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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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!