ON THIS DAY
IT’S DAY 280...
THE world’s most expensive teabag was encrusted with 280 diamonds and worth £7,500. It was commissioned by the maker of PG Tips to mark the brand’s 75th anniversary in 2005. It contained tea leaves, so it could still be used to make a brew. THE Gin Act was passed 280 years ago in 1736 to curb ‘dangerous’ levels of consumption of ‘Mother’s Ruin’ by taxing it. On the day before the Act was passed, mobs took to the streets to drink as much gin as they could lay their hands on.
THERE ARE 86 DAYS LEFT
BuTTERFLIES can fly only if their body temperature is above 86f (30c), because their muscles need to be warm enough. That’s why they bask in the sun before flying. DERCy GONCALvES holds the record as the actress with the longest career in history, notching up 86 years in show business. The Brazilian ran away from home to join a travelling theatre in 1922 and starred in a film aged 101 in the year of her death, 2008. A SILKWORM caterpillar can eat up to
86,000 times its own body weight — around 3g — in less than two months.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BRITT EKLAND, 74. The Swedish actress who starred in The Wicker Man and as Bond girl Mary Goodnight in The Man With The Golden Gun. Ekland, right, wed Peter Sellers at Guildford register office ten days after meeting him at the Dorchester hotel in London. She confessed years later that the famously pert derriere in a scene in The Wicker Man was that of a body double. MELvyN BRAGG, 77. The Cumbrian-born presenter of The South Bank Show and Radio 4’s In Our Time can’t stand talking about his luxuriant locks, dismissing them as ‘my effing hair’. Lord Bragg enjoys singing with friends when he returns to Cumbria, particularly songs by the Everly Brothers and ‘Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel in Pavarotti’s voice’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
CAROLE LOMBARD (1908-1942). The comedy actress — dubbed ‘America’s Queen of Screwball’ — was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s. She appeared in Nothing Sacred and My Man Godfrey and cemented her status when she wed William Powell and later Clark Gable. She died in a plane crash aged just 33. JOE FRAzIER (1944-2011). The American boxer who took on Muhammad Ali in a trilogy of historic fights, including the 1974 ‘Thrilla in Manila’. Frazier lost two out of the three, and always remained in Ali’s shadow. The animosity between the pair (pictured, with Frazier on the left) was so great that they once wrestled each other to the floor in a Tv studio and were fined $5,000 each for ‘deplorable conduct demeaning to boxing’.
ON OCTOBER 6th...
IN 1889, the Moulin Rouge — which means Red Mill in French — opened in Paris. The cabaret venue is known as the birthplace of the modern form of the can-can.
IN 1991, Hollywood superstar Elizabeth Taylor married for the eighth and final time to construction worker Larry Fortensky at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. They divorced five years later.