Word: elsa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tenth movie, Die Laughing, Robby Benson, 23, is practically the entire show. He stars, wrote the script with his father Jerry Segal, and composed five songs for the score. Benson plays a cabbie trapped in an espionage plot who is lucky enough to have Elsa Lanchester, 76, as a sort of guardian angel. Her explanation of her role is vintage Lanchester: "You see, I have to go up into the California vineyards in an effort to help Robby, who's been caught by alien agents because his monkey that I'm taking care of has the secret...
...androgynous creature, and over the years the part has been played by boys and girls, men and women. Among the female Ariels one might cite Kitty Clive in the 18th century, Maria Foote, Priscilla Horton and Kate Terry in the 19th, and Fania Marinoff, Agnes Carter, Rachel Kempson, Elsa Lanchester and Margaret Leighton in our own. For the most famous American production of The Tempest (in which only Arnold Moss' Prospero attained distinction, but which still ran a hundred performances on Broadway in 1945), director Margaret Webster engaged as Ariel the ballerina Vera Zorina, who moved beautifully but could...
...Elsa and Lili were born in the 1890s, the daughters of a well-to-do Jewish lawyer in Moscow. Before the Revolution, Mayakovsky had courted Elsa, flouting her family's objections to the scruffy, hulking poet who had served a prison term at 16 for Bolshevik subversion. But when Elsa, who was quite plain, introduced him to her handsome married sister in 1915, Mayakovsky formed a passionate attachment to Lili that only his suicide in 1930 could terminate. After his death, these redoubtable sisters were to play key roles in the production of the Mayakovsky legend. Settling in France...
...setting for their meeting was in itself almost symbolic of the point the Briks had come to in their lives. Their Petrograd apartment was a mixture of fashionable bohemianism and middle-class elegance ... The atmosphere was strained when Elsa and Mayakovsky came in. Unwilling to sit down to make polite small talk, he hulked in the doorway to the dining room as the others settled at the table for tea. Lili leaned over to Elsa and whispered, 'Please, I beg you, tell Mayakovsky not to bore us today. Tell him not to read us any poetry...
...they liked it or not... For Brik the poem was a brilliant revolutionary statement. Osip took the notebook that 'The Cloud in Trousers' had been copied into and read the poem over to himself, while Mayakovsky smiled, stirred jam into his tea, and looked at Lili and Elsa with his large brown eyes. Suddenly he took the notebook from Osip's hands, and asked Lili, 'May I dedicate...