ON THIS DAY
August 13, 2020
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
AUGUST 13, 1964 AUTHOR Ian Fleming, died yesterday age 56. But the character he created, James Bond, lives on. A new Bond novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, will be out next year. Mr Fleming had also just written his first children’s series, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car based on stories he told his son Caspar, who turned 12 yesterday.
AUGUST 13, 2012 PRInCE Harry, yesterday, in his most important solo royal engagement yet, took centre stage at the spectacular farewell to the London Games, which the Queen opened two weeks ago. The third in line to the throne said the Games had been ‘extraordinary’.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
MADHUR JAFFREY, 87. The actress and food writer taught herself to cook while at London drama school Rada. Born in India, she learned to swim ‘with the help of a watermelon’ and dreamed of being another Marlon Brando. She says she has been typecast due to her race, only offered ‘sort of Middle Eastern parts where I was dancing with a camel; the exotic girl. And then it became terrorists and terrorist mothers, and then it became doctors’.
HEIDI THOMAS, 58. The Liverpool screenwriter created BBC drama Call The Midwife, in which her husband Stephen McGann plays Dr Turner. Thomas was approached by a man in a supermarket, who had not been allowed to be at his children’s births in the 1950s and thanked her for a show that ‘completed his experience of fatherhood’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
HERB RITTS (1952-2002). The famed U.S. photographer launched his career with an impromptu shoot of friend Richard Gere, after their car got a puncture in the desert. The actor said: ‘Some photographers embalm their subjects, but he enlivened them.’ Ritts went on to picture everyone from Elizabeth Taylor and Brad Pitt to the Dalai Lama and nelson Mandela.
BERnARD MAnnInG (1930-2007). The Manchester-born comic made a fortune from his Embassy Club but the Beatles did not impress: ‘That John Lennon drove me potty because he wanted a dressing room with a washbasin. What did he want that for? You come here to work, not to wash.’ Manning, often criticised for racist jokes and using the F-word, said: ‘Grown men that work on building sites don’t want to hear “ecky thump” and “ooh dammit”.’
ON August 13...
IN 1927, the BBC broadcast a Promenade Concert, or Prom, for the first time.
IN 1946, The War Of The Worlds author H.G. Wells, died at 79. He wanted his epitaph to be: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’