Word: noel
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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...
...pitch of last week's praise for Coward was a measure of what he himself calls "the Noel Coward renaissance." He has lived long enough to see himself transformed from a faded relic of some impossibly sophisticated yesterday into a minor classic. After World War II, a new generation viewed him-along with P. G. Wodehouse-as the last, slightly ridiculous vestige of the frivolous '20s. Country houses, stiff upper lips, cocktails-and-laughter-but-oh-what-comes-after and all that. Many of his plays flopped in the '40s and '50s and his fortunes sagged...
...creation, looming behind all his smaller ones and investing them with special effervescence. This is what John Osborne meant when he said that Coward "is his own invention and contribution to this century." This is what makes it idle to scan the man or his works for the "real" Noel Coward. The mask of supreme entertainer has become the man. With Coward's 70th birthday, the legend is sealed. As Carlyle said of the universe, we had best accept it-as gratefully as Coward does...
...Noel Coward pours the froth of inflection as if it were the champagne of wit. He is a connoisseur of surfaces, a sealer of the comic Everests of trivia. His plays are echo chambers of his own voice. His cool, clipped speech serves as an ironically British parody of the stiff upper...