ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE FEBRUARY 19, 1970
SURPRISING things can happen to a man when his bed is flying at 580mph 31,000ft up. Air turbulence, for instance. I discovered this bedroom hazard during the maiden flight of the Playboy plane — the world’s largest flying boudoir. Hugh Hefner’s 8ft bed aboard his £2 million jet bumped up and down in the turbulence as I lay sprawled on the fur covers.
FEBRUARY 19, 1981 TINY Sue Brown ended a 152-year all-male tradition yesterday. The 5ft 3in student was named as Oxford’s cox, the first woman to take part in the Boat Race.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
RAY WINSTONE, 64. The actor from London, once dubbed ‘the East End’s answer to George Clooney’, made his name as a young actor in borstal drama Scum and has starred in films ranging from Sexy Beast to Indiana Jones. A schoolboy boxing champion, Winstone was expelled from drama school for vandalising the principal’s car.
BENICIO DEL TORO, 54. The Puerto Rican star won an Oscar for his role as a jaded cop in Traffic. Del Toro put on nearly 3st and burnt himself with cigarettes to get into character as a drug-crazed doctor in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. He said: ‘For a while I couldn’t get a job in Hollywood after that movie came out . . . people thought I was a drunk, that I’d turned into a drunken, fat slob.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
DICK EMERY (1915-1983). The comedian from London, whose catchphrase was ‘Ooh . . . you are awful — but I like you’, drew audiences of up to 17 million with his BBC show. He trained to be an opera singer, had five marriages and many affairs. He said his violent, alcoholic father ‘did extraordinary things, cruel things to me, which twisted me up when I was much older’. Of his multiple characters, he said: ‘I hide me. A comic’s gotta hide all the pain he feels inside.’
MERLE OBERON (19111979). The actress — feted for playing Cathy, opposite Laurence Olivier, in 1939’s Wuthering Heights (right) — claimed to have been born in Tasmania to hide the fact she was the daughter of a woman from Sri Lanka with part Maori heritage, and grew up in poverty in Mumbai. The facial scars which she suffered in a car accident in 1937 were hidden using a lighting technique that came to be known as the ‘Obie’ — the cinematographer who invented it, Lucien Ballard, was the second of her four husbands.
ON FEBRUARY 19
IN 1910, Manchester united lost to Liverpool in the first game played at Old Trafford. IN 2016, novelists Harper Lee and umberto Eco died.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Calomel (c 1670s) A) The smell of rain. B) A mercury-based compound once used as a child’s medicine. C) An ornamental stand. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Go to town — meaning to splash out; from the 19th century when cowboys went into town to spend their wages.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
THERE is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life... light, shade and perspective will always make it beautiful.
John Constable, painter (1776-1837)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY did the witches’ team lose the cricket match? Their bats flew away.
Guess The Definition answer: B.