film Theatre. To my delight, I discovered that I was sitting behind Christopher Lee and, after the ceremony and in the hope of impressing my friend, I tapped Lee on the shoulder - or as near as I could reach! - and assayed a conversation...

"Mr Lee," I began, "you won't remember me..." Fatal words, of course! "We met at Pinewood a couple of years back on the set of Nothing But the Night, when I was there to interview Peter Cushing..."

"Oh, yes," he replied politely and then turned to go - except that I was hoping to take the conversation further.

"So..." I said and Christopher turned back to look at me, wondering, no doubt, to what further inconsequential inanities he was to be subjected... Simultaneously, I realised that I didn't actually have anything else to say...

"So," I said again, "How is Peter Cushing?"

Storm clouds lowered and his eyes burned with positively more than just a hint of red!

Then came the devastating put-down: "We don't LIVE TOGETHER, you know!"

I was crushed! Devastated! Utterly speechless!

Needless to say, I've never, subsequently, had the nerve to remind him of this encounter. Well you wouldn't, would you --- just in case you got told off again!

LOOKING FOR VAN HELSING

You can't keep a good vampire-hunter down, it seems...

A recent day-trip to Whitstable brought to mind a man of whom I have many fond memories; for Whitstable is not only famous as the place where some of the tastiest native oysters snuggle down in their beds, but also as the residence of that pre-eminent vampire-sleuth-and-slayer, the most gentlemanly film actor of his age --- PETER CUSHING.

The fact that the Hammer House of Horror star made his home beside the long shingly shore of this little town on the Thames Estuary, has now been honoured by naming a street CUSHING'S WALK and designating a spot on what passes for an esplanade, CUSHING'S VIEW...

I first met Peter Cushing when I was in my early twenties. I had ambitions to write and came up with the (not very original) idea of a book about 'actors' and one of the people I approached for an interview was Cushing.

I had already written him several letters as a fan that had led to a correspondence and he responded to my request for an interview with an invitation to visit him at Pinewood Studios where he was filming what would turn out to be one of very few turkeys in his prolific career, Nothing But the Night.

On the appointed day, I was treated royally: given a seat on set to watch filming (I was fascinated by the fact that Cushing, a chain-smoker, wore a white cotton glove on his right hand when not on camera so as not to get nicotine stains!) and I was introduced to his co-stars, his long-time screen nemesis, Christopher Lee, and the pneumatic Miss Diana Dors.

Then I was toured round the studio lot and was shown all those wonderfully phoney facades (walk through the door of a Mexican town and find yourself in a Cornish fishing village!); taken to lunch in the commissary (sitting at the next table to one of my film gods, Ken Russell, who was then filming Savage Messiah); and, after the interview, given a lift back into London by Cushing and Paddy, his Irish chauffer/stand-in.


The book never got written but we maintained our correspondence and, years later when I was presenting a book programme on the BBC, I twice got to interview Peter when he published two volumes of autobiography.

My last memory of this warm, courteous and generous man was of his going through the second volume, Past Forgetting, correcting various typos in his immaculate copperplate handwriting - to the complete frustration of his publicist, who wanted to whisk him off to his next appointment!

Anyway, back to Whitstable...

I am sitting propped up against one of the groins on the very windy beach when a man with a loud know-it-all megaphone-voice scrunches over the shingle, holding forth to a companion who hangs on his every word. "Oh, yes," says Megaphone, "I know this beach like the back of my hand..."

I tune-out for a while - to avoid crucial levels of boredom - but then, suddenly, pick up on a name that I know...

"Peter Cushing?" Megaphone is saying, " Oh yes, that's his house over there - the black weather-boarded one..."

"Do you ever spot him?" asks his friend eagerly.

"Well," replies Megaphone, "of course, he's a bit of a recluse, you know, so we don't see him about much nowadays..."

Hmmm! Not too surprising really... Not when you think that the dear man has been dead for almost THIRTEEN YEARS!

DO NOT GO GENTLY...

At the recent memorial service for Ian Richardson, Dame Helen Mirren read a poem entitled 'Dirge without Music' by the American lyrical poet and playwright, Edna St Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950), the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

It has something in common with Dylan Thomas' well-known verse, 'Do not go gentle into that good night...' and W H Auden's 'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone...' (made famous by the film Four Weddings and a Funeral) in that it is about the raging anger that is an intrinsic part of grief.

Dirge without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

***

Dame Helen's reading was charged with high emotion and she was all but overcome by the final line of the second verse. This was hardly surprising since, without question, this is one of the most passionate and painful responses to the death of a loved one I have ever encountered...

On the subject of grief and anger...

Bela, a fellow admirer of Ian Richardson, attending the service, refers to this poem and its reading in a post headed Grotesque and Unseemly, a title that refers not to Dame Helen's touching performance but to the scrum of photographers and autograph-hunters that flocked like vultures around the steps of St Paul's Covent Garden, following the service, button-holing every famous name they could recognise.

I too was appalled, but decided not to mention it in my report because I didn't want to sound a sour note when writing about something that had been a loving, celebratory service, honouring a fine actor.

But Bela is absolutely right: the display of insensitivity was staggering and anger-inducing and - whilst everyone attending the service behaved impeccably and gave the photographers and autograph collectors the snaps and inscriptions they wanted - it was a reminder of the extraordinary level of intrusiveness that celebrities are expected to endure.

What staggered me, as I noted on Bela's blog, was that some of the autograph seekers didn't even wait until people got outside the church... I happened to be coming down the aisle behind Elizabeth Spriggs - who was walking on a stick and with some difficulty - when a fan pushed his way in front and thrust an open autograph book and a pen at her. Then, having got her signature, he snatched back the book and dashed off in pursuit of Prunella Scales.


[Image: Tomb on San Michele, Venice © Brian Sibley]

OUR REVELS NOW ARE ENDED

Among yesterday's congregation were David Suchet, Prunella Scales, Julian Glover, Charlotte Rampling, Trevor Nunn, Charles Kay, Isla Blair and Elizabeth Spriggs. They and many other familiar faces from stage and television had gathered at St Paul’s Covent Garden, ‘The Actor’s Church’, to pay tribute to the late Ian Richardson.

It was an hour-long drama performed and directed to perfection, evoking laughter, summoning tears, combining mourning and celebrating in equal measure, in order to say farewell to a much loved and admired actor in the way only theatre people can...

We entered the church to a subtle organ arrangement (so subtle that most people would have missed it) of songs from My Fair Lady: a doubly appropriate welcome since Ian had acted and sung the role of Professor Henry Higgins and because St Paul’s is the church featured in the opening scene of Pygmalion and My Fair Lady and under the portico of which Higgins loiters in order to eavesdrop on the gutter-English of Eliza Doolittle.

This was followed (unbilled in the order of service) by Ian’s voice as Richard II exhorting us, for god’s sake, to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings…

“Ian loved memorial services,” said one of the actor’s sons, Miles Richardson, “He said it was an opportunity for all the old farts to get together!” Then, looking round the pews packed with names from the Who’s Who of British Theatre, he added, “Thank you for coming!”

There was a sterling rendition of ‘Jerusalem’ that would have gladdened the heart of every member of the Women’s Institute from whose ranks, one suspects, had come the considerable phalanx of female admirers that swelled the congregation.

There was a Robbie Burns song from Scottish soprano, Isobel Buchanan; Stephen Gray singing 'Blow, Northern Wind', a song Ian had sung in a production of Pericles; and there was a hilarious piece of comic nonsense from Sir Donald Sinden about watching a Noh Drama in Japan which - though Sir Donald forgot to mention it - was Ian's favourite joke!

There were readings by Dame Helen Mirren and Simon Russell Beale and reminiscences from composer Guy Wolfenden and the theatre equivalent of Zeus, Sir Peter Hall.

Sir Peter recalled seeing Ian act for the first time with the Birmingham Rep and of inviting him to join the newly founded RSC. He praised Ian's 'voice' and noted that "some actors think that to raise ones voice is unnatural!" Not a view with which PH has any truck: "I tell them, 'You are wearing somebody else's clothes, saying somebody else's words and sitting on somebody else's chair. What's natural about THAT?'"

In concluding what was the closest thing in the service to a eulogy, Sir Peter said that Ian had, in his work both as a classical actor and as a star of popular television dramas, provided “hours and hours not of truth, but of credibility”.

Richard Pasco then read Shakespeare's poem 'Fear no more...' from Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownéd be thy grave!

Lines that were aptly followed by Geoffrey Burgon’s famous setting of ‘Nunc Dimittis’ in the version used as the closing music to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (in which Ian had played the ‘Tailor’) with St Paul’s Cathedral chorister, Paul Phoenix piping Simeon's prayer, "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace..."

After which it was left to Sir Derek Jacobi to deliver the curtain speech in the form of Prospero's final perorartion from The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

A reminder…

There are two more episodes of Ian Richardson’s reading of my book Shadowlands still to be broadcast on BBC Radio (88-90.2 FM) this and next Friday evening at 21.15.

Last week - for the second time - Radio Times chose Shadowlands as its ‘Pick of the Day’, calling it “a rare and poignant piece of radio.” And that is a tribute solely to the performance of the reader who posessed one of the great voices of our age...

ACTING MANNERS

In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, actor Richard Griffith was whinging about his fans, telling interviewer, Nigel Farndale: "I'm not interested in the casual interest of strangers… I hate the odious business of sucking up to the public. I hate it."

Now, I have no problem with actors wanting to maintain a private side to their life, but I am bored to distraction with people like Griffiths who want us to feel sorry for them because of the interest shown in them by the very public without whose applause, adulation and affection -- not to mention payments for theatre tickets -- they would not be enjoying their treasured ‘star status’.

It is tedious and tiresome…

The airheads and crack-heads of the pop world or the catwalk may not know better, but an actor of Griffith’s stature and experience certainly should…

I have never forgotten a conversation I had many years ago now with the late Dame Thora Hird. I had the privilege of writing several radio scripts for Thora and on this particular occasion we had just had lunch in a hotel restaurant near Broadcasting House.

As we were crossing the lobby, the girl behind the reception desk rushed over and asked Thora if she could possibly have an autograph for her mum who was one of her biggest fans.

“Of course you can, love,” said Thora. Handing me her walking stick (she had just had a hip replacement) she rootled about in her handbag, found a photograph, chatted with the girl, asked the mum’s name, signed and handed over the picture.

Then we walked out of the hotel and were on the point of crossing the road when a black cab screeched to a halt in front of us. Winding down his window, the cabby bawled out: “Thora Hird! Saw you on the telly on Sunday! You’re a bloody wonder!”

Thora laughed. “Thank you cabby!” she shouted back with a triumphant wave of her walking stick.

A few yards further on, just as we were about to enter Broadcasting House, Thora was accosted by a bunch of youngsters who were encamped outside the nearby entrance to Radio 1 in the hopes of spotting any arriving or departing pop stars, but who now came rushing over to get the autograph of a woman old enough to be their granny.

I did walking stick duty once again until everyone had been spoken to and had their autograph.

When we finally made it inside the building and were traveling up in the lift, I asked: “How do cope? Don’t you ever get tired of all that attention, of people being so demanding?”

“You listen to me, young man,” said Thora, giving me a dig with the walking stick, “those are the people who put me where I am and who have kept me there! How else should I treat them?”

Pity Thora’s no longer with us, she could have told Richard Griffiths a thing or two!

THE GLASS WORLDS OF PETER ELLENSHAW

One day in the late 1940s, Walt Disney was walking through London when he came across a young Englishman drawing chalk pavement pictures. He was so impressed with the artist’s brilliance at creating realistic scenes, that he immediately offered him a job and took him off to Hollywood where he lived happily ever after creating special effects for dozens of Disney movies.

It’s a nice story, but total baloney! However, that’s the story that Walt Disney used to tell about Peter Ellenshaw (right) who died on Monday in California, aged 93.

Ellenshaw was one of the last great practioners of the now-lost art of matte painting - a special effects technique which involved making highly realistic paintings on plates of glass that, when placed in front of the camera while filming a scene in a movie, extended the physical settings in which the actors were filming to create elaborate interiors or dramtic and fantastic landscapes.

Born in Essex in 1913, Peter Ellenshaw learned his trade under Britain’s foremost special effects artist, W. Percy (‘Pop’) Day, assisting on such legendary movies as Things to Come, The Thief of Bagdad, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

After serving with the RAF during WWII, Ellenshaw retuned to the movies providing superb matte paintings for a quartet of live action features made by Walt Disney in the UK: Treasure Island, The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, The Sword and the Rose and Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue. Then, in 1953, Ellenshaw went to Hollywood to work on Disney’s lavish adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.


With one or two exceptions - he made uncredited contributions to Quo Vadis and Spartacus - Ellenshaw worked exclusively for Walt Disney on almost three dozen movies including such family classics as Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, Pollyanna, Swiss Family Robinson, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the film that won him an Oscar for his stunning London panoramas, Mary Poppins.


The moment when Mary Poppins, Bert and the Banks children, having climbed the smoke staircase, look out across the vista of chimneys, spires and domes as the sun sets and the street lights twinkle on is surely one of the most magical scenes in a magical movie.


In 1979, I had the privilege to host a Guardian Lecture with Peter Ellenshaw at the National Film Theatre when the artist came to London to promote The Black Hole - a truly terrible picture for which he was, nevertheless, justly Oscar-nominated for his powerful visual effects.

During the lecture he revealed that, in addition his extraordinary pictorial contributions to Poppins, he had assisted with the music and choreography, by first suggesting (and then demonstrating) to Walt Disney and composers, Richard and Robert Sherman, the Cockney song-and-dance called ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ which would provide the inspiration for the chimney sweeps’ ‘Step in Time’ number on the rooftops.

Then, grabbing my arm and pulling me out of the safety of my interviewer’s chair, Peter insisted that I join him in doing a knees-up for the audience - one of the most humiliating moments in my media career!


Of course I forgave Peter Ellenshaw for the embarrassment he caused me, because he was a truly formidable talent - not just for the extraordinary visual creations he brought to the cinema screen (work done nowadays using a computer), but also for the strikingly beautiful landscapes and seascapes that he painted for his own satisfaction and which now hang in many public and private collections.






As Bert, that other pavement artist working near Cherry Tree Lane, observes:

"Today, I'm a screever, and as you can see,
A screever's an artist of 'ighest degree,
And it's all me own work
From me own memory..."

Visit the Ellenshaw Family website to learn more about Peter Ellenshaw and his son (and fellow artist) Harrison Ellenshaw and their work inside - and outside - the House of Mouse.

IAN RICHARDSON: A MEMORY

I note with great sadness the passing, at the age of 72, of the actor Ian Richardson.

Although identified for all time with his performance as the Machiavellian politician, Francis Urquhart, in the BBC’s 1991 TV trilogy, House of Cards, Ian Richardson was an actor of extraordinary range and talent.

A founder member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played many of the Bard's greatest roles including (right) Hamlet for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1959. He starred in dozens of plays on the London and Broadway stage, but his popular fame rested on his performances in such memorable television productions as John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blues, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and Charles Dickens' Bleak House as well as a spell as a clinically incisive Sherlock Holmes.

Just three weeks ago, I had the honour to be in a BBC studio listening to Ian Richardson recording my book Shadowlands, the story of C S Lewis and his late-flowering love for Joy Davidman.

I was thrilled when my producer (and best friend) Malcolm Prince told me that Ian had agreed to present the book as a serialised reading on Radio 2. We couldn’t have been better served: he arrived early and worked flat out for seven hours at a demanding and unrelenting pace, refusing anything to eat or drink (other than water) until he had completed the recording of all eight fifteen-minute episodes.

Though fully prepared and clearly having given a lot a thought to the changing moods of the piece from episode to episode and how most effectively to portray the central characters, he invited criticism and delighted in being given notes.

When I offered a suggestion for an alternative reading of a short, six-word sentence that is one of the turning points in the book, he instantly seized on the thought and gave it that interpretation with perfection; and, on another occasion, when one of us offered an idea, he immediately responded: “Yes, yes! I see exactly how it should be read! Thank you! I love taking direction!”

Of course, any direction by us was minimal. What could we ever truly tell an actor with Ian’s prodigious talent and years of experience? Watching him at work, as he grappled with the emotions underpinning the story, and in particular the sense of overwhelming grief giving way to slowly emerging hope that is at the heart of Shadowlands, was a privilege.

I hope - not simply for selfish reasons - that the BBC will decide to eventually broadcast the reading: it would be a small tribute to a great actor…

One last enjoyable memory from a memorable day: after several noisy outbursts from people in the corridor outside the studio that had interrupted the recording, someone walked by whistling merrily. Ian got up from the microphone and went to the door and pointed out to the whistler that a red light was illuminated over the door indicating that a recording was in progress. When he returned to his seat, Malcolm apologized on behalf of a thoughtless colleague… “That’s alright,” replied Ian, “I don’t think he’ll do it again - I gave him one of my best Francis Urquhart looks!”