Too Soon?
RIP Charles Durning. Also Jack Klugman, Gerry Anderson and Richard Rodney Bennett. Naturally I’m a big admirer of Durning, and mean no disrespect with the above flippant imagery.
What is it with the reliable Christmas death toll? Can we suppose that even in your 80s and 90s, Christmas stirs excitement in your heart, and thus brings about fatal cardiac infarction? Or is it just all the bloody stress? Right now, I’d plump for the latter.
December 28, 2012 at 2:57 pm
So sad to hear of Gerry Anderson’s death as he was a key figure in my young adult life, even though I never met him. In the late 60s, just married, and living on a Thames houseboat at Windsor, our social life lay just across the bridge in Eton. Much posher these days, it was then home to a bohemian crowd of painters, potters, actors and musicians, several of whom worked for GA at Century 21 Productions in Slough. Their flats were often decorated in items purloined from the sets, their clothes flamboyant, their sexual tastes multifarious, and their parties of the very best. It opened my eyes to a world I barely knew existed.
We were given tickets for the premiere of Thunderbirds Are Go by its production designer, Keith Wilson, and got dressed up in all our sixties finery to attend.
Happy times, before life got serious.
December 28, 2012 at 6:29 pm
That sounds AMAZING. I get the impression that Robert Fuest’s Just Like a Woman is the best record of that kind of lifestyle.
December 29, 2012 at 10:36 am
I don’t know Just Like a Woman but the film that we were firmly persuaded was all about us was Blow Up, especially as my husband was at the time a professional photographer (industrial, not fashion – but we ignored that detail).
His occupation meant he was always welcomed by the narcissists of Eton and they would pose unashamedly as soon as he appeared with his Rolleicord. I wish we still had all those negatives.
These days I can only watch Blow Up from behind the sofa with my eyes closed, and even then find it horribly embarrassing.