Tag: tribute

tribute

Kerry Greenwood

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Normal service is somewhat suspended today, because yesterday morning I woke up to see the news that Kerry Greenwood has died.

I first read her Phryne Fisher series more than a decade ago now – in the days before the blog and the early days of Kindle ownership and before the TV series appeared on UK screens. Since then I’ve been back to them more times than I can count – as ebooks and audiobooks. And I’ve read new additions to the series as soon as I could get my hands on them. Only a couple of months back I posted about how excited I was that there is a new Phryne coming this year. And now Murder in the Cathedral will be the last.

Seventy is no age at all really, but I hope she knew how much joy her creations – Phryne and the gang and her modern day detective Corinna Chaoman – have brought people. And judging by the obituaries, she made a real difference to people’s actual lives as a legal aid solicitor as well. Thank you and rest well.

tribute

Remembering Dame Maggie Smith

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I’m not going to lie, I had a different post planned for today, but then the news broke on Friday afternoon that Dame Maggie Smith had died and I changed my plans.

There’s been a lot of talk of her two great late-in-life roles – Professor McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in Grantham Abbey – but I’m that little bit older, so for me the first time I saw her was in The Secret Garden and then in the Sister Act Movies. And she was as perfect in those as she was in those later roles, and in fact in everything else she did. You all know my tastes by now – so it’ll be no surprise to you that I’ve seen more of her comedic performances (I’ve got Death on the Nile on the TV as I watch this) on film than I have of the serious stuff, but five years ago I was lucky enough to see her performing in what turned out to be her final stage role in A German Life.

I’ve been really lucky in my theatre-going life to see a lot of the acting greats – and great performances. When A German Life was announced – more than a decade after her last stage role, I bought a membership to The Bridge Theatre just to get the priority booking – and the trip was not just me and Him Indoors, but also my sister and her now-husband and my parents too. And it was so worth it.

In A German Life, she played Brunhilde Pomsel, a German woman who had been a secretary to Goebbels during the Second World War. She spent the whole show alone on stage, sitting a chair telling you about her life – and I think it was the most mesmerising thing I have seen on stage. You couldn’t drag your eyes off her – in fact it was only right at the end, that I realised that her chair had been moving forward and the set receding the whole time. She was that good – and she was in her mid 80s. It was just astonishing.

I should also say that I’ve seen her son Toby Stephens live on stage too – twice in fact because I thought he and Anna Chancellor were so good in Private Lives that I went back for a second visit – with Him Indoors and my parents. So as well as being sad for the loss of one of the greats of British acting, I’m also thinking of him and his brother Chris Larkin and the rest of her family. Their statement announcing the death on Friday was very touching.

I’ll be checking the TV listings to see if any of her film performances pop up over the next week or so as a tribute, but in the meantime as well as Death on the Nile I have both Sister Acts on the TiVo, so I’m sure I’ll find a chance to watch that at some point in the coming days.

tribute

Judith Kerr

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Another sad week, but another life well lived – maybe even better lived than Doris Day‘s.  Her life story – her flight from Nazi Germany as a child, coming to writing for children when she was at home as a full-time mum, still producing new books right up into her 90s, when she could also be spotted out and about in Barnes – is one that will inspire you as much as her books did when you were a child.

There have been so many lovely stories and the obits all pay testament to a wonderful woman with an amazing gift.  There’s not much I can really add.  Except that I wanted to mark her passing somehow.  I was out for lunch with a friend last week and we went into a bookshop on our walk.  She’s got a new baby so we were looking at the children’s books.  I ended up buying Mog the Forgetful Cat for her, because every child should have a copy of Mog. I should add that I think her little girl (six months old) already had a copy of The Tiger Who Came To Tea.  Which is exactly as it should be and a total testament to the power of Kerr’s books.

Lots of people on Twitter yesterday were quoting from – or posting pictures from – Goodbye Mog, which is probably the saddest picture book I’ve ever read.  I ended up teary eyed in the office and on the train.  Kerr had such a way with words and pictures.  I hope she knew how much her books meant to everyone. All the stories of her at her publisher’s summer parties – in a lovely frock, with a drink in hand – being mobbed by authors who’d read and loved her books as a child make me think that she might have had an inkling.  And I hope that I’m as fun and sprightly as she was at 95.

Here’s just a few of the articles that I read about her yesterday:  The BBC’s obituary, the Independent’s obituary The Guardian had an obituary but also collected some reader recollections.  I’ve also got her Desert Island Discs on my listen list as well as this essay from the TLS Writing with borrowed words still to read.

As I write this The Tiger Who Came To Tea and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit are best sellers in their categories on Amazon.co.uk.  And Tiger is 99p on Kindle, Pink Rabbit £2.99.  If you haven’t read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit – her book for older children telling the story of her family’s escape from Nazi Germany – take this chance, you really should.

tribute

Not a Book: Doris Day

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You may not know this about me, but my all time favourite five films are probably Pillow Talk, Some Like It Hot, The Philadelphia Story, Mary Poppins and The Parent Trap (the Haley Mills one).  And once you get over the fact that all my favourite films are more than 50 years old, you’ve probably figured out that the death of Doris Day left me feeling quite sad this week.  Actually, my favourite films also shadow my reading tastes in many ways, so maybe you’re not so surprised after all.

In case you’ve never seen it, Pillow Talk is the story of an interior decorator who’s feuding with the playboy she shares a party line with.  He finds out what she looks like, decides he likes the look of her and adopts a fake persona to try and get in her pants.  Of course he falls in love but she’s less pleased when she finds out who he really is.  Yes, by modern standards, there are a few issues – how well does she actually know him when they get their happily ever after considering he’s been playing her – but if we were to turn it into romance tropes, it’s an enemies to lovers, reformed rake, love triangle, sassy confident heroine thing.  And whoo boy is that a whole lot of some of my favourite tropes.  Here’s the trailer – which is very, very retro…

Pillow Talk got Doris her only Oscar nomination, but she was the top female box office start of the late fifties and early sixties and she deserved more.   I’ve seen pretty much the whole of the Doris Day film canon – I had a Lovefilm rental subscription in my final year of uni and used it wisely – and as the best of the obituaries have been trying to point out, she was more than “just” Hollywood’s favourite girl next door.  Everyone has heard of Calamity Jane – and she is brilliant in it – but she’s also fabulous in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.

 

Yes she got stuck in a type – the second Rock Hudson sex comedy, Lover Come Back, isn’t as good as Pillow Talk – and is even more dubious by modern standards as he gets her knocked up while in a false persona – but it’s still got a few laughs and hey, it was daring for the time and got an Oscar Best Screenplay nod (Pillow Talk won that Oscar).  And it’s the law of diminishing returns because Send Me No Flowers – the third and final Rock n Doris – isn’t as good as Lover Come Back, although are some nice farcical moments there.

Move Over Darling has it’s moments – with Doris playing a wife back from the dead after a plane crash and trying to win her husband James Garner back from his new fiancee.  I prefer it to her first film with Garner, The Thrill of It All, but that has its moments too, as well as highlighting the repetitive formula of Hollywood at the time – got a success?  Repeat it with the same actors and a slightly different premise.  On the musicals from, as well as Calamity Jane, Doris gets to be fabulous in the Pajama Game, but all the prints I’ve seen of it have been terrible, so I’m giving you the Calamity Jane trailer instead.

 

 

Calamity Jane was my first introduction to Doris back when I was really young, but as a teen in the late 1990s, early 2000s, I loved romantic comedies.  And when I first saw Pillow Talk, back in those teenage years, it was my introduction to the films of the past that had got us to the modern films that I loved.  It started me down the rabbit hole that lead me to Katherine Hepburn’s screwball comedies and all the rest.  There’s been a bit of a dearth of romantic comedies of that type in the last few years, so imagine how much I was cheered up at the end of the week when this trailer for Netflix’s Always Be My Maybe dropped.  And I’ll leave you on that optimistic note.

 

Authors I love, tribute

Sir Terry Pratchett

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We all knew that this was how this would end. Ever since Sir Terry announced he had early onset Alzheimer’s, we knew he would be gone too soon. But I had still hoped it was further away.

Alzheimer’s is always cruel, but it seemed particularly unfair that it should hit a man whose mind was so sharp, so bright, so inventive. I’m terrified of death, but I understood his passionate fight for assisted dying. Pratchett created a flat world carried on four elephants on the back of a giant turtle, where dwarves, trolls and golems lived side by side with people. Why would he want to carry on when his mind was no longer capable of remembering what day it is, or recognising people. I hope it never progressed that far for him.

I was introduced to Discworld by my school librarian when I was about 13 – Jingo was the newest book at the time – although the first I read was Wyrd Sisters. I loved Star Trek, but didn’t really see myself as a fantasy reader. Discworld changed that. I had always read a lot, but Sir Terry’s books introduced me to something new and opened the doors to books I would never previously have considered. Even if few other worlds could compare to the Disc.

Choosing a favourite is near impossible, I love Rincewind, Vimes and the Witches. Tiffany Aching is a joy. Any book is improved by the presence of The Patrician. But Moist von Lipwig was a late arriving treat. I’ve listened to the audiobooks of Going Postal and Making Money more times than I care to count. I wanted the Moist the tax collector book – but Raising Steam was brilliant.

I can’t believe there will be no more.

Thank you Sir Terry, for all the joy and pleasure your books have given me and millions of others. I will sit down and read them all again, just as soon as the thought of it doesn’t make me cry.