Word: cowardly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...NOEL COWARD: It will be a week of hell, not only for me but also for the people who have to sing my praises. I'll be sitting there wearing my tribute-accepting face, which shows me proud but unspoiled by my own success. It is a face I have used since...
...also, as he has said, the face of a "heavily doped Chinese illusionist" -a perfect Noel Coward characterization of the sort of facial urbanity one wears to prize-givings. At one dinner party, Earl Mountbatten of Burma actually calculated that Coward had written 27 plays and 281 songs, and Sir Laurence Olivier called him "utterly unspoiled." The Coward eyebrows uncocked a bit, the eyes glanced sideways, and the words hummed forth on the wings of a bee: "That's what you think." He rose to reply to the tributes at a midnight gala in his honor: "I am awfully...
...John Gielgud, Lady Diana Cooper and Richard Attenborough dined at 8:30 or thereabouts, and Merle Oberon flew in from Acapulco. The Queen Mother Elizabeth had him round to lunch. Book shops positively blossomed with Sheridan Morley's new Coward biography, A Talent to Amuse. At London's Phoenix Theater, Princess Margaret and Tony joined everyone in singing "Happy Birthday." After which Richard Briers and Susannah York did the balcony scene from Private Lives (currently playing in Manhattan, amid great nostalgia and critical acclaim). Other Coward sketches and songs followed until, at 4 in the morning, the Chinese...
...COWARD: Dear boy, I have had no great causes. Do I have to? I can't think of any offhand. If I did, they'd be very offhand. I wanted to write good plays, to grip as well as amuse...
...background to last week's celebrations was a retrospective of Coward's career that was unprecedented even for as oft-revived a writer as he is. A parade of his plays and revues flickered past on BBC-TV. The National Film Theater began to spin out a series of his films. Occasions like 70th birthdays tend to bring out hyperbole, and uncritical reassessments blossomed in the press. Some critics went so far as to rank him with Sheridan and Wilde, or to call him England's greatest living playwright. Such judgments overlooked the extent to which Coward...