Word: actor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After a miserable childhood, an unsatisfying stint as a subeditor on a British trade paper (Gas World) and a so-so fling as a repertory actor-manager, John Osborne looked back on his 26 misspent years in anger. When he brooded about his estrangement from his mother and his wife (divorced by him for misconduct last week), he got even angrier. The manners and morals of Britain's middle class drove him to total fury. There was little left for him to do but take his violence to the public. So John Osborne sat down and wrote a play...
Suds & Tears. Playing a lewd, brash burlesque comedian, Sir Laurence often lifted the play-a juvenile soap opera in its triter lines-to the heights of a new Pagliacci. Most critics agreed that Olivier, with real virtuosity and superb support, had disproved the footlight adage that actors can be no better than their material. But Playwright Osborne was not disparaged too severely. Of all theatrical talents, perhaps the uncanniest is an ability to write the sort of humdrum drama that great actors can instinctively exalt. On this bittersweet basis, John Osborne got his share of the applause. But the tears...
...delicate play, and the overstatement of the text must be moderated by a straight and unembellished delivery if the allegory is to be believable and effective as theater. Prescott Evarts overacts the central role of Everyman with false emotion and gestures that border on the ridiculous. He seems, as actor and director, to have no idea of the simplicity and almost matter-of-factness which the play must have. Perhaps he confused it with Hamlet. Sybil Kinnicutt simpers outrageously as Knowledge, an allegorical role which again demands a simple and unforced beauty...
Traded Tiara. Diana's mother was a legendary beauty, Blanche Oelrichs Thomas, also known as Michael Strange in her spare-time incarnations as poet and author. It was in Carder's, where she was trading her diamond tiara for a rope of matched pearls, that she met Actor John Barrymore-"the most beautiful man that ever lived," said she, "like a young archangel." But their unangelic love affair was like "a tennis match in Hell." More than three years later, Blanche Thomas, defying the warning cries of her friends and the exigencies of the Social Register, divorced...
...young gentleman unless it was understood that she would marry him." However, the first young gentleman with whom she sought to follow Mummy's advice soon married someone else. From this point on. Author Barrymore carefully chronicles several lovers and three husbands. First in the trio was British Actor Bramwell Fletcher. 17 years her senior, who liked to sit at home painting and reading. Husband No. 2 was Tennis Pro John Howard. Distressing in many ways. Johnny was a refreshing change in others, e.g., asked by Mummy to mow the lawn, he only drawled: "Sorry...