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Lädt ... A Positively Final Appearancevon Alec Guinness
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. There is something wonderfully perverse about Alec Guinness publishing his diaries. He is, after all, one of those actors who made his mark precisely by obliterating his own personality in favour of conjuring up, chameleon-like, a host of vivid characters on film, stage and television. Asked what Alec Guinness is like in real life, most people would not dare venture an opinion. But with his journal My Name Escapes Me (and it's a telling title), Guinness has found new fame at 82, with his lucid, mild-mannered yet often insightful ponderings on his own life (failing eyesight, well, failing everything, really), unselfconsciously woven with more national and universal concerns. Now, with A Positively Final Appearance, we get a second instalment, covering the years 1996 to 1998, which saw personal triumphs over that eye trouble and political upheaval with the death of Diana and the birth of Blair. We're drawn into a gentler, more refined world, where teasing and sardonic appraisals of the arts, past and present, are interlaced with memories of old friends (and when they include Garbo, Noel Coward and Wallis Windsor, why not?) Guinness is well cast as the seasoned, genial raconteur looking back at the end of a long life. But A Positively Final Appearance? Somehow, I doubt it.--Alan Stewart The charming cover shows Sir Alec in one of his Stan Laurel moods and poses, this time in executing an especially commissioned dance on stage, with careful chorography he says, for the more infirm and elderly performer. The book is a sort of journal, a valid form of biography, and covers his closing years ending shortly before his death in 2000. By now Sir Alec Guinness in his late eighties is rather frail, considers himself ‘elderly and rather infirm’ as is aware of the dangers of becoming a curmudgeon – but despite his watchfulness he still embarrasses himself by catching himself peevishly growling at modern youth, and the lowering of standards (particularly when his beloved Connaught Hotel decides to become “popular”). The first chapter, ”Men as trees, walking” opens the book in an eye clinic surgical ward – it proves to be one of a series of continual doctor’s visits in an ever increasing go-round that most of his more senior readers will know all too well. He retains his ability to enchant and entertain however, and his mischievous wit is once more peeping at us over the top of the page – among those he thanks for help in writing this book (and it really was his last) are his dogs, “who instinctively knew the right moments to interrupt me”! Amazingly he foretells of his own death, awaking one morning he says, thinking “You only have another seven hundred days to live”. He estimates that made the time of his passing as “November 2000. Not bad I thought…” In fact he died a little earlier, in the August and his beloved, life-long wife Merula confirmed the rightness of their companionship by dying in October. Given advanced age and health problems this is a far darker tale than the other two books in his series of biography (Blessings in Disguise http://www.librarything.com/work/126013 and My Names Escapes Me http://www.librarything.com/work/185580) but it is still a delightful read. Zeige 5 von 5
The retired actor muses with humble precision on the little details of his life; the results are sometimes mundane, often witty, and occasionally transcendent. Readers of Guinness’s previously published diary (My Name Escapes Me, 1997) might expect more of the same, but the new volume is subtly different. The previous book was a traditional diary with clearly marked dates; this one has few dates, instead meandering like a stream-of-consciousness novel, or, as Guinness puts it, “a sort of sluggish river.”
"My Name Escapes Me, the diaries of Sir Alec Guinness, became an international bestseller when published in 1996. This new volume contains Sir Alec's journal since the summer of that year." "The summer of 1996 ended well with an operation that successfully treated an eye which had been useless for almost ten years. Further good news on the health front followed in March 1997. These were tumultuous times for the nation - the election of Mr Blair, the death of Diana - but other matters continued to hold equal importance in Hampshire: the difficulties of the plane trees during the dry summer, the extraordinary appearance in the skies of the Hale-Bopp comet, the vulnerability of the hassocks in Steep Church and the experiments with Chinese cooking, encouraged by Ken Hom's TV enthusiasm." "Shakespeare's birthday (his 433rd) is celebrated with a visit to Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which gives pleasure despite its title and despite the fact that it leads to the melancholy thought that the worst Romeo ever was 'none other than me, moi-meme'. And a revival of Terence Rattigan's Cause Celebre at the Lyric prompts some memories of the playwright who is putting bums on seats thirty years after he was dismissed by the avant-garde."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)792.028092The arts Recreational and performing arts Stage presentations, Theatre Standard subdivisions and types of stage presentation Techniques, procedures, apparatus, equipment, materials, miscellany Acting and Performance History, geographic treatment, biography BiographyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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