Ephraim Hardcastle
TOM Stoppard’s biographer Hermione Lee claims his affair with Jeremy Irons’s wife Sinead Cusack petered out when she finally found the long-lost son she’d put up for adoption 40 years before. Sinead, 72, is now happily reunited with Richard Boyd Barrett, 53, a Dublin politician. In her book, Lee reveals that Sinead gave Tom her blessing when he turned to Sabrina Guinness, now the playwright’s third wife, with the endorsement: ‘Sabrina had been looking all her life for a good man and now she’s got the best man in the world.’
APROPOS of Stoppard, Sinead’s predecessor in his affections The Good Life actress Felicity Kendal enjoyed what biographer Lee describes as an ‘on-and-off’ affair, adding: ‘She used to send him Kendal Mint Cake and ask if he fancied one.’
WILL the Queen include serving staff at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle in her drastic redundancy scheme? According to journalist Ryan Parry, who masqueraded as a Buck House footman in 2003, he was one of ten serving the Queen’s solitary lunch. They were made up of another footman, two kitchen porters, two chefs, two silver pantry under-butlers, a page and a coffee-room maid. And the coffee run was hardly under-resourced. Parry was handed a silver jug from a maid, explaining: ‘My role was to take the tray 20 metres to the page’s vestibule and hand it to the page, who then carried it another eight metres to the Queen in her dining room.’
HELENA Bonham Carter, pictured portraying Sherlock Holmes’ mother in new film Enola Holmes, was once an avid devotee of the Baker Street sleuth. ‘I remember when I was 18 and on jury service I took the complete Sherlock Holmes in with me,’ she recalls. But her literary flirtation with Holmes was short-lived. She adds: ‘It was all turned on its head because he is shockingly misogynistic.’ A word in your shell-like Helena: Sherlock is fiction – i.e. made up.
HARRY Evans, on the first day of his journalistic career as a 16-year-old trainee on Lancashire’s Ashton-underLyne Reporter in 1944, was curtly handed a sheaf of paper by the news editor with the mumbled instruction: ‘Asparagus’. ‘I was confused and terrified,’ recalled Harry, who has died in New York aged 92. ‘We’d never had asparagus at home so I typed “Asparagus” and sat at the desk awaiting inspiration.’ Another staffer arrived explaining that Harry had been instructed to write a paragraph.
LONG-in-the-tooth Greek playboy Taki Theodoracopulos pontificates that Sasha Swire’s diaries sound like ‘revenge porn’, adding that he knew her as a teenager: ‘I found her unpleasant, unfriendly and rather plain-looking.’ Ouch!
SUPERANNUATED Doctor Who Tom Baker has had a newly discovered 450million-year-old fossil, Gravicalymene bakeri, named after him by two Australian palaeontologist fans. Tom plans to append his name with the word ‘Fossil’, saying: ‘I am delighted to be entitled at last.’
Email: john.mcentee@dailymail.co.uk