ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
MARCH 28, 1951 BRITAIN expects more than 700,000 visitors from abroad by the end of The Festival Of Britain. Guests range from a party of 2,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses from New York, to the Kabaka (paramount chief) of Uganda and the Emir of Cyrenaica. Hundreds of Australian sheep farmers, rich from the boom in wool, are planning to spend their money in Britain. MARCH 28, 1959 ACTRESS Elizabeth Taylor has converted to the Jewish faith ... the faith of her late husband Mike Todd, and her singer friend Eddie Fisher. The ceremony, consisting of a prayer read in Hebrew by a rabbi with Miss Taylor replying, took place yesterday in the Temple Israel of Hollywood. She converted, she said, ‘because, in a way, it was what I told my husband I would do’.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
LADY GAGA, 33. The U.S. singer and actress won her first Oscar last month (right): Best Original Song for Shallow from A Star Is Born. She delighted fans by taking along her younger sister Natali, 27, as her guest. Gaga’s real name is Stefani Germanotta — she got her stage name from the Queen song Radio Ga Ga. MIKE NEWELL, 77. The Four Weddings And A Funeral director became the first British director of the Harry Potter films when he worked on Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. Asked about the success of Four Weddings, his father said: ‘Well, it’s all right, but he’s done a lot better, you know.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
SIR DIRK BOGARDE (19211999). The matinee idol from London (right), who starred in Doctor In The House, Death In Venice and A Bridge Too Far, was born Derek van den Bogaerde. He played a gay man in 1961’s Victim, the first British film to deal openly with homosexuality, but hid his own sexuality from the public. CAYETANA FITz-JAMES STUART (19262014). The 18th Duchess of Alba was Spain’s richest woman, but claimed she was not that wealthy, saying: ‘I have a lot of artworks, but I can’t eat them, can I?’ Her home in Madrid is said to have housed works by El Greco, Rembrandt and Rubens and letters written by Christopher Columbus. She held more than 50 aristocratic titles which meant she did not have to kneel for the Pope and could ride a horse into Seville Cathedral. But she had so much plastic surgery she was described as looking ‘like a Pekingese with Botox’.
ON MARCH 28…
IN 1925, Oxford’s boat sank during the annual Boat Race. IN 1959, the government of Tibet was dissolved by China.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: otarine (late 19th century) A) Relating to an otter B) Relating to a chimpanzee C) Relating to a sea lion ( Answer below) PHRASE EXPLAINED Smarty pants:
A know-all; the phrase was coined in the U.S. in 1937 but ‘smarty’ dates back to the 1860s and was popularised by Mark Twain in his Tom Sawyer stories to mean a ‘would-be smart or witty person’.