Word: philippa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is appointed Superior; as it turns out, she is a bit too young and imperious for the job. Sister Briony (Judith Furse) is taken along for her medical knowledge. Sister Honey (Jenny Laird) is a gentle creature, a tonic for jangled nerves. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) is responsible for the garden. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) is a jagged-voiced, quarrelsome neurotic; it is hoped that the drastic change of surroundings will do her good...
Gradually the less stolid of the nuns start coming apart. Sister Philippa plants flowers instead of the vegetables that they need. Sister Superior Clodagh's prayers are interrupted by flashbacks to a love affair. Sister Ruth does not renew her vows (which are renewable annually in this Order); she pours herself into a red dress and makes a maddened dead-set for the Englishman. The pagan atmosphere is too much for the nuns; by the time the rains set in, they forlornly abandon St. Faith's for the convent back in Calcutta...
Harlem-born Philippa, a mulatto, is a pretty girl who reads Nietzsche, Flaubert and Dostoevsky. She likes to play chess against herself (to a skeptical reporter who asked how it could be done, she replied: "Maybe I'm a schizophrenic"). At six she gave recitals of her own compositions (The Goldfish, The Jolly Pig). At ten she had finished grammar school (her I.Q.: 185); at eleven she had written 100 piano compositions. Most of her friends, she says, are grownups. Her Negro novelist father, George Schuyler (Black-No-More, Slaves Today) and her white Texas-born mother used...
...Philippa's first-prize Manhattan Nocturne, written when she was twelve, has been performed by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York, the Chicago Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Said Philippa: "I was in Mexico on a vacation trip with Mother, and I was so homesick for New York that I wrote it to express what I felt." The second-prize Rumpelstiltskin is from Philippa's almost-completed Fairy Tale Symphony...
Last week, wearing a grown-up black dress and a black mantilla, Philippa sat with queenly poise in a box of Detroit's gold-spangled Masonic Temple Auditorium and heard the Detroit Symphony play her Nocturne before 7,000 schoolchildren. Conductor Valter Poole shrewdly programmed it after Mozart's First Symphony, composed when Mozart was eight. Neither score was great, but both showed great promise...