I yield to her cry, losing my own names within me
Tonight in K-holes of the internet: chasing a citation led to the following excerpt from a review of Michael Dobson's Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (2011):
But it is Dobson's recovery of the prison camp performances by British troops that is most fascinating. Plays like Hamlet and parodies like Shamlet: A Drammer usually had the strong support of the camp authorities who enjoyed the results and saw them as a way of keeping escape plans in check. Many subsequently successful actors were in the casts and the costumes were, on occasion, brought in from local German professional theaters. And the awe which the men playing female roles, "these latterday boy-players" (140), attracted amounted to a cult of celebrity whose erotic complexities Dobson and his sources carefully document. As one prisoner recalled, Denholm Elliott, later a star of film and theater, was one of these "heart-throb[s]": "'She' had more fans and more people dreaming about 'her' than 'she' would ever imagine. When 'she' walked down the road, eyes would follow 'her' adoringly" (quoted on 139).
Like any right-minded person, I naturally exclaimed FUCK ME ARE THERE PHOTOGRAPHS and thanks to the helpful algorithms of our data-scraping overlords was able to find one—in long shot, but I've seen enough of Elliott that his profile is unmistakable—plus the testimony of an admirer:
Spellbound, we watched and listened as first he presented as a girl, then as a girl pretending to be a youth, then again as a girl . . . [The following morning], [q]uite on impulse, I walked over to the slim lad who had been Viola, and I thanked him for his marvellous performance. Denholm smiled, a long-lipped Irish sort of smile. 'Glad you liked it,' he said, while his quiet eyes drifted shyly away from mine and his hand went up to finger back a flopping wing of dark hair.
Even my paper gaydar thinks that was flirting.
Earlier in the pages non-contiguously available on Google, Hobson observes:
Although this is one aspect of prisoner-of-war life which has been kept out of British popular memory, Axis camps like these in occupied Europe thus played host between 1940 and 1945 to what was easily the largest flowering of English single-sex theatre since Shakespeare's own time.
Obviously there are romance novels waiting to happen here if they haven't already.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch expressed surprise that there isn't a movie. He asked what sort of amenities a stalag celebrity might expect to receive from her stage-door Johnnies and I said confidently chocolate and cigarettes; he thinks that in the film a sympathetic sort of German guard would have to fall in love with one of the leading ladies. I'm just delighted to know this fact about Denholm Elliott. I had known that he was a prisoner of war, that he had taken part in amateur theatricals in captivity, that he was bi, and that he was documentedly beautiful when young; until tonight I had never seen a picture of him earlier than 1950. I really feel I should have seen Twelfth Night coming.
But it is Dobson's recovery of the prison camp performances by British troops that is most fascinating. Plays like Hamlet and parodies like Shamlet: A Drammer usually had the strong support of the camp authorities who enjoyed the results and saw them as a way of keeping escape plans in check. Many subsequently successful actors were in the casts and the costumes were, on occasion, brought in from local German professional theaters. And the awe which the men playing female roles, "these latterday boy-players" (140), attracted amounted to a cult of celebrity whose erotic complexities Dobson and his sources carefully document. As one prisoner recalled, Denholm Elliott, later a star of film and theater, was one of these "heart-throb[s]": "'She' had more fans and more people dreaming about 'her' than 'she' would ever imagine. When 'she' walked down the road, eyes would follow 'her' adoringly" (quoted on 139).
Like any right-minded person, I naturally exclaimed FUCK ME ARE THERE PHOTOGRAPHS and thanks to the helpful algorithms of our data-scraping overlords was able to find one—in long shot, but I've seen enough of Elliott that his profile is unmistakable—plus the testimony of an admirer:
Spellbound, we watched and listened as first he presented as a girl, then as a girl pretending to be a youth, then again as a girl . . . [The following morning], [q]uite on impulse, I walked over to the slim lad who had been Viola, and I thanked him for his marvellous performance. Denholm smiled, a long-lipped Irish sort of smile. 'Glad you liked it,' he said, while his quiet eyes drifted shyly away from mine and his hand went up to finger back a flopping wing of dark hair.
Even my paper gaydar thinks that was flirting.
Earlier in the pages non-contiguously available on Google, Hobson observes:
Although this is one aspect of prisoner-of-war life which has been kept out of British popular memory, Axis camps like these in occupied Europe thus played host between 1940 and 1945 to what was easily the largest flowering of English single-sex theatre since Shakespeare's own time.
Obviously there are romance novels waiting to happen here if they haven't already.
spatch expressed surprise that there isn't a movie. He asked what sort of amenities a stalag celebrity might expect to receive from her stage-door Johnnies and I said confidently chocolate and cigarettes; he thinks that in the film a sympathetic sort of German guard would have to fall in love with one of the leading ladies. I'm just delighted to know this fact about Denholm Elliott. I had known that he was a prisoner of war, that he had taken part in amateur theatricals in captivity, that he was bi, and that he was documentedly beautiful when young; until tonight I had never seen a picture of him earlier than 1950. I really feel I should have seen Twelfth Night coming.
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That is neat, I had not heard of it, and it has a great cast. Thank you!
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He was kind of ridiculously ubiquitous in British film and TV from the mid-'60's on—I almost certainly saw him first in either Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), because I still feel Yale's Old Campus would benefit from a statue of Marcus Brody, but I started to notice him as an actor because I didn't have a choice. He just kept turning up in things and being brilliant in them. Eventually I got the point and started watching things because he was in them. This has yielded surprisingly few backfires.
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I won't even be surprised if someone tells me they exist! I just don't know enough about queer historicals to know where to look.
This post got me looking at photos of him when he was young, and sure, definitely!
I discovered him as a middle-aged character actor; he had a marvelous face and I assumed that he'd acquired it over time. Then I was watching The Cruel Sea (1953) with my mother and his voice was instantly recognizable as soon as it's heard offstage and the rest of him followed and it turned out instead that he had always had that face and it had been pretty. He never lost that long-lipped smile.
And furthermore/tangentially, it turns out he was in this movie The Signalman: A Ghost Story that Wakanomori and I really loved--was it you who told me about it?? If not, you should look at it.
I may have! I've never officially reviewed it, but it was my introduction to the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971–78) and I know I have mentioned it because I loved it. But even if not, I'm glad you did!
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When we get rich we’ll pour one out for long-lipped Denholm. (Any fellow who uses that as a description of another fellow’s mouth has observed, appreciated, and assessed at least theoretically a couple things about previously referenced mouth. I do not make the rules.)
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Twins are a legitimately confusing factor!
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I still need the time off from my life to write the queer WWII thing I haven't finished yet!
(If nobody's beaten us to it: hell, yes.)
When we get rich we’ll pour one out for long-lipped Denholm. (Any fellow who uses that as a description of another fellow’s mouth has observed, appreciated, and assessed at least theoretically a couple things about previously referenced mouth. I do not make the rules.)
You know where they're all posted, though, which is extremely handy.
*hugs*
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Do please fuck 'em up, Your Grace. (This is my patient face. I get it. Time off from life, what's time off from life.)
(If nobody's beaten us to it: hell, yes.)
There is not a surfeit of WWII m/m [m/amab, pick your pronoun permutation] Stalag Amateur Theatricals and Silk Cravat Maps fiction. I think it would at least make mild bank. Also, with your name on it, we could place it with an indie publisher and then you'd let me be in charge of barking up the royalty and promo tree. Also also all the subterfuge and Silesian countryside and railway explosions and probably, you know, the haftling-barracke version of an orangery.
The 20s owe us this.
You know where they're all posted, though, which is extremely handy.
You've got to know where they're posted if you need to rip them down in a hurry.
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I hope scholarship, too. I knew about the all-male theatricals; I didn't know about the celebrity culture.
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*
Re: *
Excellent icon.
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Have you seen any of those Tumblr posts that start “Oh, to be a..” and then go on to describe some really specific historical scenarios with same-sex romance vibes? I haven’t yet seen anyone do “Elizabethan players” or “POW camp,” but I *have* seen “young farmer joins Cromwell’s New Model Army and secretly falls in love with his commanding officer who later dies in his arms” and “two 1930s chorus girls with big dreams.”
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No! What an interesting form of fiction.
“young farmer joins Cromwell’s New Model Army and secretly falls in love with his commanding officer who later dies in his arms”
That is really specific.
GIP
Delightful
Re: GIP
It's the sort of thing that just makes me happier about the world, and who couldn't use that right now?
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Mine shouted PING! and then blew up.
*documentedly beautiful when young*
Blimey. He was. It looks like a smile was never away from those long lips - or his eyes. I found this gem on Wikipedia: "Never act with children, dogs, or Denholm Elliott." Quite an accolade!
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I'm sorry. It was kind of like asking you to give a casual once-over to the Trinity test.
Blimey. He was. It looks like a smile was never away from those long lips - or his eyes.
I don't even think he grew out of it; he just weathered magnificently. (I think that may be one of my aspirations.) You couldn't see it in all of his characters, but you could always see it in him.
I found this gem on Wikipedia: "Never act with children, dogs, or Denholm Elliott." Quite an accolade!
I've seen him steal scenes you wouldn't think lasted long enough to be stolen. He was a gem.
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I feel better about history for knowing it!
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I said I would pass on the invitation -- no idea what your time or interest in reading Shakespeare aloud is right now, but I can testify that they are solidly good people who do really interesting thinking about the source (also also "how can we make this more gay?")
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Please tell them that my Discord tolerance is about as minimal as my tolerance for Zoom (i.e., after this weekend of Arisia I will burnt out for some time on both), but I am honored to be invited and definitely interested in hearing about what they are doing for when I have the bandwidth!
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You're welcome! Look how surprised I am!