Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris; Mr. Gernreich Did Not

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately researching a Sixties fashion guru, Rudi Gernreich, for a writing project. The experience has made me realize how much fashion shapes our everyday lives, especially if we happen to be female. Gernreich, notorious circa 1964 for daring to create a topless bathing suit, was in many ways a fashion radical. Though he was an award-winning designer with a celebrity clientele, he eventually came around to asserting that “fashion will go out of fashion,” and that individual freedom and comfort are far more important than high style.

 Gernreich, who would have turned 100 this month (he died in 1985), gradually became a champion of low-key, easy-care, and often unisex garments. Not for him the glamour and expensive individualism of the great Paris couturiers, whose business model was to create sumptuous styles intimately tailored to fit each client’s body. So he makes an interesting contrast to the story of Mrs. Ada Harris (based on a popular 1958 novel by Paul Gallico), a London charwoman who has a hard time making ends meet. It’s 1957, and she still doesn’t know for sure that her beloved husband died in World War II. A romantic at heart, she unexpectedly falls in love with a fabulous Dior gown all-too-casually worn by one of her wealthy clients. When a small windfall comes her way, she makes up her mind to cross the channel and purchase an extravagant gown of her very own.

 When she enters the House of Dior, she’s immediately hit by the snobbery inherent in the world of couture. Dior’s clients are expected to be the wealthy, the titled, and the celebrated: snooty folks who treat Dior underlings with disdain and often don’t bother to pay their bills. Through a series of happy accidents and just plain chutzpah, Mrs. Harris wins acceptance among the models and dressmakers. As played by the very talented Lesley Manville, she possesses spirit and good sense, both of which  endear her to the working-class peons who make the extravagant garments. Soon she’s finding common-sense ways to help the House of Dior with its fiscal problems, and we just know that she and her new gown will (after a few challenges are overcome) live happily ever after.

 I first became truly aware of Lesley Manville in 2017, when she copped an Oscar nomination for playing the steely sister of Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread. That film too was set in the haute-couture fashion world, with Day-Lewis starring as an imperious designer named Reynolds Woodcock. Clearly, in Phantom Thread, both Woodcocks are far more dedicated to clothing than they are to people. (A highlight is the moment when the two siblings conspire to strip an elegant green dress off of the drunken body of a wealthy patroness who in their eyes just doesn’t deserve the masterpiece she’s wearing.) In Phantom Thread, Manville was essentially frigid, so it’s a pleasure to see her turn on the charm. Like so many British actors, she seems able to do just about anything.

 While watching Manville in Phantom Thread, I suddenly recognized her as the loyal but deeply frustrated wife of Sir Arthur Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), in Mike Leigh’s wonderful Gilbert & Sullivan film, Topsy-Turvy, I also was lucky enough to see her on-stage opposite Jeremy Irons, doing remarkable things with the role of the drug-addled Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s classic Long Day’s Journey into Night. And it’s no surprise that she’ll soon pop up in the latest season of The Crown, playing the ageing (and deeply troubled) Princess Margaret. Personally, I can’t wait.

 

 

Long Play’s Journey into Night

Updated poster;

See below for an original poster remarkable for its trashiness. 

That’s one thing about big-name movies: they introduce us to stage actors we normally wouldn’t get a chance to see in action. Most of us know of Jeremy Irons, especially for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Claus von Bulow in 1990’s Reversal of Fortune. He’s also played such varied roles as Alfred in various Batman flicks, Humbert Humbert in the latest incarnation of Lolita, and (as a voice actor) Scar in The Lion King. But Lesley Manville, despite her appearance in several Mike Leigh movies, was completely unknown to me until last year’s Phantom Thread. As Daniel Day-Lewis’s devoted sister and business partner, Cyril, she was one leg of a triangle breathtaking in its complexity. Not for nothing was she honored with an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

Recently, I was lucky to see Irons and Manville together on stage in the Bristol Old Vic production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. (Funny how Broadway flips over plays imported from England, while the Brits keep re-discovering American theatrical masterpieces. Now that most English actors can do credible American accents—which wasn’t always true in the past—there’s nothing to stop them from reveling in  classic American material.) The New York critics weren’t 100% kind to this production, but I was thrilled to witness a play I’d never seen on stage. It’s a powerful piece, closely based on O’Neill’s own family, in which each of the four main characters fights his or her personal demons while simultaneously lashing out against the others. Theatre historians have seen in Long Day’s Journey (which O’Neill did not allow to be presented in his lifetime) a precursor to other famous plays, like Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County that dissect vicious family discord.

I’ve always had a thing for Eugene O’Neill, who was America’s first great playwright, and the only one to be awarded a Nobel Prize. The son of an actor famous for collaborations with Edmund Booth and for florid productions of The Count of Monte Cristo, O’Neill started his playwriting career with an emphasis on realism. He won his first of four Pulitzer Prizes in 1920 for Beyond the Horizon, a realistic play mirroring  his own experience at sea. Later he went through a period of experimentation, trying out masks, tribal drums, contorting scenery, and characters speaking their thoughts aloud. Fascinated by Greek tragedy, he made this the basis of his Mourning Becomes Electra. Then, late in his life, he went back to realism, but with a tragic overlay.

Groucho Marx makes fun of the interior monologues from Strange Interlude in 1930’s Animal Crackers. Among the O’Neill plays that were made into movies, Anna Christie (starring Greta Garbo) is a standout. Paul Robeson starred in a Hollywood version of The Emperor Jones,  O’Neill’s impressionistic tale of a Pullman porter who flees to the West Indies and declares himself a god. The American Film Theatre, which between 1973 and 1975 adapted great American dramas into films, produced a cinematic version of The Iceman Cometh, with Lee Marvin leading an all-star cast. (Denzel Washington recently competed for a Tony Award for his Broadway performance of the starring role.) . And in 1962, Sidney Lumet directed Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell in a faithful cinematic rendition of Long Day’s Journey. All four received acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival, and Hepburn nabbed an Oscar nomination as well. 

Hepburn was memorable, but Manville gave me a vivid reminder of the girlish charmer that Mary Tyrone started out to be.