If life is a performance, his was a masterpiece.
2023-06-02
N/A
95 min
The extraordinary life of playwright, singer, actor, composer, and director Noël Coward, who rose from poverty to stardom while keeping his sexuality a secret. Featuring Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Michael Caine and Lucille Ball. Narrated by Alan Cumming. With Rupert Everett as the voice of Noël Coward. Directed by Academy Award Nominee Barnaby Thompson.
This is quite a fascinating documentary. Not because Barnaby Thompson has a particularly innovative approach to the subject matter, but because he has managed to use an enormous amount of contemporaneous archive of this enigmatic man, and because he has engaged the charismatic dulcets of Rupert Everett to, rather authentically, read excerpts from his journals that were written, meticulously, throughout his adult life. Born in relative poverty, Coward lived with his parents whilst his mother slaved away running a boarding house. Like his friend in later life, Charlie Chaplin, you get the feeling that this hand-to-mouth upbringing instilled in this largely uneducated man a determination to succeed. From child acting to writing; the USA, Britain and Jamaica all provided creative conduits as he steadily rose to be the best paid writer in the world. Of course, his life wasn't without it's pitfalls and failures but there is a resilience about the man that this film reinforces time and again. His homosexuality is referenced in the narrative from Alan Cumming but unlike Sir John Gielgud, Coward's complete discretion when it came to that aspect of his life was such that there is little, if anything, to put meat on those particular bones. We just know he was gay, he just never let it define his public persona. The variety and quality of the archive is illustrative of the talents - and of the endearing pomposity - of this creative wordsmith and if you are at all interested in the development of music, theatre, cinema and comedy - aspects of the entertainment industry that this man influenced heavily - then you ought to enjoy it.
