The English Greta Garbo
QUESTION The Alfred Hitchcock film Young And Innocent (1937) features an 18-year-old actress called Nova Pilbeam. What became of her? Considered Britain’s leading child and teenage star of the Thirties, nova Pilbeam was born in 1919 in Wimbledon, West London, to Arnold and Margery Pilbeam. Her father was an actor and theatre manager of the Lyric, Hammersmith.
At the age of 12, nova had her first professional stage part as Marigold in Toad of Toad Hall at The savoy, and during her career she often appeared on stage, including at the old Vic. she also performed as Peter Pan at the London Palladium ( 1935- 36) and productions of As You Like it, Twelfth night and many others.
in 1934, aged 15, she made her first film, Little Friend, a domestic drama that impressed Gaumont- British studios, which gave her a seven-year contract.
Her big break came in the same year when Alfred Hitchcock gave her a part in The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring Leslie Banks and Peter Lorre in his first British screen part. This was followed by the 1936 film Tudor rose in which nova had the lead as Lady Jane Grey, a role that she described as the jewel in her career.
Then Hitchcock cast her in Young And innocent with a leading part as a chief constable’s daughter on the run with her boyfriend, played by derrick de Marney.
This was possibly the peak of her film career: she was considered for a further Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, but the part went to Margaret Lockwood, and she had hoped to play the part of Mrs de Winter in rebecca ( 1940), Hitchcock’s first American-made film, but the director preferred Joan Fontaine.
nova met film director Pen (Penrose) Tennyson, great-grandson of the poet Lord Tennyson, in the late Thirties, and they married in october 1939 when she was 19. The marriage was cut short when he was killed in a plane crash in 1941.
in the Forties, nova made nine more films including Pastor Hall (1940), Banana ridge, a farce starring robertson Hare (1942), and The next of Kin (1942). Her last film was The Three Weird sisters (1948).
none of these later films was outstanding, and nova retired from the cinema, saying: ‘The films i made were mostly not very good, and i didn’t particularly like the business of filming.’ she was still only 29.
she continued working on stage until the early Fifties, including appearing at the duchess Theatre in Flowers For The Living. in 1950 she married BBC journalist Alexander Whyte, and they had a daughter, sarah Jane, born in 1952. They were married for 22 years until his death in 1972.
once described as an ‘english Greta Garbo’, nova eschewed attempts to interview her and would always deny her identity if approached. she lived for many years with her daughter in Highgate, north London, dying just over two months ago on July 17 at the age of 95. Clive Gill, Wimborne, Dorset.
QUESTION Ripley’s Believe It Or Not tells of a gateway of the Fortress of Purandhar, near Poona, India, built on foundations made from 15 tons of gold. Is it still there? PurAndHAr Fort, situated one mile west of sasvad, about 25 miles south of Poona, is renowned for its unique location, occupying one of the highest points in the Western Ghats or sahyadris, the summit rising 4,840ft above sea level.
The mountain on which the fort was constructed was known as the indraneel Parvat. in Hindu mythology, this mountain was created when Lord Hanuman was carrying the dronagiri mountain range and a portion of land slipped from his hands.
The history of the fort goes back to the 13th century. The Bahmani sultanate was a deccan Muslim state in south india, one of the great medieval indian kingdoms. The fort was constructed in 1350 by the first Bahamani sultan, Hasan Gangu, after he gained control of the Maharashtra region. Almost immediately, several legends sprung up around the fort.
it was said that one its bastions gave way several times during its construction and the sultan ordered his minister, esaji naik Chive, to bury a first-born son and his wife in the foundations to protect it.
The minister was supposedly given control of two villages for his troubles. in medieval india, several reports exist of the practice of burying humans either dead or alive in the foundations of fort walls.
it was believed that the ghosts of those sacrificed as such would keep evil spirits away. other reports suggest that Gangu also had 50,000 gold bricks buried under the bastion to appease the spirits. The poor state of repair of the fort is a good indication that this never happened.
David Harper, Leeds.
QUESTION Was Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, given to the nation because no one in the Royal Family wanted to live in it, after Queen Victoria died there? FurTHer to the earlier answer, several MPs questioned the motives behind the donation of osborne to the nation.
Conservative MP Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841-1922), former proprietor of the satirical political journal Vanity Fair, was upset that the terms of Queen Victoria’s will, wishing the house to be retained by the Crown, had been ignored.
in a Commons debate on the osborne House Bill he said: ‘A stranger instance of the mutability of human affairs has never been presented than this — that within two years of the death of our revered sovereign, a minister should stand up and propose to the House a variation of the wishes and will of her late Majesty.
‘Those are his own very words. i think that if three years ago such a suggestion had been made, it would have been scouted, not only by Ministers, the House, and the people of Great Britain, but even by the entire world, as an impossibility.’
in a 1905 debate, Lanark Labour MP James Caldwell pointed out that the upkeep of the house and gardens proposed in the 1902 Act had been from £3,000 to £5,000 a year, when the actual expenditure for 1904 had been £14,900 — more than £1.5 million in today’s money.
He suggested this ‘valuable gift to the nation’ had turned out to be ‘ an enormous burden’.
Henry Liston, Truro, Cornwall.