Word: gilliatt
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Director John Schlesinger and writer Penelope Gilliatt have created something free from self-pity or self-hate, even though they deal with the upper-middle-class. Their film starts with the question "Do you feel any pain?" It ends with the conclusion that people can retain emotional sensitivity, self-respect and respect for others if they are willing to build on the world that's given them. Some might say that the message is dull simply because it is quietist, or that it is appropriate only to these three people. Such reactions would--from whatever point-of-view--be puerile...
Irresistible Signal. In her 20s Penelope Conner became known for something more than her critical acuity. There was that flaming hair, for one thing, and that look of perpetual astonishment. And there were the men. She was married for seven years to a brilliant neurologist, Roger Gilliatt-the best man at the wedding of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones. The Gilliatts split when she ran off with Playwright John Osborne (Look Back in Anger). After five years of volatile marriage, she and Osborne called it finis. She got custody of their only child, Nolan Kate. For a brief time...
Those credentials have hemidemisemi-quavers of Alma Mahler, who also combined personal beauty and an intellectual signal that achievers found irresistible. But Gilliatt's life has no such grand Viennese design. The first major film critic since James Agee to enjoy distinction as a scenarist, she has become something of a recluse, both in her life and work. The prominent are never the subjects of her fiction, so far almost twoscore polished short stories and two novels, largely about the odd, unfashionable characters whom Anthony Burgess reviewed as "defiantly interesting...
...Gilliatt's abiding empathy illumines Sunday Bloody Sunday and roots her in America. Though her passport is British, she works nine months a year on Manhattan's West Side, where she and Nolan, six, share a large flat. One of her favorite recreations is solitary word games-she has concocted one of the world's longest palindromes: "Doc, note. I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod." Now that Sunday Bloody Sunday has opened to ecstatic notices in London, she is in the act of turning down offers from producers who once thought...
...Gilliatt remains one of the few foreigners who openly celebrates her adopted home. "England is a very brilliant, very wry old country and I love it very much," she says. "But America is huge and different and I don't think any event, any act-like Attica-will ever express the whole of this inexhaustible country. I hope some day to be good enough to write a film about...