Word: matronly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What this poetic approach too often misses is Williams' deft and impish sense of humor. The Glass Menagerie is autobiography in the form of a situation comedy. The first half of the play could be called "Mama's Family": Amanda Wingfield, a fiftyish matron whose husband abandoned her 15 years earlier, plots to find a "gentleman caller" who will support her and marry her shy, lame daughter Laura. In the second half, a young man does call-no gentleman, rather an awkward go-getter whose own glory days are long past-and a bittersweet romance flutters through...
...California, where celebrity and gauzy illusion are manufactured wholesale, a kind of fantasy come to life - the Queen of England! - was everywhere, walking on red carpets. No one cared that she looked unhip in her blue matron's outfits. Fame, especially enduring fame, is the California dream, and she is transcendently famous without even trying, the embodiment of an institution as old and grand as a giant sequoia. Los Angeles Electrician Raymond Pratt, 32, waited three hours to glimpse the Queen briefly. "She is one of the few things in life that is still sacred," he said. Her presence...
...enjoying a lively and entertaining production at Dunster House. A rather curious musical, it is history deflated to suburban proportions, via Broadway. Pippin (Justin Richardson) is an average upper-middle class college overachiever; his dad. Charlemagne (John D. Langdon), a gruff executive type; Fastrada (Ann Henry), his mother, a matron right out of the Five Towns area; and Lewis (Mark Morland), his younger brother, the ancient equivalent of a dumb jock--a dumb warrior...
...young, of course, Grace was simply a middle-aged celebrity, less interesting than most because better behaved. But to those of her own generation, it was almost impossible to think of her as a matron whose photos sometimes showed the puffiness of weight too easily gained, and whose statements in the press were likely to be suppressed clucks about her daughters' unsuitable consorts. To her contemporaries, perhaps simply because she stopped making films at 26, Grace Kelly remained vividly what she had been, a lovely blond swirl of shadow and substance, a white-gloved good girl who managed...
DIED. Celia Johnson, 73, refined British actress, best remembered for her role as the respectable suburban matron in love with Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (1946); of a stroke; in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. A veteran of the English stage since 1928, Johnson endeared herself to U.S. audiences through such films, besides Brief Encounter, as In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1947) and Captain's Paradise (1953), in which she embodied the quintessential Englishwoman, mature and intelligent. Last year she was made a Dame of the British Empire...