Sharpest shooter in the West

American Indian Wars. Her grandfather was the former captain of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry and, in an unfinished memoir, she describes how she and her elder siblings, Guy and Lizzie, would coax him into giving his Indian War whoop. “Of all the unearthly sounds I ever heard,” she wrote, “I never heard another that made my scalp prickle like that one.” In later life, it was not uncommon to hear her singing Civil War songs with her sons.

While Nichols’s diary entries from the early 1900s suggest a life of dancing and reading, she grasped early that she could turn her considerable love for photography into a means of supporting her young family. Around 1905, with two infants crawling about the house, she signed up for a correspondence course and built a darkroom, taking on work as both a photographer and a photo finisher.

She called her good shots “dandies”.

When not in the darkroom, Nichols could be found out photographing on her stallion, Kodak. “There was a brief fury over a divided riding skirt,” says Anderson. “It was very unusual for a woman to be taking photographs during Lora’s early years. Wyoming was a working man’s world. Part of her attraction to the field was that photography allowed her entry into that world.”

It helped that Nichols could hold her own intellectually. “She had only a fourth-grade education, but her self-education never ended,” Anderson explains. “She and her sons would quote Dickens and Twain and the Romantic poets to each other. It was an intellectually challenging thing to be with her.”

By 1911, Nichols’s marriage to Oldman had run its course – but business was booming: “I keep most of my old customers and keep getting new ones,” she writes at the time, though, two years on, she is feeling the strain: “This business of being a ‘working girl’ and having no spare time is still a matter of wonderment to me.”

In 1914, she married her cousin, Guy, and had four further children (Ezra, Cliff, Frank and Dick) in the space of six years. Her new husband, though, was given to quitting jobs abruptly, and leaping from one moneymaking scheme to another. During this time, Nichols stopped photographing altogether. Nicole Jean Hill, co-author of the new book, points out that the enthusiasm of her previous diary entries was almost entirely replaced by “dark ponderings on the lack of meaning and purpose in her life”.

A short stay at her mother’s in 1925 seems to have rekindled

Nichols’s fire. Later that year she bought a large clapboard building in Encampment and founded three business ventures: the Rocky Mountain Studio, a newspaper that she called The Encampment Echo, and, a few doors down, The Sugar Bowl, serving soda and ice cream.

As well as developing film, her studio lent cameras. When cowboys and young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps – a public works programme instituted in 1933 under Roosevelt’s New Deal – came through town, Nichols would press a Kodak box camera into their hands and ask them to return with pictures of the plains and mountains beyond Encampment. These images make up about a third of her archive.

Things came to an abrupt stop in 1935, with the death of Nichols’s mother, Sylvia. With less than a dollar in her pocket, she left Encampment for California, where she found well-paid work in a children’s home, and rose to become its director. Nichols told her friends that the move was for her health – she had a heart condition from rheumatic fever as a child – “but it was more than that”, says Anderson. “She was devastated. Her son Bert told me that Sylvia’s death drove her to the edge.”

Nichols eventually returned to Encampment in 1956. “She retained a gentle spirit,” says Anderson. “Her life had been impossibly difficult at times and yet anger, bitterness, regret were unknown to her. She had her library, her music, at times religion, but photography seemed her most constant panacea. Even in her final weeks, she was still making pictures, still welcoming visitors to the home.”

Encampment, Wyoming (Fw: Books, £40) is available from ideabooks.nl

Olivia Cooke is proof that it’s not only posh actors who make it these days. The 27-year-old is the daughter of a police officer and a sales rep, went to state school in Oldham, left before her A-levels, and never attended drama school. Yet as the star of ITV’s Vanity Fair, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the forthcoming Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, she is fast becoming one of Britain’s most in-demand young actors.

It shows no signs of going to her head. When I catch up with her via video call, she’s sitting on the floor in her new flat in London, wearing a warm jumper. We chat about her role as a rising spy in the forthcoming TV adaptation of Mick Herron’s acclaimed Slough House novels, which she has just been filming in the exalted company of Gary Oldman, Jonathan Pryce and Kristin Scott Thomas. Presumably it’s good prep for playing Bond one day, I suggest. “For me to play Bond?” she says. “Hysterical.”

Next year, as one of the stars of the much-hyped House of the Dragon, there will be few places for Cooke to hide. She hadn’t even watched the original Game of Thrones, she admits, but when she got the part she binged it. What did she think of its hated-by-some finale, in which Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) goes from heroine to ruthless destroyer? She lets out a deep breath that suggests something has been preying on her mind.

“I saw too many clips, just being alive at the time, so I knew what was going to happen,” she says. “What happened with Daenerys, I was OK with it, because I was expecting it, but it’s hard, you know…” – she pauses – “I’m a bit nervous about the new one. You’re never gonna please everyone, so I’ve just got to not listen to that stuff.”

Given the controversy Game of Thrones generated with its use of sexual violence against women, did she think twice before taking the role? “I wouldn’t feel comfortable in being a part of anything that has just egregious graphic violence towards women for no reason whatsoever, just because they want it to be tantalising in a way that gets viewers,” she says. “I was lucky enough to read the script before, and it has changed a lot from the first few seasons. I don’t think they’d be in their right minds to include any of that any more.”

She has talked in the past about experiencing sexism on set. Has that changed post MeToo? “It’s one of those things where I don’t know if it actually has or if I’m just really good at batting it off now, having been in the industry for nearly 10 years. Alarm bells would ring a lot when I was younger… a lot of men are really worried about what they’re saying now, as they should be. I guess everyone’s a bit more nervous now. ”

For Cooke, it’s been quite a decade. Cast in the 2012 BBC drama Blackout, opposite Christopher Eccleston, while still at Oldham Sixth Form College, she decided to leave early. She followed up with a role in The Secret of Crickley Hall and had already been cast in a film, when she was turned down by Rada – something she still likes to “pretend to be bitter” about.

Undaunted, she auditioned for the US TV series Bates Motel, and was offered the chance to fly out to film in Vancouver for five months. She took it. It was the beginning of a remarkable run of Stateside roles that has established Cooke as a charismatic – and remarkably natural – screen presence.

She was magnetic as a highschool teen with leukaemia in the 2015 indie Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, after her breakout role in the hit teen-horror Ouija in 2014. In the next few months, we’ll see her as a rock frontwoman in Sound of Metal (she was channelling Debbie Harry) and as a newly-wed facing up to a neural plague that is gradually claiming her husband’s memory in Little Fish. Both films are mustsees, with Cooke going toe to toe with the cream of British male acting talent: Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal, and, in Little Fish, Jack O’Connell. “Sometimes when he’s acting, he’s just a raw open wound, and you really feel for him,” Cooke says of O’Connell. “I didn’t have to do much.”

First, though, you can see Cooke as the dangerous-to-know daughter of a gangster in the death-dealing Irish caper Pixie. She’s the eyecatching standout as the title character, no mean feat given that the supporting cast includes Colm

Meaney and Alec Baldwin. The film turns on a classic messed-with-thewrong-guys plot that follows two naive young Sligo locals with a corpse in the boot and a shipment of MDMA that was meant for a gang of criminal priests led by Baldwin. Pixie O’Brien is the young woman the boys turn to, hoping that she has learnt enough from her gangster father (Meaney) to keep them alive. She turns out to have smarts in abundance, along with a mercenary streak that’s as wide as the river Shannon.

Pixie’s not the first selfish, amoral character Cooke has played. She gave us a piquant sociopath in Thoroughbreds (2017), alongside Anya Taylor-Joy of The Queen’s Gambit fame, and a likeably ruthless Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. I wonder why she is drawn to playing deadly narcissists, and what makes her so good at it. “Most of the characters that I’ve played have been heavily sympathetic and sweet, kind-natured women,” she protests, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. But sometimes it just gets a little bit samey and boring and you want to be mischievous and nasty.”

Despite the lithe menace of Cooke’s Becky, Vanity Fair did badly in the ratings. Does its lacklustre performance, compared with the phenomenon that is Bridgerton, suggest that what viewers want from period drama is less subtlety, and more sex?

“We were up against Bodyguard so we had no f---ing chance,” she says. “But someone did tell me that it’s in the top 10 streamed on Amazon right now. I’ve not watched Bridgerton so I can’t comment on it, but I hope people don’t

Pixie is out now on DVD and as a download. Sound of Metal will be released on Prime Video next month just want [sex] from period drama because once you’ve seen one sex scene and there’s no plot to back it up and no subtext, and it is just for people to watch and get their kicks, surely they’re bored with that. If they’re interested in a show just to watch sex, surely they’ll just watch something streamed on a website. It’s up to these streaming sites to churn out things that are worthy and aren’t just melting our brains.”

After four years living in New York, Cooke is glad to be back in the UK. She was homesick, she says, and is enjoying no longer having to modify her Oldham accent to make herself understood. Besides, people over here get her humour better, and she’s closer to her mum (who still lives up North), although she’s not able to see her at the moment, because of the lockdown.

It’s been a strange time to start a new life in Britain. “I didn’t work from November to November,” she says. She had taken time off to move and settle in when the pandemic struck, and “everything got wiped out. I found some solace in the fact that I could just read and watch and ride my bike.”

She has talked in the past about suffering from anxiety and depression. For a while she avoided social media, but she confesses: “I’ve got it now. I got it in lockdown because I was lonely. Of course, it adds to anxiety, I hate it, it’s awful, but I’m hooked to see what my friends are up to, and reading my stupid little memes to get my serotonin hit.”

Is the film and TV industry a difficult place for someone who experiences anxiety? “I think the world in general is a really difficult place for someone who has got anxiety. We’ve all got varying degrees of depression – we’re living in a pandemic, and the world is in absolute tatters, you know, there was a potential coup in the United States government, it’s just madness. Also, the world is about to combust, because we’re just rinsing Mother Nature for all it’s worth.”

For actors, she says, “like any competitive industry, you’re always going to be pitted against your peers, and forced to think in this really competitive way, which I don’t really like because I think competitiveness edges into jealousy really quickly. Your agent’s like, ‘We’ve got to beat this person again, this person just pipped us in the past’ – it’s just not healthy.”

It might be unhelpful to suggest that she’s winning.

The two volumes of the piano music of Sir Arthur Bliss, played with great perception and sensitivity by Mark Bebbington and available on the Somm label as part of its heroic mission to present lesser-known pieces by British composers, has precipitated me back into an exploration of the work of this curate’s egg of a composer. I have always thought Bliss missed out on the renown he deserved, even though he ended up, for the last 22 years of his long life (he died in 1975, aged 83), as Master of the Queen’s Musick, in succession to Sir Arnold Bax. Unlike many who have held that role, he made quite a success of it. He found composing easy, and never seemed to have any trouble doing it to order.

Bliss was born in Barnes in 1891 to an American father and an English mother, who died when he was four. His upbringing was that of the English well-to-do: Rugby and Cambridge, and then the

Royal College of Music, where his studies were interrupted by the war. One of the great revelations of these discs of his piano works is that they show both his early maturity as a composer and the influence on him not just of his teachers at the RCM (who included Vaughan Williams) but of some of his contemporaries, too, notably Herbert Howells. Bliss was coy about his juvenilia and indeed hardly mentioned it in his autobiography. As a result, several of these piano works had never been recorded before.

The pre-war music, notably his Suite for Piano of 1912 – written while he was still at Cambridge and before the RCM shaped him – sounds as it might have had Bliss been studying in Belle Époque Paris or Vienna. That was still the mainstream of musical ideas in Britain before the Great War

(never forget that Vaughan Williams himself went to Paris in 1908 to take lessons from Ravel, to acquire what he called “a little French polish”) and Bliss was plainly immersed in it. Another pre-War, and pre-RCM, work is his Valses Fantastiques, which critics have speculated was inspired by Ravel; however interesting it is, it has none of the Frenchman’s depth, nor his willingness to go off in experimental directions. For Bliss, that would come later. Nonetheless, these early compositions drip with promise.

At the RCM, Bliss started to develop a more radical idea of composition. Although he remained far behind the developments in European writing immediately before the war, as displayed by Ravel, or Stravinsky, he was finding his own voice. Inevitably, that voice only became apparent after the war. Bliss had an arduous conflict: he was an officer in the Grenadier Guards, sufficiently brave to be mentioned in dispatches, but wounded twice and gassed and, worst of all, bereaved when his beloved brother Kennard was killed on the Somme. It was not until his Morning Heroes of 1930 that he got all that out of his system.

In the immediate post-war period came impressive works, notably his four-part Masks from 1924, and another Suite for Piano of the following year. The Suite is one of the peaks of Bliss’s piano writing. In four movements, it shows an unbridled originality and invention, and that Bliss had finally settled on how he wanted to use the piano – it is a work that manifestly demands serious skill on the part of the pianist, and on the Somm recording Bebbington is more than equal to it.

Bliss was by then susceptible to the influence of jazz – music that other composers of his generation, such as Foulds and Moeran, willingly embraced, but which his teacher Vaughan Williams allowed himself to be influenced by (such as in his Piano Concerto of 1930) with a reluctance bordering on distaste. The odour of jazz lingers around the Suite, but is even more apparent in two short works: The Rout Trot of 1927 and the eponymous Bliss: One Step of 1923.

There are some later works, perhaps most impressive of all his Triptych of 1969, and these show the composer’s reflectiveness, and his increasing determination to conform to no one but himself. For those familiar with his orchestral writing, this piano music is alarmingly helpful in exposing the foundations of Bliss’s art; otherwise it is the perfect way in to the music of a composer long overdue reappraisal.