Word: celia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fashions in child training are as extreme, and change almost as much, as women's hats. In the last two decades there has been a complete revolution in the nursery and playroom. In the Journal of Pediatrics, Dr. Celia B. Stendler of the University of Illinois' College of Education describes it: "From an era where the mother was taught that the child must have his physical wants cared for and then be left alone, must be fed on a rigid schedule, must learn to cry it out, must be toilet-trained early and must not be spoiled...
Coward plays a sedately married London psychiatrist who goes off his rocker over a flighty, glamorous divorcee (Margaret Leighton). His devoted wife, played by Celia (Brief Encounter) Johnson, introduces them, goes conveniently off to her mother's place so they can fall in love, and then understandingly dispatches them on a tour of the Continent so they can get the whole ugly mess out of their systems. What drives Coward into the jitters and finally off a housetop is not guilt over his own infidelity-perish the thought-but a suspicious jealousy of his mistress...
...only one with any conviction, and she ably makes the most of it. Wearing his hauteur like a mask and registering most emotions with his eyebrows, Coward almost qualifies for a Broadway revue sketch parodying Noel Coward. In more ways than one, the victim of the piece is Celia Johnson, a fine actress doomed to wear a stiff upper lip through the whole ugly mess...
...table face down. The specialist admonishes them for dramatizing themselves and trying to glorify their plight; they are, he says, mere self-deceivers. Actually Edward, who can love nobody, and Lavinia, whom nobody can love, share a common bond of isolation, and will be far happier together than apart. Celia Coplestone comes to the specialist, too, but with a sense of sin and a capacity for humility and atonement: for her, salvation, no matter how arduous, will be necessary. The play ends two years later with another cocktail party, showing the Chamberlaynes adjusted and telling of Celia's death...
...well as Freud, concerned with love as well as sex; and is indeed more spiritual adviser than psychiatrist. After his perplexed visitors have left, he and his assistants drink a libation of red wine-in telling contrast to a frivolous champagne toasting at the cocktail party-and chant for Celia...