Letter leak is last word in treachery
Hard to forgive a slight story There’s no one like our Gloria
RICHARD E Grant is truly mesmerising in the role for which he’s been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
He portrays louche reprobates and unsavoury but charismatic rapscallions with more oomph than any other thespian.
The film is Can You Ever Forgive Me? and his co-star Melissa McCarthy also turns in a humdinger of a performance.
It tells the true story of New Yorker Lee Israel, an unsuccessful biographer who discovers a lucrative talent for forging letters from famous dead people.
There are just a few problems with this cinematic banquet: Lee is horrible. Richard E Grant’s character is ghastly and it’s impossible to care about a fabricated letter from the long-deceased Noel Coward.
With so much genius invested in so slight a story it is a real shame.
Undying love for Valentine
BEFORE you ask: yes I am. Yes, I’d be disappointed if he didn’t. And no, I couldn’t care less if it’s a conspiracy of the card makers along with Interflora and Cadbury. At Feltz Towers we go great guns for St Valentine.
We know we’re lemmings, being fleeced for every penny we possess, fated to pay through the nose for an indifferent meal we’re made to consume vacuumpacked in a crowded restaurant, cheek by jowl with couples who look as if they’d be happier attending one another’s wakes.
We’re fully aware that St Valentine’s Day is the perfect platform for full-scale rows, for heated exchanges in public places and female disappointment when a wilting bunch of garage chrysanthemums are presented with a flourish while roses and diamonds are nowhere to be seen. I repeat: I don’t care. I like an official day to celebrate love.
I’ve been a fan since my first card appeared on my school desk in 1966.
I’m too old to change now.
GENTLE reader, I don’t want to say “I told you so” – but I did. I insisted the Duchess of Sussex was more sinned against than sinning. I refused to join the cats’ chorus condemning Harry and Meghan for failing to reach out to her abominable apology for a father, Thomas Markle. I was convinced Meghan had tried her utmost to nurture and build bridges with the dad she adored. Now, in yet another spectacular own goal, Markle has unleashed for every nosy parker in the world to see an intimately private hand-written five-page letter from his daughter quite obviously intended for his eyes only. Lord knows what he intended the fallout to be.
What is clear, however, is that Meghan emerges from yet another ham-fisted attempt at sabotage with her reputation intact. Every syllable of her exquisite calligraphy is testimony to the fact that she has tried with every fibre of her being to include, care for, support and financially shore-up the man who only let her know he wasn’t going to attend her wedding by means of a text he claims he sent and she maintains she never received.
Truly, Thomas Markle is a piece of work. He specialises in deliberately missing the point. How can any father purporting to be empathetic and concerned for his daughter comfortably show total strangers this sentence penned in her own hand?
“Your actions have broken my heart into a million pieces – not simply because you have manufactured such unnecessary and unwarranted pain, but by making the choice to not tell the truth… Something I will never understand.” What about going public with this? “… you watched me silently suffer at the hand of [my half-sister’s] vicious lies, I crumbled inside.”
How does Markle imagine people feel about this phrase: “If you love me, as you tell the press you do, please stop… please stop creating so much pain, please stop exploiting my relationship with my husband.” How dense and narcissistic, how deluded and self-obsessed does an individual need to be to be unable to appreciate how deeply his daughter’s words will affect every reader?
MEGHAN’S misery is etched in every hurt and incredulous paragraph. It has become fashionable to chastise Meghan’s close coterie of friends for giving an interview in her defence to the US magazine People. Critics have accused her of conniving with them and counsel her against “playing a dangerous game” in seeking – Princess Diana-style – to manipulate the press.
I disagree. Meghan has been maligned, traduced and criticised. There have been racist undertones to the trolling, plus an unhealthy dollop of antiAmerican xenophobia. She has been branded an unloving daughter and an arriviste, and unsubstantiated rumours about making Kate cry at Princess Charlotte’s bridesmaid dress-fitting and insisting Windsor Castle be spritzed with scent have abounded.
If Meghan’s friends don’t scotch the rumours the rot will set in and we will all start to believe the slurs. She doesn’t deserve them and stamping them out is justified. Who knew Thomas Markle would unwittingly play a part?
CORBYN IS LIVING PROOF OF CHAOS THEORY
POLITICS aside, there’s one thing I can’t abide about Jeremy Corbyn. I can’t stick the mess.
Apparently when he and one of his ex-wives moved house, he left the fridge clogged with congealing food and the garage stuffed floor to ceiling with rusting railway detritus, bits of wood and an assortment of metal signs.
As the new owner gave vent to his fury in the drive, Corbyn eventually paid a bloke to shift his junk. It was duly installed in the garage of his next PLAYING exuberant host at the Caron Keating Foundation tea dance at London’s Langham Hotel on Sunday afternoon, Brian Conley – currently starring in the musical 9 to 5 – introduced the charity’s heart and soul Gloria Hunniford with the question: “Can anyone please tell me why Gloria hasn’t yet been made a Dame?”
The guests, including Judge Rinder, Lesley Joseph, Christopher Biggins and Strictly’s Neil and Katya Jones looked at one another perplexed. Why on earth isn’t our ‘Glo’ Dame Gloria?
No woman deserves the accolade more. When Gloria lost her beloved daughter Caron, star of Blue Peter and a dazzling array of TV shows, to breast cancer, she turned her agonising grief into what she modestly calls “a kitchen table charity” through which she raises substantial amounts for cancer-related projects and families afflicted by the illness.
She’s a darling person, determined to fill the abyss Caron left by mothering anyone and everyone who needs a maternal touch.
There may be nothing like a Dame, but Gloria would fit the title like a glove. abode. Has the fellow never heard of Marie Kondo? Surely we’re all conversant with the notion that cleanliness is next to godliness and the fact that keeping a cluttered and chaotic home usually denotes a cluttered and disorganised mind? HOW many friends do you have – three, five, at a pinch seven if you add a couple of school pals you haven’t seen in years?
A quick glimpse at a piece about the will of the late Eurovision presenter and TV panellist Katie Boyle stopped me in my tracks. Katie, who died last March aged 91, left £3.6 million to be shared between 109 friends and relatives.
Yes, you read that number correctly. Just imagine (a) amassing that number of pals (b) remember them in your will and (c) doling out bequests to coach-loads of relatives into the bargain.
Katie was known for her grace and poise but her final act reveals a stellar breadth of loyalty and generosity.