STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS
Juliette Binoche. Photographed by Collier Shorr for The New York Times
SOME JOY
Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, and Brandi Carlile at Joni’s home at one of her musical salons. “Music healed her,” when she was going through her health issues, Elton once told me. Music heals. Friendship heals. Kindness heals. Joy does.
BEFORE GOOGLE
Dirk Bogarde.
From dirkbogarde.co.uk:
THE STAGE ACTOR (an excerpt)
by John Coldstream
Back from the war in the Far East, demobilised from the Army and out of work, the 25-year-old Derek Van den Bogaerde was introduced to the producer Peter Daubeny. The latter was unmoved. ‘He made no impression on me at all, except that his face, with its Spanish black eyes, reminded me of Eddie Cantor.’ Not long afterwards, Daubeny was persuaded to visit the New Lindsey Theatre Club, where a group of unknowns was appearing in a new play called Power Without Glory. The production had run out of money and the company was ‘stranded’. Daubeny headed reluctantly for Notting Hill, but with a cheque in his pocket, in case what he saw encouraged him to lift ‘a death-sentence upon these young actors, whose whole future might well depend on outside good will.’ He found himself gradually engaged by Michael Clayton Hutton’s play, and then: ‘Suddenly there rushed on to the stage a breathless figure, half choking with emotion: a slight, dark youth, radiating a curious, almost hypnotic power; every movement, every inflection of his voice, uncannily suggesting the poetry of the gutter, of a lost soul. Beyond any doubt, here was an actor of the first quality. It turned out to be the young man with whom I had been so unimpressed shortly before…’ And the name in the programme was Dirk Bogarde.
Among the pivotal moments in Dirk’s working life, that night in the cramped little theatre belongs in the first division. In April 1947, Daubeny transferred the production to the Fortune Theatre, where Noël Coward went to a dress rehearsal and was so struck that he sent an encomium to Daubeny for printing on posters all over London. In a personal telegram to Dirk he said: ‘I hope your brilliant performance has the true success it so richly deserves.’ In critical terms it did, confirming Dirk as an exciting new talent; but, with Oklahoma! opening across the road at Drury Lane, the West End run of Power Without Glory was short. It was Coward’s turn to succour the cast, offering them all a part in his new work, Peace in Our Time. Dirk, however, was unavailable. Two other visitors to the New Lindsey had reported back to the producer Sydney Box at Gainsborough film studios, who offered a screen test to ‘the one with the charisma.’ Coward pleaded with Dirk not to forsake the theatre for the ‘piffling business’ of the cinema, but it was already too late. Dirk was on a retainer with an arm of the J. Arthur Rank Organisation; a seven-year contract was imminent; and on 6 September 1947 he would start shooting Esther Waters, with his name ‘above the title’, as it would be for the rest of his career. He was, in effect, lost to the theatre.