Film king cut stars down to size… and why not?
BARRY NORMAN, who died in his sleep on Friday aged 83, received many epithets over the years but ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’ was the one that tickled him most.
With his distinctive manner, he became a household name in the 1970s, breezily presenting the BBC Film show for 26 years.
Self-deprecating to a fault, he was the first to note that his lived-in appearance made him an unlikely sex symbol.
He famously flirted with Michelle Pfeiffer and was once kissed by Elizabeth Taylor. ‘I’ve met some extremely beautiful women,’ he once recalled. ‘I’m quite sure I came back from interviewing Sophia Loren or Brigitte Bardot raving about how good looking they were. But that’s as far as it went.’
In truth, he was devoted to his wife Diana, his ‘soulmate’ who died in 2011. The couple were married for 53 years. It wasn’t just women who liked Norman. Erudite, witty, insightful, understated, he was, it seemed, everyone’s favourite film buff. Well, not quite everyone’s. For along with a fireside manner, he also possessed a temper – and was not afraid of cutting Hollywood royalty down to size.
‘There were quite a few people who were terrified of me,’ the critic – who estimated that he had watched 15,000 films – once admitted. He almost came to blows with Robert De Niro after he asked a question the actor didn’t like – and he refused to interview Madonna when she turned up an hour and 40 minutes late. He dismissed Robin Williams as an actor with an addiction to ‘saccharine, tooth-rotting sentimentality’ whose talent was ‘spread so thinly as to be almost invisible’. But the film industry held Norman in enormously high regard and most stars found being interviewed by him a rare pleasure.
At the height of his fame he became a puppet on the satirical TV series Spitting Image, which created a catchphrase for him: ‘And why not?’ that he later used for the title of his autobiography.
Yesterday, his daughters Samantha and Emma called him ‘remarkable’, adding: ‘He had a great life, a wonderful marriage and an enviable career.’