#edith lanchester

[whats-in-a-sentence]

In 1895, at the age of 24, she fell in love with a factory worker, James Sullivan, and since she was opposed to the bridal vow of obedience, they decided to live together without marriage. The night before they moved into their home, her father, brothers and a so-called expert, Dr George Fielding Blandford, interviewed Edith Lanchester and agreed that she was insane.

The doctor issued the certificate giving the cause of her mental illness as 'over-education'. She was handcuffed by her father, and taken, protesting, to an asylum where she was bullied, coerced and assaulted.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[letterboxd-loggd]

Ladies in Retirement (1941) Charles Vidor

September 4th 2023

[erstwhile-punk-guerito]

[byneddiedingo]

Isobel Elsom and Ida Lupino in Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

Cast: Ida Lupino, Louis Hayward, Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester, Edith Barrett, Isobel Elsom, Emma Dunn, Queenie Leonard, Clyde Cook. Screenplay: Garrett Fort, Reginald Denham, based on a play by Denham and Edward Percy. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: Lionel Banks. Music: Ernst Toch.

Ladies in Retirement, a nifty little thriller included in the Criterion Channel's "Noir by Gaslight" series, centers on a steely performance by Ida Lupino. She plays Ellen Creed, a Victorian spinster trying to make a life for herself and her two eccentric sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). The sisters have been living in London with a family that has become fed up with them, so Ellen is forced to persuade her employer to let them come live with her in a somewhat gloomy house on the edge of a marshland. The employer, whom Ellen serves as a kind of companion/housekeeper, is the imperious Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom), a retired "actress." (We later learn that she was only a fourth-from-the-right chorus girl, who managed to accumulate a small fortune from stage door johnnies and wealthy patrons.) Unfortunately, the sisters manage to alienate Leonora as well. Louisa is batty and hypersensitive, and Emily is brusque and a collector of things she picks up on her walks, like shells and birds' nests and even a dead bird, which she leaves scattered around the house that Leonora bullies the maid-of-all-work, Lucy (Evelyn Keyes), to keep immaculate. Ellen knows that she can't make a living for herself and her sisters, and she doesn't want them sent to an asylum, so she decides to take things, which means Leonora's neck, in her own hands. Curtain on act one. (The stage origins of the movie are apparent throughout.) Enter Albert Feather (Louis Hayward), a somewhat distant relative of the Creed women, who calls Ellen "Auntie" and charms the sisters. He also charms Lucy. Albert has been to the house before, while Ellen was in London collecting her sisters, and managed to flatter Leonora into giving him some money. But now he's on the lam, wanted for embezzlement from the bank where he worked. When he finds that Leonora is gone -- "on a trip," as the story goes -- he begins to suspect that Ellen is hiding something. And so the plot hinges on his quest to uncover Ellen's secrets, with the aid of the infatuated Lucy. It's a nicely paced movie, with fine performances, especially by Barrett and Lanchester as the weird sisters. Though remembered today more as a director than as an actor, Lupino, then in her early 20s, excels in a part that had been played on Broadway by the much older Flora Robson. Although Louisa and Emily are the more flamboyantly mad of the sisters, Lupino manages to hint that Ellen is the maddest of them all.

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

Ladies in Retirement

A penny dreadful at heart, Charles Vidor’s LADIES IN RETIREMENT (1941, Prime) is crackling good fun as it builds up civilized scares in the grand Hollywood tradition. In a cottage in the midst of a foggy marsh, a wealthy, retired chorus girl (Isabel Elsom) lives with her buttoned-up companion (Ida Lupino) and timid maid (Evelyn Keyes). When Lupino’s dotty sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett) are threatened with commitment to an asylum in London, she brings them to the cottage for a short visit that lasts so long Elsom tries to throw them all out. So, Lupino strangles her as the old lady is singing “Tit-Willow” (everyone’s a critic) and walls her up in an old bread oven. Can she keep it together, particularly when her roguish nephew (Louis Hayward, having great fun as the fox in the hen house) shows up and starts asking questions? This is from the days when a murder was depicted by having the victim’s pearls drop a few at a time onto the floor. If you’re in love with slasher horror, you just may not get it. Entirely and obviously constructed on a large sound stage, the house and the marshes are a marvel of art direction, Vidor and cinematographer George Barnes create some vivid compositions that increase the tension while also reflecting character and relationship. Screenwriters Reginald Denham (who co-wrote the original play with Edward Perry) and Garrett Fort have been perhaps too faithful to the original. After a time jump, the dotty sisters’ disruption is communicated through exposition rather than a series of incidents accumulating over time. But the cast is superb, with special honors to Elsom, whose specificity is a marvel as she plays a woman pretending to propriety after a very improper past; Lanchester as the more sullen and rebellious of the sisters (it’s very different from her usual run of good-natured eccentrics) and particularly Lupino. Her character’s arc is similar to the one in THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940), but the proper British setting makes it much more subtextual, and her restraint and stillness are marvelous to behold.

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 10.28

Beer Birthdays

Anna Straub (1884)

Bill Millar (1942)

Tom Schlafly (1948)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Bill Gates; computer zillionaire (1955)

Annie Potts; actor (1952)

Julia Roberts; actor (1967)

Jonas Salk; microbiologist (1914)

Daphne Zungia; actor (1962)

Famous Birthdays

Jane Alexander; actor (1939)

Canaletto; Italian artist (1697)

Charlie Daniels; country musician (1936)

Desiderius Erasmus; Dutch writer (1466)

Auguste Escoffier; chef (1846)

Dennis Franz; actor (1944)

Jami Gertz; actor (1965)

Dody Goodman; comedian, actor (1915)

Edith Head; costume designer (1898)

Bruce Jenner; olympic athlete (1949)

Elsa Lanchester; English actor (1902)

Brad Paisley; country singer (1972)

Joaquin Phoenix; actor (1974)

Joan Plowright; actor (1929)

Andy Richter; comedian, actor (1966)

Jonas Salk; microbiologist (1914)

Jack Soo; actor (1917)

Ivan Turgenev; Russian writer (1818)

Evelyn Waugh; English writer (1903)

[jennifergarlen]

New on the blog - LADIES IN RETIREMENT (1941), starring Ida Lupino, Elsa Lanchester, Edith Barrett, and Louis Hayward.

[tokatlifistikburhan]

Gülsen gülemiyorsun 🤦

[lupinoschums]

Edith Barrett, Ida Lupino, and Elsa Lanchester in "Ladies in Retirement" (1941)

[gatutor]

Elsa Lanchester-Ida Lupino-Edith Barrett “El misterio de Fiske Manor” (Ladies in retirement) 1941, de Charles Vidor.

[pretty-nostalgic]

“Sexuality is often just another role, as arbitrary as any part a screen star is asked to play. Fear of discovery—and vanity—meant knowing how to espouse bisexuality long enough to see oneself through an offscreen bed scene. The question of whether Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy—“Gillette blades” for cutting both ways—loved women and tolerated men is less a matter of evidence than of attitude and affinity. Lesbians lie to men, said Judith Anderson, because they don’t want to be rejected, even if there is no sexual attraction. A majority of Hollywood’s lesbians enjoyed men as long as they didn’t come too close.

Marriage was common. The most famous modern homosexual, Oscar Wilde, was married with children, and Hollywood lesbians sought protection and acceptance in “lavender” marriages to actors who were often homosexual, and with whom they could form secret alliances against hostile surroundings.

“Paramount’s premier costume designer Edith Head married Fox art director Wiard “Bill” Ihnen. Both were always busy, stayed out of each other’s life, and lived past eighty. Crawford and Stanwyck’s cracked marriages to alcoholics gave these two former chorus girls a sense of stability, while the safe and sexless marriage of Linda and Cole Porter gave his career dazzle. Laurence Olivier’s marriage to Jill Esmond remained unconsummated for years as she struggled to accept her lesbianism. While living with faithful companions, Hepburn, who early on scored in near-andrógynous parts, maintained the perfect front with alcoholic Spencer Tracy, who, as a Catholic, never divorced his wife. The successive marriages of Janet Gaynor, Lili Damita, and Agnes Moorehead were daisy chains of deceit. Other “tandem couples” included Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland. When they had to, lavender couples produced children.”

-The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen

[marypsue]

Decided to try writing a couple of the most popular fic tropes in Crimson Peak fandom and got about halfway through ‘OFC descendant of Edith and Thomas’ before realising that my clever reference to del Toro’s naming Edith after a famous horror actor was not landing, because I had named the OFC after the actress who played the Bride of Frankenstein...and the primary popular association with the name ‘Elsa’ is. Uh. Not Lanchester. 

So now she’s named Laura Price.

[kaylorbookclub]

Book recommendation: The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen

Genre: nonfiction, biography

Summary: This is the documented story of some of the most glamourous women in the world who lived two lives - in public as larger-than-life romantic heroines of the screen, and in private as lesbians or bisexuals. From the early years of the "talkies" through the beginning of the 1950s, they were secretly known as the Sewing Circle, and this is their story. Among them were Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead, Katherine Cornell, Barbara Stanwyck, and Joan Crawford. Others whose secret lives are divulged for the first time: Maude Adams, Lynn Fontanne, Myrna Loy, Edith Head, Janet Gaynor, Jill Esmond, Elsa Lanchester, Isadora Duncan, Laurette Taylor, Libby Holman, Marjorie Main, Agnes Moorehead, and Dame Judith Anderson.

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 10.28

Beer Birthdays

Anna Straub (1884)

Bill Millar (1942)

Tom Schlafly (1948)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Bill Gates; computer zillionaire (1955)

Annie Potts; actor (1952)

Julia Roberts; actor (1967)

Jonas Salk; microbiologist (1914)

Daphne Zungia; actor (1962)

Famous Birthdays

Jane Alexander; actor (1939)

Canaletto; Italian artist (1697)

Charlie Daniels; country musician (1936)

Desiderius Erasmus; Dutch writer (1466)

Auguste Escoffier; chef (1846)

Dennis Franz; actor (1944)

Jami Gertz; actor (1965)

Dody Goodman; comedian, actor (1915)

Edith Head; costume designer (1898)

Bruce Jenner; olympic athlete (1949)

Elsa Lanchester; English actor (1902)

Brad Paisley; country singer (1972)

Joaquin Phoenix; actor (1974)

Joan Plowright; actor (1929)

Andy Richter; comedian, actor (1966)

Jonas Salk; microbiologist (1914)

Jack Soo; actor (1917)

Ivan Turgenev; Russian writer (1818)

Evelyn Waugh; English writer (1903)

[lupinoschums]

Laughs and thrills motivate the plot in “LADIES IN RETIREMENT,” Columbia’s screen version of the famous stage play, which comes to the CAPITAL THEATRE Thursday (November 6th). On the screen, IDA LUPINO, LOUIS HAYWARD, ELSA LANCHESTER, EVELYN KEYES, EDITH BARRETT and ISOBEL ELSOM have the principal roles. Charles Vidor directed.

[lupinoschums]

Edith Barrett, Ida Lupino, Elsa Lanchester in Ladies in Retirement (1941)