How Hollywood came to stay in the spare room
annETTE BEning portrays Hollywood actress gloria grahame in a movie about how an ordinary Liverpudlian family looked after the Oscarwinner in their spare room when she fell ill.
during her screen career, grahame was one of the top go-to actresses to play femme fatales. She starred opposite Kirk douglas in The Bad and The Beautiful, and won a best supporting actress Oscar for her efforts.
She raised temperatures in Fritz Lang’s pictures The Big Heat and Human desire, and was just a girl who famously couldn’t say ‘no’ in Fred Zinnemann’s film of Oklahoma!
The film producer Barbara Broccoli knows grahame’s life-story intimately. She acquired the film rights to Peter Turner’s memoir, about how he (a jobbing actor and writer) befriended grahame when she was staying in digs in Primrose Hill, north London, during her run in the late Seventies in The glass Menagerie at the roundhouse.
in between making Bond movies, Broccolli went about developing it.
She signed director Paul Mcguigan, writer Matt greenhaigh, and then Bening and Jamie Bell as Turner.
in Film Stars don’t die in Liverpool, based on Turner’s tome, Bening’s grahame falls ill and asks Turner if she could recuperate at his family’s home in Merseyside. ‘I could get better there,’ she says quietly.
Julie walters and Kenneth Cranham play Turner’s parents.
Broccoli felt the Liverpool love, too. ‘The whole environment, from the minute you arrive there, is so welcoming,’ she enthused.
‘I can totally understand why she fell in love with the place and the warm-hearted people,’ she added.
a couple of years ago I re-watched a slate of Grahame’s films at aretrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln
Centre in New York, and I was reminded of just how powerful a presence she was in movies.
‘What’s so great and provocative about her on screen is that she always managed to retain her sense of self and she didn’t comply with the Hollywood system. She was an original — she couldn’t be re-manufactured into something else. She held on to who she was,’ Broccoli noted.
Bening’s performance brilliantly captures those qualities, and the vulnerabilities that hit female actors. Bening’s not afraid to show that a close-up isn’t the friendliest angle for a film camera.
‘Actresses, women in general, have to come to terms with the ageing process,’ Broccoli sighed. But she added: ‘And it’s so beautifully handled by Annette Bening, who has aged in the most wonderful way and has retained her sexuality.’
In any case, said Broccoli: ‘Women are beautiful at all ages.’
Bening has a fiery allure and there’s certainly a frisson between Bening and Bell. As, Broccoli said, you don’t feel the disparity of their ages. They feel as if they belong together.
McGuigan’s picture also, thankfully, shatters the myth that if you’re in the motion picture business you must be making tons of money. The vast majority of actors struggle, and only a small percentage ‘make it’.
‘Who needs 12 bathrooms?’ Grahame responds when asked if she missed the mansion-and-swimming-pool phase of her life. By that point her Hollywood home was a humble mobile one. She died of cancer, aged 57, in 1981.
Film stars probably don’t pass on in Liverpool, but they soar to great heights when portrayed by Annette Bening and Jamie Bell.
The film is likely to pop up during the BFI London Film Festival in October, and it will go on general release on November 17.