Wednesday 6 June 2012

deep grass


We all agree, presumably, that personalised number plates are a load of old dingo's kidneys, but my friend Dan has quite a good one that I always forget and I bloody love the ones that the butcher on the Kilburn High Road has on its vans. One is above. The other is stubbornly refusing to leave my phone but I will favour you with it when it does.

In other news, I watched This Gun For Hire last night. It's good and was the breakthrough film of Alan Ladd, the film star with the least film star name I can think of. Fourth on the bill was Laird Cregar, who I recognised from this and that. He was playing a villainous middle-aged businessman. Incredibly, when TGFH was made, Cregar was in his twenties.

He was one of six sons of a cricketer who played for the Gentlemen of Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century, before going to Winchester, deciding to be an actor, working as a bouncer in Pasadena and forcing Hollywood to pay attention to him by doing a one man show about Oscar Wilde.

He got obsessed about his weight, and said he wanted to be an actor, rather than a 'type'. He crash dieted in order to play George Bone in Hangover Square. This involved amphetamines among other things, he lost over a hundred pounds, caused himself serious abdominal problems and died. He was thirty-one.

The film of his I most want to see is I Wake Up Screaming, in which he plays a psychopathic detective.


No comments: