Michael’s career as a government minister made him a target of the tabloids. The Daily Mail ran a series of articles claiming that during a hospital stay Michael had received special treatment. But Mi...
Motion picture producers were well aware of audiences who now looked to Walter Brennan to spice up the action, to do something that would entertain them in pictures that were otherwise commonplace. Ev...
My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday, Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wa...
Neither John Wayne nor Walter Brennan grew up in the cowboy West, and though Brennan became a rancher, he did not pretend to be his characters the way Wayne sometimes did. Walter’s son Andy remembered...
Never meant to be more than a B picture entertainment produced on the Universal International backlot and at the Iverson Ranch (a five-hundred-acre family property often used for location shoots), it...
No other supporting player won three Academy Awards, and you would be hard-pressed to name another character actor whose performances frequently overwhelmed those of ostensible leads like Joel McCrea...
Nothing much changed in Walter Brennan’s domestic life even after he won his Academy Award and received rave reviews for both Come and Get It and Banjo on My Knee. He remembered hurrying home with his...
Obviously fond of Jill, Paul remembered a time they were all together in a car arguing, and Jill whispered in Paul’s ear, Michael thinks he can win an argument by how loud he shouts.
Of an entirely different order is Brennan’s magnificent performance as Pop Gruber, an aging grifter in Nobody Lives Forever (November 1, 1946), starring John Garfield as a con man, Nick Blake, who eve...
On one of his trips with Jill they visited Montaigne’s tower, twenty miles outside Bordeaux, said Michael, who liked to pinpoint the author’s biographical geography. We also went about to several of t...
On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Walter Brennan embodied fundamental decency and democratic virtues that made him indispensable to Cooper’s signature Everyman roles. Brennan’s perfo...
On the question of the bomb, said Michael, returning to the issue that trumped just about any other in his mind, people say you should have done more when you were in the bloody government. I’m not sa...
William Brennan did not live to see his son, now a remarkable transformative actor, win his first Academy Award, for Come and Get It, the first time the award for supporting actor was given. Edward Ar...
One of Michael’s favourite pastimes was hauling books down from his shelves and reading to me, or pointing out comments he had made on the flyleaves. The astringent Brigid Brophy never failed to amuse...
Queria a liberdade de experimentar outras vidas assim como experimentava vestidos. Incomodava, porém, a ânsia por segurança, por acomodação ao confortável, próprias à classe média.
Recently Michael had encountered Salman Rushdie at a party given by Geoffrey Robertson, the lawyer who had secured Michael’s libel judgment against Rupert Murdoch’s Times. Jill and Michael had install...
Richard Avedon photographs Marilyn, her torso covered in feathers (her sexual plumage) and wearing high heels, her left leg bent and brought up to her body so that the leg projects outward horizontall...
Sam Goldwyn had a long-standing business partnership with Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio making Tobacco Road. As a contract player, Walter had to do what he was told. The system usually suited him....
Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson’s company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days wi...
Second only to the royals in Michael’s gallery of good-for-nothings were, of course, the Tories. John Major occupied a special page in Michael’s book of bad ones. The trouble began when Suraj Paul, a...
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