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2018: A Year in Film and TV
I’m lucky enough to live just around the corner from the Duke of York’s, England’s oldest independent cinema; and so this year I made the most of my Picturehouse membership. I like movies that blend a...
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2018: A Year In Books
With her third novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh confirms herself as a major writer of our time. This darkly comic tale follows the sleepy adventures of a young, beautiful and...
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Penny Marshall 1943-2018
Carole Penny Marshall was born in the Bronx in 1943. Her mother Marjorie ran a dance school, and her father directed industrial films. Of Italian descent, he had changed his name from Masciarelli to...
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From ‘Soledad’ to Hope, With Lynch and Lana
SOLEDAD is a new journal from my good friend Jeremy Richey, the maestro behind ART DECADES. Soledad is (of course) the Spanish word for solitude, which is one of my favourite things. It can be sad,...
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‘Peak Strange’: The Jeanne Eagels Biopic
Whenever I mention Jeanne Eagels, movie fans invariably ask if I’ve seen Kim Novak playing her onscreen. And my answer is usually this: “love Kim, hate the film.” Over at her Self-Styled Siren blog...
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‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’
Albert Finney was born in Salford in 1936. His father, Albert Sr., was a bookmaker. He attended Salford Grammar School and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). After...
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Marilyn’s Monsters
Marilyn Monroe has long been an inspiration to artists and writers. Among the many books devoted to her life and image are a number of comics and graphic novels. Kathryn Hyatt’s Marilyn: The Story of...
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Sunshine Blondes: Marilyn and Doris Day
“You take the grey skies out of my way You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day…” – Wham!, ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ (1984) Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1922....
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Soledad 2: Twin Peaks, Joe D’Amato and More
The Italian actress Cinzia Monreale lies in her coffin on the cover of SOLEDAD Arts Journal‘s second volume, available now on Amazon for just $6 in the US, or £4.73 in the UK. It’s a still from Buio...
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Some Kind Of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe
In 1954, Marilyn Monroe was rehearsing ‘Do It Again’ as part of her show for U.S. troops in Korea, when the officer in charge of her tour deemed the Gershwin standard “too suggestive,” and insisted...
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Marilyn: A Life in Biographics
“When we can recognise an actor by a set of icons, we can also recognise how completely that actor and their work have entered our culture and our consciousness.” A snapper board, a ukulele, and a...
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Two-Faced Woman: Joan Crawford and ‘Rain’
While it is generally agreed that no actress surpassed Jeanne Eagels’ performance as Sadie Thompson in Rain, many have tried. Among them was none other than Joan Crawford, in a 1932 talkie which was...
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2019: A Year In Film and TV
In 2019, we said goodbye to Albert Finney and remembered Sharon Tate… Barry Jenkins brought James Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, vividly to life; and Joaquin Phoenix led an impressive...
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2019: A Year in Books
First published in 2015 as Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes and now available in English, Zuleikha tells the story of a Tatar woman whose brutish husband and vindictive mother-in-law treat her as a slave. This...
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Marilyn’s ‘Mirror’ Review Goes to Print
My review of Amanda Konkle’s excellent book, Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe, is featured in the latest issue (#38) of UK fanzine Mad About Marilyn, alongside articles about Marilyn’s...
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My Hopes and Fears for 2020
As a new decade beckons, I’m deeply worried about the way our world seems to be heading. As W.H. Auden wrote on ‘September 1, 1939‘ (a poem deemed so prescient he tried to bury it …) I sit in one of...
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Arthur Miller: The Writer and the Man
Rebecca Miller, daughter of American playwright Arthur Miller and his third wife, Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath, is a novelist and filmmaker whose works include The Ballad of Jack and Rose...
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Mark Blum 1950-2020
Mark Blum was born in Newark and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. As a teenager, trips to Broadway shows taught him to love the theatre, though he never considered acting as a career. “I was raised in...
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Becoming Carole Lombard: Stardom, Comedy and Legacy
“When Carole Lombard talks, her conversation, often brilliant, is punctuated by screeches, laughs, growls, gesticulations, and the expletives of a sailor’s parrot,” Noel F. Busch wrote in a 1938 cover...
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Madonna, Alan Parker and the Battle for Evita
Sir Alan Parker was born in Matlock, Derbyshire in 1944, and grew up in Islington, North London. His father was a house painter, and his mother a dressmaker. After studying at grammar school he began...
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