Noël Coward - Master Of Fun
Favourite anecdotes about the renaissance man's renaissance man courtesy of Michael Caine and Stephen Fry.
“Noel was gregarious and gay - in every sense of the word. Each Wednesday evening when we were shooting [The Italian Job], I used to have dinner with him at The Savoy. I always think of those occasions as among the most quintessentially English things I’ve ever done. Noel had a free room for life at The Savoy, he told me, because during the war, he had been playing cabaret there and had sung on through a night of terrible bombing. ‘I wasn’t really being brave,’ he told me. ‘Once the air raid started, people weren’t allowed to leave and so I had a captive audience for the first and only time in my life, so I sang every bloody song that I knew before they could escape in the morning. Not only did I get the satisfaction of doing that but I was given a free room for life. Not a bad evening’s work…’”
- Michael Caine
“I'd known John Mills for some time [before casting him in Bright Young Things]. As I’ve sometimes said, ‘Oh, I've known him since he was in his eighties!’ I was staying at the Savoy at the time we met - an American had asked me to adapt Noel Coward's Hay Fever and lent me the use of his suite - and I invited John over for the evening. He came into the suite and promptly burst into tears. ‘Oh, my God!’ he said. ‘It's Noel's suite!’ And there I was, adapting Coward's Hay Fever in Coward's Savoy suite and my guest for the evening was John Mills, who was Coward's good friend and had rehearsed 'Mad Dogs And Englishman', written for Johnny, in the very same place. Coincidences are seldom so charming.”
- Stephen Fry
Lovely post! I'm a fan of Coward, Mills, Caine, and Fry. Quite a quartet.