Word: cowardly
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DIED. Estelle Winwood, 101, fey, indefatigable slip of a British character actress who in an eight-decade career appeared on Broadway in some 40 plays, especially those of G.B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, and a score of movies, including The Glass Slipper (1955) and Murder by Death (1976); in Los Angeles...
...works amusingly. But it is one thing to simplify, for dramatic convenience, the structure of historical lives and quite another to oversimplify their emotional tenor. In Talmage's hands, the brilliant Strachey becomes a fussy queen; the dangerously unstable Carrington, a ditsy pre-hippy. Like Noël Coward, Talmage seems to think the ideal relationship between a man and a woman is that of innocently playful and bantering siblings to whom heterosexuality is no more than one of nature's less tasteful jokes...
Given the composers' polish and predilections, it was inevitable that Porter and Coward should admire each other's work. Given their distaste for awe, it is unsurprising that each disguised his affection as mockery. In Kaufman and Hart's comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, the character based on Coward is parodied with a convoluted song Porter wrote for the occasion: "Oft in the nightfall/ I think I might fall/ Down from my perilous height; Deep in the heart of me,/ Always a part of me,/ Quivering, shivering light." Coward responded with Nina who "declined...
...antiques dealer, incongruously parading his elegant wares in Las Vegas. None of this misfortune appeared to affect the victims; to the public, each man presented a sophisticated shrug. Porter's attitude seemed encapsulated in a verse: "It was great fun,/ But it was just one of those things." Coward sang, "I believe that since my life began/ The most I've had is just/ A talent to amuse...
...truth was best articulated by Coward in a moment of rare revelation: "Work is much more fun than fun." Only for composers, of course; for the recipients of Noël's and Cole's enormous labor, fun is far more fun than work. -By Stefan Kanfer