Wednesday 13 March 2024

He pushed the boundaries of excess

From the fantastic tribute in the Evening Standard by David Johnson (editor of one of my fave websites Shapers of the 80s):

The press called them the “New Romantics” and the “Blitz Kids”, declaring the Eighties the “Age of the Pose”. Art-school tutor Rosetta Brooks compared their self-consciously styled poses to “street theatre ultimately extended into continuous performance as a post-punk embodiment of Gilbert and George in one person (the individualist).” Each poser, she believed, is a ready-made. Step forward fashion student Stephen Linard, who ticked all the above boxes – a flamboyant Canvey Island boy, ...who yearned to make a statement in every street or room he graced.

Arriving at St Martin’s School of Art in London (1978-81), Linard pushed the boundaries of excess…His outrageous fashion details flagged direction for the two dozen sharpest Blitz Kids who shaped the New Romantics silhouette from the Blitz onwards...

“The competition pushed you on... you might change what you were going to wear eight times on a Tuesday to try to outdo everyone else at the Blitz.”

...“The Blitz was an art students’ club. The place was choc-a-bloc with artists: Brian Clarke, Zandra Rhodes, Molly Parkin, Antony Price, Duggie Fields, Kevin Whitney and us because it was halfway between Central School and St Martin’s. People who said ‘Oh you Blitz Kids don’t DO anything’ were talking rubbish, because WE all did. We were the ones with our work in the glossy magazines long before the rest.”


Always centre stage...

With friends/fellow squatters that included Boy George, milliner Stephen Jones, "scene queen" Princess Julia, the faboo Eve Ferrett, assorted fashionistas such as The Clothes Show's Caryn Franklin and art-model Sue Tilley, and the Pet Shop Boys, and clients that included Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Spandau Ballet, Fun Boy 3 and even David Bowie, he became legendary in couture circles. He was unique!

RIP.

[click any pic to enlarge]

Tuesday 12 March 2024

Liza!

...it's her world, we merely inhabit it.

Many happy returns, Miss Liza May Minnelli (born 12th March 1946)!

Wednesday 6 March 2024

The Kiwi Songbird

Heavens to Betsy!

Dame Kiri te Kanawa is 80 years old...

A "national treasure" here in the UK [despite being a born and bred New Zealander] since Charles and Diana's marriage way back in 1982, Dame Kiri's dulcets have indeed been an integral part of the classical repertoire for many decades. She's appeared on the best world stages, including the Royal Opera House, La Scala Milan, Paris Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Vienna State Opera, Sydney Opera House and the New York Met; she was chosen by Leonard Bernstein for his award-winning classical adaptation of West Side Story, sang the "signature tune" for the 1991 Rugby World Cup, starred as "Dame Nellie Melba" in Downton Abbey and was an enduring favourite choice of the late HM The Queen for many a Royal celebration...

...like this one:

Many happy returns, Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa, ONZ, CH, DBE, AC (born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron, 6th March 1944)

[Read my previous tribute to the grande dame @adecadeago on the occasion of her 70th birthday.]

Wednesday 28 February 2024

Princess Tiger Eyes


The higher the hair, the closer to god...

From the Telegraph:

Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, who has died aged 83, was an Italian socialite, B-movie actress and fashion model, whose “profile of Renaissance beauty and fascination, like the portraits of young noblewomen in the Uffizi” was celebrated in 1960s Vogue.

A niece of Gianni Agnelli and the epitome of the jet set, Ira von Fürstenberg had, by the time she was 20, already been married to two of the 20th century’s most notorious playboys, Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, the so-called “King of Clubs” who invented the resort of Marbella (and jealously refused Salvador Dalí’s request to paint Ira naked), and the Brazilian industrialist Francesco “Baby” Pignatari.

She was only 15 at the time of her first marriage, and needed special dispensation from the Pope to wed von Hohenlohe, 31, who had proposed to her by telegram after seeing her in a vision as he crawled clear of the wreckage of a plane crash. Ira the child-bride made the cover of Life magazine in 1955, leading a flotilla of 130 gondolas to the church in Venice. Her mother’s family company, Fiat, gave them a red Cinquecento, wrapped up and tied with a bow.

Five years later, by now neglected and disenchanted, she eloped with the 44-year-old Pignatari. Von Hohenlohe sent armed policemen to catch the couple in flagrante in a hotel in Mexico City, and there was a fight. Then von Hohenlohe kidnapped their two sons, and went on the run for two and a half years, occasionally dressing the boys in wigs and dirndls to pass them off as girls, to evade the princess’s million-dollar reward offered to anyone who could find them.

Her 1961 marriage to Pignatari in Reno ended in divorce in Las Vegas in 1964, after he sent a friend to tell her: “Baby wants to leave you.” As her son Hubertus later put it: “She had got caught up in a man’s world as half a child.” She steered clear of matrimony thereafter, although in the 1980s she seemed close to becoming the second wife of her cousin, Prince Rainier of Monaco, after the death of Grace Kelly.

The Agnelli money permitted her to lead a life of peripatetic glamour, with houses in Mayfair, Madrid, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on the Via Veneto in Rome, where she had avant-garde perspex furniture, and in the Place Vendôme in Paris, where she had solid gold bath taps. (“Everybody has to see something beautiful in the morning in order to have a good day,” she said.) She told her biographer, Nick Foulkes, however, that “my only real home is on aeroplanes. I spend so much time going from country to country that my children suspect that I’m really a flight attendant.”

It was on a plane in 1966 that she met the producer Dino De Laurentiis, who saw star potential in her famous tawny eyes (“princess tiger eyes”, her first husband called her). Her film debut was the James Bond spoof Matchless (1968), co-starring Patrick O’Neal and Donald Pleasence, and she went on to grace the screen in a string of “sex kitten” roles, playing opposite Anthony Quinn, Peter Lawford, Klaus Kinski and Walter Chiari; she was even screen-tested by Roger Vadim for the lead in Barbarella.

She declined to star in one of Tinto Brass’s erotic movies, but as a rule, over her 29 film and television roles, she was content to wear very little, reassuring her anxious father that “for the moment my acting does not have the same power to make people flock to the cinema as my body”...

When the parts dried up, Princess Ira merely moved on - running the fashion house Valentino’s perfume division, and using her influence in the world of haute couture to bolster the career of her protégé Karl Lagerfeld. In later life she became a renowned artist and sculptor, whose works sold for thousands to the latter-day "jet-set".

What a woman! What a life!

RIP, Princess Ira von Fürstenberg (17th April 1940 - 18th February 2024)

Thursday 15 February 2024

There is nothing like one...

...or, indeed a dozen!

The acting dames above, back row, left-right: Dame Joanna Lumley, Dame Floella Benjamin, Dame Twiggy Lawson, Dame Harriet Walter, Dame Penelope Wilton, Dame Maureen Lipman.

Front row, left-right: Dame Virginia McKenna, Dame Sian Phillips, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Vanessa Redgrave, Dame Penelope Keith, Dame Patricia Routledge.

Queen Camilla was with the illustrious Dames to celebrate 400 years since the first Shakespeare folio was published.

The Celebration Of Shakespeare event yesterday, hosted by Gyles Brandreth with the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, also featured a host of Shakespearean actors including Sir Simon Russell Beale, Sir David Suchet, Jeremy Irons, Julian Glover, Brian Cox, Freddie Fox, Gary Oldman and Robert Lindsay.

I woud have killed to be a fly on the wall...

Wednesday 14 February 2024

Our Renee

Many happy returns to one of our favourite modern sopranos, Miss Renée Fleming, who is 65 years old today!

Here are some of her finest moments...

Renée Lynn Fleming (born 14th February 1959)

Sunday 11 February 2024

A lovely way to spend an evening

"If my own experience had taught me anything, it was that, if a thing had to be done, it could be done."

Gertrude Lawrence was destined to be a star from an early age. Despite having an incorrigible stepfather whose gambling led them to do many a "moonlight flit" from lodgings to lodgings when she was little, her memory of her mother dressing up each time (with best hat, best coat and evening gloves) as they loaded their possessions into a cart - such a camp theatrical flourish! - left an indelible impression on her. And indeed, she let nothing get in the way of her pursuit of the glamorous life and audience acclaim for the rest of her life...

This fascinating insight, among many, many illuminating (and often quite salacious) details about the life of one of Britain's most glittering stars of early 20th century theatre, was revealed courtesy of the brilliant show Gertrude Lawrence - A lovely way to spend an evening, a one-woman show that Madam Arcati and I went to see at the fantabulosa Wilton's Music Hall on Friday night.

A tour-de-force by actress and opera singer Lucy Stevens [pictured at the top of this post], accompanied only by the talents of pianist Elizabeth Marcus, with a knowing wink and an assured tone she took us through the ups and downs of Gertrude's life, her triumphs and adventures, men, marriages, bankruptcies and her lifelong "partnership" with Noël Coward, peppered with many of the great songs that made her so famous and so beloved.

"Everything that has value has its price. Nothing worth having is ever handed to you gratis."

Among the numbers that Miss Lawrence premiered [and most of which Miss Stevens sang for us in this show] were the Gershwins' Do, Do, Do and Someone to Watch Over Me [which became an enduring standard] from her Broadway smash Oh, Kay!, Body and Soul (written especially for her by Johnny Green), The Saga of Jenny and My Ship from Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark (another hit show for Gertie) - and of course, she popularised many of The Master's finest numbers, including Parisian Pierrot, Poor Little Rich Girl, Mad About the Boy and London Pride.

"In London I have been by turns poor and rich, hopeful and despondent, successful and down and out, utterly miserable and ecstatically, dizzily happy. I belong to London as each of us can belong to only one place on this earth. And, in the same way, London belongs to me."

The latter was particularly emotionally performed by Miss Stevens, as she recounted the oft-forgotten fact that in the midst of WWII Gertie abandoned what might have otherwise been a comfortable life in America for her beloved homeland, and embarked a gruelling tour with ENSA, entertaining the troops on the frontlines of Normandy and the Far East.

Another fact that was new to me was the fact that not only did she premiere as "Anna" in The King and I, she had in fact commissioned Rodgers and Hammerstein to write it! Of course, starring alongside the youthful and hunky Yul Brynner came with its own additional delights - as I recounted way back in 2011

Truth be told, Gertie's proclivities - despite her enduring marriage to Richard Aldrich, who outlived her - were legendary, and her affairs included Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the future Edward VIII/Duke of Windsor, assorted nobles and military officers, Bea Lillie and Daphne Du Maurier!

"Very few among us are noble, or even mature, in all parts of our nature at the same time."

This was a stupendous show, immaculately performed and presented (and directed by Fascinating Aida's Sarah-Louise Young)! I am so very glad we got to see it...

It continues to tour, so catch it if you can - see https://gertrudelawrence.com/ for further details.

[Also worth reading is this witty tribute to the great lady on the "Dame Town" site.]