Word: bea
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...Fanny's house were Clifford Odets, Bea Lillie, Jimmy Durante, George and Ira Gershwin, and Fanny's third husband, Billy Rose. But Fanny Brice, who died in 1951, had a taste for art as well as show business, and it was that taste that Billy inherited. Now he ranks as one of the top painters of the American Southwest...
Peter and the Wolf (Beatrice Lillie; London Symphony Orchestra; London). The ineffable Bea seems to take Prokofiev's fable with what Max Beerbohm called "a stalactite of salt." Her impish spoofery is just what this staid and somewhat self-conscious classic now needs...
...common touch, Blackpool's history is alight with great names of show business-W. C. Fields. Bea Lillie, Danny Kaye, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead. But none of them could rewrite the Blackpool creed. "You can't be chichi in Blackpool" is how one Blackpudlian phrases it. "It's not art for art's sake here. It's art for Pete's sake, and Pete owns the town...
...topnotch Saudek sample came along last week on NBC. Four for Tonight was an unusually witty review in which Tony Randall did a string of sight gags based on Mad magazine, Bea Lillie fanned her way through a couple of her more durable numbers, and Cyril Ritchard went Around the World on 80 Pounds, at one point carrying his valet in his valise. Best of all was Songstress-Comedienne Tammy Grimes, summing up the history of American women in popular songs; her smoky voice got everything but the filter feedback out of that 18th century smash, Tobacco...
...suddenly gets a mad glint in her eye, yanks the lid off her ice bag, dumps the cubes into a highball, gulps it down, grins wickedly. These and a dozen other bits of business are brought off with delicious wit and a berserk precision of gesture that only Bea Lillie among living comediennes can match. Like Lillie, Kay Kendall was not really so much a comedienne as a clown, and her last picture should leave no doubt in anybody's mind that she was a clown with a touch of genius...