Star! | |
---|---|
![]() Poster by Howard Terpning | |
Directed by | Robert Wise |
Written by | William Fairchild |
Produced by | Saul Chaplin |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Ernest Laszlo |
Edited by | William H. Reynolds |
Music by | Lennie Hayton |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 175 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $14.32 million [1] |
Box office |
Star! (re-titled Those Were the Happy Times for its 1969 re-release) is a 1968 American biographical musical film directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews. The screenplay by William Fairchild is based on the life and career of British performer Gertrude Lawrence.
In 1940, Gertrude "Gertie" Lawrence is in a screening room watching a documentary film chronicling her life, then flashes back to Clapham in 1915, when she leaves home to join her vaudevillian father in a dilapidated Brixton music hall. Eventually, she joins the chorus in André Charlot's West End revue. She reunites with close childhood friend Noël Coward.
Charlot becomes annoyed with Gertie's efforts to stand out, literally, from the chorus. He threatens to fire her, but stage manager Jack Roper intercedes and gets her hired as a general understudy to the leads. She marries Jack, but it becomes clear she is more inclined to perform onstage than stay home and play wife. While pregnant, she insists on going on for an absent star, and captivates the audience with her own star-making performance of "Burlington Bertie". Charlot and Roper witness the audience's warm approval, and both realize, Charlot grudgingly and Roper wistfully, that Gertie belongs on the stage.
After their daughter Pamela is born, Gertrude is angered when Roper takes the baby on a pub crawl, and leaves him. A subsequent courtship with Sir Anthony Spencer, an English nobleman, polishes Gertie's rough edges and transforms her into a lady. Caught at a chic supper club when she is supposed to be on a sick day, she is fired from the Charlot Revue. Squired by Spencer, she becomes a 'society darling'. Coward then convinces Charlot to feature her in his new production, and she is finally recognized as a star. When the revue opens in New York City, she dallies with an actor and a banker, bringing the number of her suitors to three.
Gertrude faces financial ruin after spending all her considerable earnings, but ultimately manages to pay back her creditors and retain her glamour. As her career soars, her long-distance relationship with her daughter deteriorates. When Pamela cancels an anticipated holiday with Gertie, she gets extremely drunk and insults a roomful of people at a surprise birthday party thrown by Coward. Among the people insulted at the party is American theatre producer Richard Aldrich. When he returns to escort the hungover star home, he gives an honest appraisal of her. She is insulted, then intrigued by him, making an unannounced visit to his Cape Playhouse where she proposes to play the lead. They argue at rehearsal. He proposes marriage; she throws him out.
Back on Broadway, she has trouble getting a handle on a crucial "The Saga of Jenny" number in Lady in the Dark . Aldrich turns up at a daunting rehearsal where he observes her frustration and takes her, with Coward, out to a nightclub. She protests, then realizes the kind of performance they are watching is the key to her dilemma in the show. Coward pronounces him "a very clever man". Gertie later gives a rousing performance of "Jenny". She marries Aldrich eight years before her triumph in The King and I and untimely death from liver cancer at the age of 54.
According to extensive production details provided in the DVD release of the film, when Julie Andrews signed on to star in The Sound of Music , her contract with Twentieth Century-Fox was a two-picture deal. As The Sound of Music neared completion, director Robert Wise and producer Saul Chaplin had grown so fond of her that they wanted to make sure that their team would be the one to pick up the studio's option for the other picture "before anybody else got to her first". [5]
Wise's story editor Max Lamb suggested a biopic of Lawrence and, although Andrews previously had rejected offers to portray the entertainer, she was as keen to work with Wise and Chaplin again as they were to work with her, and she subsequently warmed to their approach to the story. She signed for $1 million against 10 percent of the gross plus 35 cents for each soundtrack album sold. [6]
The film had its world premiere on July 18, 1968 at the Dominion Theatre in London, replacing The Sound of Music , which had played for three years at the theatre. [7]
At a time when the popularity of roadshow theatrical releases in general, and musicals in particular, was on the wane, the United States was one of the later countries in which the film was released. [8] When the film was in production, 15,000 people responded to promotional ads placed by 20th Century Fox for advance ticket sales in New York City, but a year later, when the studio followed up by mailing them order forms, only a very small percentage bought tickets. Sales were higher for Wednesday matinees than for Saturday nights, indicating that a crucial component—young adults—would not be a large part of the picture's audience. The film opened in the U.S. with little advance sale and good-to-mediocre reviews.
Star! was a commercial disappointment in its initial run, suffering about 20 minutes of studio-requested and director-approved cuts while still in its roadshow engagements. By September 1970 Fox estimated the film had lost the studio $15,091,000. [9]
Renata Adler of The New York Times observed "A lot of the sets are lovely, Daniel Massey acts beautifully as a kind of warmed Nöel Coward, and the film, which gets richer and better as it goes along, has a nice scene from Private Lives . People who like old-style musicals should get their money's worth. So should people who like Julie Andrews. But people who liked Gertrude Lawrence had better stick with their record collections and memories." [10]
Variety wrote "Julie Andrews' portrayal...occasionally sags between musical numbers but the cast and team of redoubtable technical contributors have helped to turn out a pleasing tribute to one of the theatre's most admired stars. It gives a fascinating coverage of Lawrence's spectacular rise to showbiz fame, and also a neatly observed background of an epoch now gone." [11]
Time Out London wrote "Wise's biopic hardly deserved the rough treatment it received from most critics and audiences, who had been led by the studio's advertising to expect another Sound of Music . This was a far more ambitious project; it backfired, but it backfired with a certain amount of honour. Daniel Massey's mincing portrayal of his godfather Noël Coward wins hands down over all the other impersonations." [12]
TV Guide thought "it deserved a better fate for its enormous score, top-flight production, excellent choreography, and fine acting". [13]
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "stylish, sharp-edged, and underrated".[ citation needed ]
Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result | Ref. |
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Academy Awards | Best Supporting Actor | Daniel Massey | Nominated | [14] [15] |
Best Art Direction | Art Direction: Boris Leven; Set Decoration: Walter M. Scott and Howard Bristol | Nominated | ||
Best Cinematography | Ernest Laszlo | Nominated | ||
Best Costume Design | Donald Brooks | Nominated | ||
Best Score of a Musical Picture – Original or Adaptation | Lennie Hayton | Nominated | ||
Best Song – Original for the Picture | "Star!" Music by Jimmy Van Heusen; Lyrics by Sammy Cahn | Nominated | ||
Best Sound | Twentieth Century-Fox Studio Sound Department | Nominated | ||
Golden Globe Awards | Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy | Julie Andrews | Nominated | [16] |
Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture | Daniel Massey | Won | ||
Best Original Song – Motion Picture | "Star!" Music by Jimmy Van Heusen; Lyrics by Sammy Cahn | Nominated | ||
Most Promising Newcomer – Male | Daniel Massey | Nominated | ||
Writers Guild of America Awards | Best Written American Musical | William Fairchild | Nominated | [17] |
Daniel Raymond Massey was an English actor and performer. He is possibly best known for his starring role in the British TV drama The Roads to Freedom, as Daniel, alongside Michael Bryant. He is also known for his role in the 1968 American film Star!, as Noël Coward, for which he won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination.
Private Lives is a 1930 comedy of manners in three acts by Noël Coward. It concerns a divorced couple who, while honeymooning with their new spouses, discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel. Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realise that they still have feelings for each other. Its second act love scene was nearly censored in Britain as too risqué. Coward wrote one of his most popular songs, "Some Day I'll Find You", for the play.
Gertrude Lawrence was an English actress, singer, dancer and musical comedy performer known for her stage appearances in the West End of London and on Broadway in New York.
Beatrice Gladys Lillie, Lady Peel, known as Bea Lillie, was a Canadian-born British actress, singer and comedic performer.
Joyce Carey, OBE was an English actress, best known for her long professional and personal relationship with Noël Coward. Her stage career lasted from 1916 until 1987, and she was performing on television in her 90s. Although never a star, she was a familiar face both on stage and screen. In addition to light comedy, she had a large repertory of Shakespearean roles.
The Sound of Music is a 1965 American musical drama film produced and directed by Robert Wise from a screenplay written by Ernest Lehman, and starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, with Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Charmian Carr, and Eleanor Parker. The film is an adaptation of the 1959 stage musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a book by Lindsay and Crouse. It is based on the 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp and is set in Salzburg, Austria. It is a fictional retelling of her experiences as governess to seven children, her eventual marriage with their father Captain Georg von Trapp, and their escape during the Anschluss in 1938.
Sheridan Morley was an English author, biographer, critic and broadcaster. He was the official biographer of Sir John Gielgud and wrote biographies of many other theatrical figures he had known, including Noël Coward. Nicholas Kenyon called him a "cultural omnivore" who was "genuinely popular with people".
Hugh Sinclair was a British actor. He trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and had a career spanning forty years in theatre, film and television. He worked in Britain and America with some of the 20th Century’s most highly regarded actors and directors, including George Cukor, Carol Reed, Ray Milland and Elizabeth Bergner. His principal work was done in the theatre and he headed the cast of two landmark plays in London, Noel Coward’s Private Lives in 1945 and the original London production of TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party in 1950. However notable films include Escape Me Never, A Girl Must Live, The Rocking Horse Winner and Circle of Danger. He excelled in light comedy and was known for his comic timing, often playing handsome, debonair characters. He had a distinctive vocal delivery that blended warmth, irony and humour and this became his trademark as an actor.
Gertrude Dolores Messinger was an American film actress known for her B-movie roles from the 1930s through the 1950s. She began as a child actor in silent films, but found her greatest fame in talkies of the 1930s. During her career she appeared in more than 50 motion pictures, with particular success in westerns.
London Calling! was a musical revue, produced by André Charlot with music and lyrics by Noël Coward, which opened at the Duke of York's Theatre, London on 4 September 1923. It was Noël Coward's first publicly produced musical work. The song "Parisian Pierrot", sung by Gertrude Lawrence, was his first big hit and became one of his signature tunes.
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".
Eugène André Maurice Charlot was a French-born impresario known primarily for the musical revues he staged in London between 1912 and 1937. He later worked as a character actor in numerous American films.
Constance Emmeline Carpenter was an English-born American film and musical theatre actress.
Shadow Play, described by the author as "a musical fantasy", is a one-act play by Noël Coward, one of ten that make up Tonight at 8.30, a cycle written to be performed across three evenings. Short plays were unfashionable in the 1920s and 30s, but Coward was fond of the genre and conceived the idea of a set of brief pieces to be played across several evenings. The actress most closely associated with him was Gertrude Lawrence, and he wrote the ten plays as vehicles for them both.
"The Saga of Jenny" is a popular song written for the 1941 Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, considered now as a blues standard.
Philip Braham was an English composer of the early twentieth century, chiefly associated with theatrical work. From 1914, he composed music for such musicals and revues as Theodore & Co (1916) and London Calling! (1923), including several revues produced by André Charlot. His best-known song is "Limehouse Blues," which has been recorded by many artists. He wrote for film in the 1930s.
"If Love Were All" is a song by Noël Coward, published in 1929 and written for the operetta Bitter Sweet. The song is considered autobiographical, and has been described as "self-deprecating" as well as "one of the loneliest pop songs ever written".
"Limehouse Blues" is a popular British song written by the London-based duo of Douglas Furber (lyrics) and Philip Braham (music).
"Forbidden Fruit", also known as "It's The Peach", is an early Noël Coward song written in 1915, but not publicly performed until 1924 and not published until 1953. Although another early song, "Peter Pan" was the first to be recorded, in 1918, Coward considered "Forbidden Fruit" to be his first full-length song, already exhibiting Coward's trademark "worldly cynicism", risque lyrics, and "love of the internal rhyme." Musical theatre writer Stephen Citron concluded that the song's "musical rhythms, phrase lengths and especially its melodic sophistication are all harbingers of a more mature Coward."
Effie Atherton, was a British singer, dancer, film actress, and musical comedy performer, known initially for her stage appearances in the West End of London and on Broadway in New York, before moving into prime musical shows on British radio in the 1930s, where she captivated her audiences with her sophisticated songs and monologues, many of which were her own compositions.