Venue goes from ‘golden age’ of cinema to hosting the Stones and Smokey Robinson

THE Odeon was built during the “Golden Age of Hollywood”, when actors like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo were popular with cinema audiences.

In the 1930s there were over 25 cinemas in Leicester and probably this one, built in 1938 by the Odeon organisation, was the grandest.

Many of the Odeon cinemas were designed by the office of the Birmingham architect Harry Weedon and those from the 1930s had a modern Art Deco look to them.

Leicester’s Odeon could seat 2,000 in comfort.

By the 1960s the Odeon had adapted to changing tastes and was hosting music concerts as well as showing films.

The Rolling Stones played at the “Odeon Theatre” in 1964 and, in 1965, the Tamla Motown Revue featured the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, and Martha and the Vandellas.

In 1993, the Odeon hosted the European première of Sir Richard Attenborough’s biopic of Charlie Chaplin.

By the 1980s the Odeon had been divided into four screens and was the only cinema in Leicester where people could book by telephone.

In response to other, more modern cinemas opening in the 1990s, the Odeon organisation built a new multiplex cinema at Freemen’s Common and the Odeon closed in 1997.

For several years it stood empty until it was reopened in 2005 as Athena, an events venue that has restored the building to its former glory.