CHISWICK HOUSE and SIR JOHN SOANE'S MUSEUM: London's Finest (3)

[This is the third in a series of articles to describe some of the most interesting and attractive places in London.]

Chiswick House, built by Lord Burlington in 1729 with its landscape Gardens, laid out by William Kent, has been described as “the most elegant public amenity in London”. It is a lovely Palladian villa, much to the taste of 18^th century aristocrats and connoisseurs.

Chiswick House

Chiswick is by the Thames in West London some 6 miles from the centre. The site of Chiswick House was first adorned by a Jacobean mansion owned by the Boyle family but it was destroyed in a fire in 1726. Richard Boyle, 3^rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753), was a gifted amateur architect and an enthusiast for Greek and Roman buildings as interpreted by the Venetian master Andrea Palladio (1508-80). He resolved to build a villa in the Palladian style and Chiswick House is the fine result, setting the criterion of taste for a generation of English country houses.

Chiswick House is in an eclectic mixture of styles, evoking the Roman Temple to Castor and Pollux, Palladio’s Villa Rotonda near Vicenza, Diocletian’s Palace at Split and the adornments illustrated in numerous architectural drawings circulated in Burlington’s artistic circle. The 65-acre Gardens were similarly influenced by, but did not slavishly copy the great Roman gardens like Tivoli. The distinguished interior designer William Kent played a leading part in the design of the gardens, whose informality ushered in the long age of the English landscaped garden, as opposed to the symmetry and classic design of the French formal garden.

The precise purpose of Chiswick House is obscure – “too small to be a house and too large within merely to wind one’s watch” observed a contemporary. Burlington hung paintings from his collection on the elegant baroque walls, but really it was meant to be a meeting place for the literate intelligentsia, where they could conduct conversazioni in the sociable 18^th century fashion. In Burlington’s time certainly many eminent people visited the House like Pope and Walpole. After Burlington died in 1753, quickly followed by his widow and only daughter, the House passed to the Duke of Devonshire’s family, prominent Whigs.

The interior of Chiswick House in its prime

The house really blossomed under the Devonshires, becoming a Whig salon, more living quarters were rather clumsily added and for some years under the dynamic leadership of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, famous visitors came, including Voltaire, Rousseau, eminent Americans John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; two famous politicians died at Chiswick, brilliant Whig leader Charles James Fox in 1806 and Liberal Tory Prime Minister George Canning in 1827.

Georgiana Devonshire

Charles James Fox

                   

Sadly the House was neglected in the 19^th century and was sold to the local council in 1929. A German flying bomb put paid to the living quarters in 1944 and caused much damage but the House was manfully restored by English Heritage and Chiswick House with its lovely Gardens are now deliciously at the disposal of the people of London.

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Sir John Soane (1753- 1838) was one of the most eminent neo-classical architects of his generation. Of modest birth, he was taken under the wing of the successful architect George Dance the Younger, went on the Grand Tour to Italy and Sicily and sought the advice of the fine designer Sir William Chambers. Winning many commissions, he is most famous for his rebuilding of The Bank of England from 1790 onwards and for his ingenious top-light design of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy.

Sir John Soane

Yet Soane was an unlucky architect. His Bank of England was ruined by Sir Herbert Baker’s clumsy 1920s extensions - “the greatest architectural crime in the City of the 20^th century” fulminated Pevsner - and his cool spacious style quickly went out-of-date as Gothic Revivalism and other schools became more favoured. From the early 1800s he collected classical objects, architectural drawings and paintings and his fame now rests on the houses he built at 12,13 (and recently recovered 14) Lincolns Inn Fields, Holborn, which he bequeathed with his collection to the nation on his death. Sir John Soane’s Museum (or simply The Soane) is a decidedly idiosyncratic institution.

The frontage of the Soane

The Museum is very crowded with a bewildering array of objects – you can easily trip up over a Grecian urn or a bust of the Emperor Augustus. Only a maximum of 80 visitors are admitted at any one time, so queuing is sometimes necessary. There are agreeable domestic rooms of the Regency period, classical and medieval fragments everywhere, an eccentric and gloomy suite of monk’s quarters, many drawings and sketches by Soane himself and by his friends, like Flaxman and Chantry, architectural fancies by Piranesi, and one of the Museums great treasures, from excavations in Thebes in Egypt, the Sarcophagus of Seti I, some 3,000 years old and covered in hieroglyphics. Soane bought it when the trustees of the British Museum declined to purchase in 1824 and he mounted a 3-day reception to celebrate its acquisition.

The busy ambiance of The Soane

To my mind the most striking feature of The Soane is its paintings, as much for their curious arrangement as for their innate quality. Soane devised an ingenious Picture-Room where three of the walls contain hinged panels which open inwards to display further pictures. Displayed in this way are the famous 8 pictures by William Hogarth known as The Rake’s Progress from 1733 depicting a disastrously misspent youth and the 4 picture series The Election from 1754 satirising the corrupt election practices of the time, acquired from the estate of David Garrick. The other paintings are by no means negligible, including Canalettos, Turners and Lawrences.

An Election Entertainment by William Hogarth

In my brief sketch I hope I have conveyed some of the individuality of The Soane. When I first visited in the 1970s, it was really very cramped but the re-acquisition of no 14 has provided more space both for the visitor and for the student. Try and join a conducted tour focussing on just a few of the multitude of objects on view. A visit is certain to be rewarding.

SMD
17.02.14
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2014

JACK HAWKINS and JAMES MASON: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (2)

[This is the second in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

Britain had its particular brand of matinee idol in the 1940s and 1950s, usually a handsome and masculine type with a distinctive voice. The two actors I here describe fall into that category, the first remaining a quintessentially British figure, while the second made a successful transition to Hollywood and to a wider audience. They are two of my favourites.

Jack Hawkins

Jack Hawkins (1910- 1973) with his craggy good looks and searching eyes was usually cast as the upright, stiff-upper-lipped Englishman with his strong sense of duty and not much time for frivolity. He played a loving but undemonstrative husband and a guiding father. In real life he was notably liberal and soft-hearted, far away from his film persona. 

Hawkins, born in Wood Green, London, was educated at the Italia Conti drama school, making his West End debut at the age of 12 in Where the Rainbow ends and his Broadway debut aged 18. He was a journeyman stage and film actor for some years and did not get into his stride until the 1950s.

Hawkins as Captain Ericson in The Cruel Sea

Hawkins appeared in a succession of movies as a police superintendent, The Long Arm (1956) and Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958) as a rubber planter fighting off Malayan communists in The Planters Wife (1952), as the father of a beloved deaf-mute girl in Mandy (1953), as a fighter pilot in Angels One Five (1953) as an Army officer in Malta Story (1956). Hawkins’ career-defining role was in The Cruel Sea (1953) as Captain Ericson of a convoy-protecting corvette warship, agonising over his duty to drop depth charges on an attacking U-boat despite the certainty of killing torpedoed British sailors struggling in the water. The film, adapted from a successful novel by Nicholas Monserrat, was a huge success in the UK and Hawkins was voted the top film star in 1954.

Hawkins was the leading man in The League of Gentlemen (1960) a thriller about a group of unreconciled ex-servicemen executing a bank heist. Hawkins’ entrance from a manhole, dressed in his tuxedo, anticipated James Bond.

Hawkins emerges from a manhole in The League of Gentlemen

Hawkins was evolving into a character actor – he was again an army officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - but a professional tragedy was stalking him. A 60-a-day smoker, his voice began to fail and his larynx with it. He struggled on, performing splendidly as General Allenby in Laurence of Arabia (1962) and as a pacifist preacher in Zulu (1964). Latterly Hawkins had an artificial larynx fitted and his voice was dubbed by other actors. He died after another larynx operation in 1973: he was only 62. A comforting and reliable presence, his passing was much lamented by his British audience.

Hawkins as Allenby in Laurence of Arabia

My second actor is James Mason (1909-1984), the son of a wealthy wool merchant in Huddersfield, he was educated at Marlborough and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He rather drifted into acting, somehow joining the Old Vic in 1933 and learning his trade under Tyrone Guthrie. He appalled his family by claiming to be a conscientious objector when WW2 broke out, but his film work exempted him from combat anyway. His good looks and silken manner translated well to the screen and during the 1940s he was a major British star, topping the box office ratings in 1944 and 1945 on the back of rather ephemeral films like The Man in Grey (1943), bodice-ripper The Wicked Lady (1945) with Margaret Lockwood and the psycho-melodrama The Seventh Veil (1945).

A young James Mason

Mason drew international attention as the wounded gunman roaming Belfast in Odd Man Out (1947), although he did not neglect his British audience with Rommel, the Desert Fox (1952), 5 Fingers as the German spy Cicero and as the villainous Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda (1952). His US breakthrough came with A Star is Born (1954), playing Norman, the wash-up alcoholic husband of his cherished Judy Garland, giving rise to that wonderful lump-in-the-throat final moment when, after his suicide, she introduces herself at the theatre “Good Evening, everybody, I am Mrs Norman Maine!”

Mason was not afraid of experimental cinema and he made two art-house films for Max Ophuls and he was a keen cinéaste, rescuing some old Buster Keaton reels and in later days making friends with an aged Charlie Chaplin. But the commercial cinema was his world and he graced Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea as the crackpot Captain Nemo, narrowly escaping death in a battle with the tentacles of a giant squid. 

Perhaps his best known role was as the silky master-spy Vandamm in Hitchcock’s greatly entertaining North by Northwest playing opposite Cary Grant and Eva-Marie Saint.

Mason in North by Northwest

Mason settled in Switzerland in 1961 and with his first wife he was obsessively fond of cats, writing books about their odd feline ways. He kept up an international film career and was seen to advantage as the notorious Humbert Humbert in Lolita. With his precisely enunciated syllables and reserved style he was perfect as the lecherous nymphet-chasing anti-hero. Other less adventurous actors turned down this controversial opportunity.

He later made many films, some of indifferent quality, but he always brought distinction to his roles. In his later days, he was to be seen in Spring and Port Wine from Bill Naughton’s comic play, displaying a fine Northern accent as the paterfamilias of a Bolton family whose adventures and attitudes baffle and alarm him.

Mason died in 1984 and was buried in Switzerland, a few steps from Chaplin’s tomb. He had enjoyed a glittering career.

SMD

13.02.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014

LAURENCE OLIVIER: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (1)

[This is the first in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

 

I begin with one of Britain’s most eminent actors ever, Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), regarded by many as the finest British actor of the 20th century. 

Laurence Olivier

Olivier’s father was an Anglican priest and his mother’s family was clerical too. Losing his mother when he was 12, his strict father nevertheless encouraged Olivier’s acting ambitions and sent him aged 17 to drama college. Joining the Birmingham Rep in 1926, he soon made his mark in classic Shakespearean roles although his West End breakthrough came in 1930 in Noel Coward’s brittle comedy Private Lives. In the same year Olivier (or “Larry” as he was known in theatrical circles) married the actress Jill Esmond and, as he admitted in a much later autobiography, failed to perform sexually on his wedding night – perhaps a manifestation of those first night nerves which were to plague him all his career. They produced a son but the marriage was not a great success, ending in 1940, although they remained friends.

Larry built up his formidable reputation in the 1930s, particularly in seasons at the Old Vic where he shared classic roles with John Gielgud, starting an often abrasive rivalry with that very different actor. “Shakespeare’s lines are to be spoken, not sung” complained Larry but often the critics preferred Gielgud’s bell-like style of diction over Larry’s forceful clarity, to Larry’s mortification. In 1937 he started an affair with Vivien Leigh, with whose life and career he was to become entwined.

Olivier as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights with Merle Oberon

                           

Inevitably Hollywood beckoned and although Sam Goldwyn berated Larry for overacting, Wuthering Heights was a great movie success in 1939 to be followed by a fine Maxim de Winter in Hitchcock’s Rebecca and a foppish Darcy in Pride and Prejudice in 1940. Larry was now a matinee idol and he and Vivian Leigh were a famous celebrity couple after her glittering success as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara

         

Olivier as Henry V

                                                                                  

After some difficulty divorcing their respective former spouses, Larry and Vivien married in California in 1940. Larry was a national asset during WW2 and he was the virile star and director of the 1944 patriotic epic Henry V, filmed in the neutral Irish Republic, with the under-employed Irish Army deployed as extras.

Released from the forces in 1944 (Larry had been in the Fleet Air Arm), he joined his friend Ralph Richardson in 5 seasons at the New Theatre (later the Albery and now the Noel Coward) acting in Shakespeare, Sheridan, Shaw and Chekhov, usually 3 different plays every day. These New Theatre seasons are regarded as a highpoint in the English theatre and the apogee of Olivier’s career. He also toured in the US and Australia and starred in his classic films of Hamlet (it won Britain’s first film Oscar in 1948 and Larry’s only Oscar too) and Richard III. Larry had an uncanny chameleon-like ability completely to absorb the persona of his role and actually to become Romeo or Astrov in Uncle Vanya or Sir Peter Teazle. It went well beyond fine acting and was a rare and unsettling gift.

Sadly his marriage to Vivien Leigh was troubled. She had an unstable mind, diagnosed as bi-polar disorder, and her mood swings and tantrums caused endless scenes. She was a born film actress, but she wanted to be a Shakespearean rival to Larry and her technique and voice projection were inadequate. When the critic Kenneth Tynan disparaged her performance in New York and opined she was holding back Olivier, she went into paroxysms of self-loathing. She had her triumphs as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar named Desire and in the much later movie The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. Larry was usually kind to her, though he had his tantrums too, and one is reminded of Lord Melbourne’s doomed marriage to Lady Caroline Lamb, a similarly impossible spouse. From 1953, Vivien embarked on a fitful affair with the actor Peter Finch (Larry consoled himself with Claire Bloom) but over time she descended into manic-depression, schizophrenia and (embarrassingly) into nymphomania. They divorced in 1960 and Vivien died in 1967, quite mad.

In the 1950s and 1960s Larry was not attracted to the kitchen-sink school of British drama but he had a great success as Archie Rice, the down-at-heel comedian in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, as usual entering into the role with amazing panache.

Olivier as Hamlet

Olivier as Archie Rice

    

 

In 1961 he married the actress Joan Plowright and they had 3 children whom he had to cosset and finance. He had to make money and he took a large number of roles in inferior movies to keep the pot boiling. Larry became the first Director of The National Theatre in 1962-73 when it was based at the Old Vic – the South Bank building did not open until 1974. He played Othello and other strenuous roles but from 1968 his health gave problems with prostate cancer and a chronic degenerative muscle disorder. Larry could never be negligible on screen and he shone in 1972’s Sleuth and perhaps most memorably in 1976 as the Nazi dentist sadistically drilling a terrified Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in Marathon Man. 

Olivier the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man

He ended his acting days with cameo roles as Lord Marchmain in TV’s Brideshead Revisited and as John Mortimer’s blind father in Voyage round my Father. He died in 1989, aged 81, laden with honours, the youngest ever theatrical knight at age 39 and the first ever theatrical peer.

Even his wife admitted he could be “difficult” and behind the insincere “luvvy” façade, Olivier’s diaries show what a bitchy, insecure and pathologically jealous type he was. He disparaged his co-stars like Joan Fontaine and Merle Oberon, and as director of the National Theatre never invited John Gielgud or Alec Guinness to play and limited the parts given to the coming stars like Albert Finney or Derek Jacobi. A monstrous ego was at work here. Watching Olivier, one always wondered what the real man was all about, but he remains enigmatic and probably unknowable.

That said, Laurence Olivier brought enormous distinction to the British theatre, was an unquestioned patriot and the brightest jewel of his wayward profession. He was admired and wondered at by a richly entertained global audience.

SMD

11.02.14

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2014