sovay: (Claude Rains)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2012-07-20 09:15 pm

I cannot smile and I don't pose

"I don't like my face at all. It's always, I've thought, been a great drawback to me. I've seen better-looking hot cross buns . . . What I said about my face, don't like it much—don't like anything about it—I don't like to see it at all. So I never do, really, go to see myself on the film, because it discourages me and puts me off for a long time and I lose confidence in myself."

My instinctive reaction to pictures of myself is hereby christened Tiny Ralph Richardson. He had a great face! I've just been watching him in Q Planes (1939), where his debonair, umbrella-carrying Major Hammond is agreed to have been the model for The Avengers' John Steed. He might have minded being up against Laurence Olivier as a very glossy young test pilot in the same year as Wuthering Heights, but I'm watching the smoothly whimsical intelligence agent who's never without his hat, even when he's up to his elbows in cooking. (. . . This film has a girl reporter and a ray gun. Super-secret aircraft. The villains are ambiguously Germanic. It's like pulp sci-fi meets proto-Bond. How in the name of Marconi have I never heard of it before?) I recommend the entire interview, especially the bits where he interviews the presenter. And I'll try to get better about my self-image before I'm seventy-three. I wouldn't mind the motorbikes, though.

[identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com 2012-07-21 01:49 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, well. I think it highly unlikely any of us bound up in the morning humming: "Why was I born so be-eu-tee-fulll..." (/Why was I born at all?/I'm no bloody good to anyone...)

That said, you look great to me. Distinctive. Interesting. I try for that. Don't achieve it, most days, but it's always far more likely than glamour.;)
Edited 2012-07-21 01:50 (UTC)

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2012-07-21 12:13 pm (UTC)(link)
THE NATIONAL THEATRE. (applause)


I had no idea.

[identity profile] ashlyme.livejournal.com 2012-07-22 02:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Q Planes sounds fun! Sympathies on the photo issues - I know that feeling well.

Unrelated, but I've now seen part of Slings and Arrows and I am in love.

[identity profile] margavriel.livejournal.com 2012-07-22 02:55 pm (UTC)(link)
I think it highly unlikely any of us bound up in the morning humming: "Why was I born so be-eu-tee-fulll..." (/Why was I born at all?/I'm no bloody good to anyone...)

Haha, I should start doing that!

[identity profile] ashlyme.livejournal.com 2012-07-22 09:19 pm (UTC)(link)
I think I'd like to register for Spatch's club.

Yeah, Oliver is sadly best once he's dead. Is it just me, or was the word ham on that truck? I must admit I spent a lot of that first episode thinking "Paul Grose with longish hair? Yum." and other shallow things. By the second (we watched the first three) I was quite hooked.

[identity profile] domparisien.livejournal.com 2012-07-23 01:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Sounds like a fun movie.

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2012-07-24 12:13 am (UTC)(link)
So, another Tiny Shoulder Personage. I'm hoping they'll decide to go for drinks and leave you alone for a while.

Agreed, he's a great face on him. As have you, of course.

That film sounds charming. If I weren't useless for actually seeing films, I'd try to go and watch it. Perhaps I will do, for once.