Archive for the ‘film’ Category
Female Composers – Part 2
Author: Webmaster
Amy Woodeforde-Finden
Amy Woodforde-Finden (1860 – 1919)
She is today remembered for one piece only, the Kashmiri Song from verses by Laurence Hope. One of nine children born to an American officer serving as British Consul at Valparaiso, Chile, and a British mother, after the demise of her father the family returned to London where Amy’s empathy with music was recognised.
From an early age she showed an interest in composition and studied with Carl Schloesser and Amy Horrocks. Her early pieces when she was still Amy Ward were published but did not attract any publicity.
Read more in Sept/Oct Words and Music Magazine!
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A look at the life of Dora Bryan
Author: Webmaster
A Words & Music Tribute
Dora Bryan - much-loved actress, singer and comedienne.
It was in early 1923 that Mr & Mrs Broadbent added to their family. They already had a three year old son named John and, on Wednesday February 7th a daughter was born to them. They named her Dora May.
Soon after the baby was born the family must have moved home for, although in later years Dora only recalls living in Oldham, her birthplace was actually Parbold, a small Lancashire township about 10 miles east-south-east of Southport.
Her dad was a director of a cotton bobbin mill and travelled about the northern counties in a small Austin, and her mum, originally from good farming stock, was a happy and capable housewife and mother.
Read more in Sept/Oct Words and Music Magazine!
From army band boy to universal comedy star
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Norman Wisdom - universal comedy star
Norman Wisdom - universal comedy star
Sir Norman Wisdom
4th Feb 1914 – 4th Oct 2010
by Iain F. McAsh
It was in May 1955 that I first met Norman Wisdom on the set of Man of the Moment, his third Rank film, following location at Lake Geneva, featuring one of his favourite leading ladies, Lana Morris. Norman’s role required him to exchange his familiar gump suit for more regal attire for a scene shared with Fifties T.V. celebrity chef Philip Harben. He was putting final touches to a soufflé when Norman in a very smart suit followed Lana, who was being chased by two heaviers from a rival Embassy pursued by Norman, but not before smashing the bowl containing the enraged chef’s soufflé
Like Sir Charles Chaplin before him, Norman and his brother Fred were the products of a broken home and forced to survive as best they could on the mean streets of London.
After an early episode as a Liptons errand boy, a kindly coffee stall owner suggested that, as a boy of fifteen, he should join the army. “I went along to the recruiting centre near Scotland Yard, passed the medical and they took me in. From boot camp at Aldershot I was sent to India with the Tenth Royal Hussars. They taught me to ride a horse and there was swimming and cricket.
A ‘Signed’ Christmas film by Iain F. McAsh
Author: Webmaster
Sir Michael Redgrave
In 1973 Christmas came a month early at Pinewood Studios. The date was America’s Thanksgiving Day on 22nd. November that year, a memorable day for America’s National Theatre of the Deaf with the start of the filming on Dyland Thomas’s evocative poem A Child’s memory of Christmas in Wales, based on the small Welsh town where he had spent the early part of his childhood. The cast consisted of non-hearing performers acting out their various roles in mime. The only speaking person was Sir Michael Redgrave, representing Dylan Thomas himself as narrator, with Bernard Bragg as his `signing` counterpart for deaf audiences.
The youthful director, Joshua White, had adapted Thomas’s poem as well as being responsible for casting the acting roles to fit the personalities of his players during advance rehearsals in London. Each individual performer took several widely differing roles, with the girls even doubling as boys dressed in typical 1920’s-style suits and caps.
