susanduic

Strangely Eric Portman gets off quite lightly in Wansell's book on Terence Rattigan........apart from saying that Mary Ellis hated him, which is very strange when she stayed at his cottage in Cornwall and refused to take a play to the US because he wasn't going.........

susanduic

Steve Crook

I note that they haven't shown any comments - although quite a few people have made them. Probably because they all say how much they disagree with the article

Steve

susanduic

and she went to his memorial service.........

susanduic

orpheum

Whilst i agree with your comment in general i have to say that Mitchum was notoriously difficult at times.Quite apart from drinking he was quite prepared to act the star to the hilt.There is a tale told in one of the biogs on a film in the 1950s ,it might have been Night of The Hunter when the producer turned up on the location in a nice new converable car.He complained that the film was behind schedle.Mitchum tore out a few pages from the script and then went and with all the crew looking on peed in his nice new car.
So i think that Mitchum could well have brought many of the bad stories on himself.

Welcome To Highbury The Home Of Football

alan french

HI Just seen your comment. I must admit at one time, I, as a schoolboy, wondered about being a journalist. However, I must admit that afer seeing newsreel footage of a press conference, after Marilyn Monroe lost a baby, I am glad that I did not become one. Their prime attitude was looking upon her as a sex symbol and not as a flesh and blood female human being, who had just undergone a traumatic experience. Maybe I should have been a knight in armour in the days of chivalry.
Alan French.

Steve Crook

There are still a few people working for newspapers who try to practise journalism. But the vast majority, with the full backing and encouragement (if not direct orders) of their editors and publishers, aren't at all interested in journalism. They're only interested in scandal and sensationalism and if they can't find it they'll happily make it up

Steve

DB7

The Weirdo Of St Trinian's: New book claims Alastair Sim had more than a scholarly interest in young girls

By Geoffrey Wansell
Scottish actor Alastair Sim was deeply private and would rarely discuss his personal life, leading to questions about preferences

With his bald head, pouchy deep-set eyes and lugubrious face, Alastair Sim was one of the film legends of the Fifties, the star of Scrooge as well as the first, and best, St Trinian's comedy - in which he played not only the school's headmistress, but also her scheming brother.

Capable of being creepy and comic at the same time, Sim came to epitomise the eccentric British buffoon for a generation of cinema-goers: a man forever bewildered as fate dealt him one cruel blow after another, but whom it was impossible not to like.

But that facade may have concealed a darker truth for, as a new biography of the actor reveals, throughout his life, Sim carefully cultivated 'friendships' with teenage boys and girls as young as 12.

And the Edinburgh-born Sim did everything in his power to keep those proclivities private - refusing countless interviewrequests throughout his career, and declining to appear on radio or TV chat shows.

'All the public need to know about me is what they see,' he insisted.

The stark reality is that the 5ft 11in Sim, who died in 1976 at the age of 75, had a good deal to hide.

What his friends may have seen as 'no more than innocent kindness' towards the impressionable boys and girls with whom he surrounded himself could well have been misinterpreted - and destroyed him.

One fact that Sim neglected to reveal was that he was a balding 26-year-old college lecturer when he met his future wife Naomi Plaskitt - who was just 12 years of age, and looked even younger.

'They became friends,' says Sim's new biographer Mark Simpson. 'And over time,this developed into an " understanding".' That understanding saw the couple marry when Naomi was 18.

By then, Sim had persuaded the teenager's mother to place her in his care, had employed her as his 'secretary', though she couldn't type and insisted that she and her mother lived with him in a London flat.

It was, to say the least, an unusual arrangement, but Naomi's mother apparently saw Sim as a route out of poverty, and happily acquiesced.

Sim's fascination with the young did not end there. After their marriage, he and his wife proceeded to take in, and care for, a succession of young actors and actresses - notably 15-year-old George Cole, later star of TV's Minder, who lived with the couple for 14 years.

Sim's closeness to the young actor 'drew comments from some quarters about the appropriateness of the relationship', says Sim's biographer. 'Even suspicion from some that it was not entirely healthy'. But the actor's friends dismissed this as 'nonsense'.

Cole, who is now 83, merely describes his mentor as 'deeply caring'; while the TV producer and director John Howard Davies - who appeared as Oliver Twist in David Lean's famous film - suggests that Sim simply 'wore his heart on his sleeve' which made him 'vulnerable to all sorts of allegations'.
Enlarge x

Firm but fair: Alastair Sim, already a household name in England, became synonymous with the role of Headmistress Fritton

Yet no one can deny that an apparently never-ending string of young actors and actresses came to stay at his house in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, throughout his career.

Time after time, questions about Sim's sexuality come to the surface. His new biographer asks, for example, what lay behind his performance in drag as Millicent Fritton, headmistress of St Trinian's school for girls.

'Was he "a little bit the other way?" as was suggested by some,' Simpson wonders, 'Or simply following in the long-established British tradition of theatrical cross-dressing?'

Sim's biographer comes to no firm conclusion - although he defends the actor against any innuendo about his sexuality by saying: 'Suspicion is the new social currency.'

Nevertheless, he makes clear that Sim - while often notably generous and tender-hearted - could be a manipulative and difficult man, with 'limited acting ability'.

So let us try to unravel the truth about the actor who starred in the first Ealing comedy, Hue And Cry, in 1947, appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Stage Fright in 1950, and the film version of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls in 1954 - and whose performances inspired Alec Guinness.

Intriguingly, Sim insisted as a child that he wanted to be a hypnotist. 'I practised on gentle dogs,' he once said.

The fourth child of a prosperous Edinburgh tailor, Sim left school at 14 to work for his father, then enrolled at the city's university, before deciding he wanted to become an actor, then changing his mind again and opting to become a teacher instead.

Blessed with an exceptional speaking voice, he was appointed Fulton Lecturer in Elocution at Edinburgh University in 1925, and shortly afterwards founded his own school of drama and speech training.

A few months later, he was asked to play the part of a priest in an amateur production of the play The Land Of Heart's Desire, and was introduced to one of his co-stars, a 12-year-old girl who 'looked much younger than her age'.

The younger of two sisters, Naomi Plaskitt was swept off her feet when she met Sim.

'He was tall and gangly with crisp black hair already receding, a lively face with huge eyes and a very beautiful smile,' she wrote later. 'From that day, and for the next 50 years, I had need to look for no one.'

At her 13th birthday party, just a few weeks later, Sim kissed the new teenager, and she remembered afterwards: 'I had difficulty getting to sleep that night.'

The actor also took care to befriend his new admirer's mother Norah - launching a relationship that was to last 'for many years'.

Sim became an ever-present guest at the Plaskitt's flat in Edinburgh and took an 'increasing interest' in his devoted admirer's education - to the extent of suggesting that Naomi leave school at 14 to enrol as a pupil in his drama school.

'Even by today's standards it must have seemed a curious suggestion,' Sim's biographer writes. 'But Norah readily agreed.'

After a year of studying with him, Sim offered the infatuated teenager a job as his secretary and they began spending more and more time together. He even started taking her with him to visit friends. When he was asked if she was his daughter, Sim replied bluntly 'No', but didn't elaborate.
Enlarge k
Enlarge Alastair Sim, with Melvyn Johns, in a scene from Charles Dicken's 'Scrooge: A Christmas Carol' film in 1951

Alastair Sim played the 'perfect Dickensian character' in the 1951 film Scrooge, alongside Melvyn Johns

The truth would have deeply shocked them - for within a year their relationship had developed into 'something more serious', so much so that Sim told her they would be married when she reached the age of 17.

That was hardly commonplace in the famously staid world of middleclass Edinburgh in the early Thirties.

'Neither Alastair nor Naomi ever suggested that a physical relationship existed in their early time together,' Sim's biographer explains carefully. But when she was 16, Naomi followed Sim to London, where he had decided to try his luck as an actor. Her mother came, too, and the three set up in a small furnished flat in Golders Green.

In August 1932, when Naomi was 18 and Sim 32, the couple married and, within a matter of weeks, the new Mrs Sim was pregnant. But she suffered terrible bouts of sickness, so debilitating that she was admitted to hospital and the pregnancy was terminated. She was to lose two more children in pregnancy.

Meanwhile, her new husband's career blossomed, expanding into films in 1935 with a role in The Riverside Murder. As a result, Naomi became his chauffeur as well as his secretary, ferrying him back and forth to studios every day. Though she'd studied as an actress when they'd first come to London, she abandoned her own career to support him.

However dubious the relationship might seem, there can be no doubting that they loved each other dearly. One friend of the time called them 'one soul in two bodies', and Naomi's support did no harm to Sim's career.

By 1938 Sim had become a star of British film musicals and by the war had repeated his success on the West End stage in a spy thriller called Cottage To Let, which also featured 15-year-old cockney George Cole.

With his wife pregnant for the fourth time, Sim decided to move out of London - renting Egypt Cottage, near Henley, which comprised three 16th century cottages knocked together, but without electricity and where the only water came from a well in the garden.

Shortly after the move, the Sims invited the young George Cole to join them, even though the decision 'drew some comments from some quarters concerning the appropriateness of the relationship'.

Sim's biographer dismisses the criticism as 'suspicion' and it can't be stressed enough that not a shred of evidence has been found that Sim ever took sexual advantage of either his future wife, while she was under age, or the young actors he befriended. But again there can be no doubt that a close relationship between a 40-year-old man and a boy 'who was 15, but could easily have passed for 11' - in the words of Sim's wife - would have drawn intense interest in today's society.

Shortly after Cole settled into Egypt Cottage, Naomi gave birth to their first and only child, a daughter, Merlith, in August 1940. The teenage actor was given the task of lighting oil lamps and fires for the new baby while, in return, Sim 'coached him in the art of acting'.

Though never formally adopted by the Sims - despite reports to the contrary - Cole was to remain with them for the next 14 years, making 11 films with the actor, until his own marriage in 1954, at the age of 29, when he and his wife Eileen moved into a house nearby.

Over the years a string of other aspiring young male actors would also find their way to Sim's home - without arousing public concern. In 1947, the Sims built a new house not far away and named it Forrigan after a play written by close friend James Bridie.

With its tennis court and games room, the house appeared idyllic, but, as so often in Sim's life, appearances were deceptive.

One of Sim's friends nicknamed it Bleak House and Simpson admits that 'for all his generosity of spirit, (Sim) could also be frugal'.
d

Alastair in a publicity shot for 1954's 'The Belles of St Trinians'

Frugal or not, young actors were always welcome - although the same could no longer be said of Sim's mother-in-law, Norah, who was still living with him.

Despite her support for the actor's courtship of her 12-year-old daughter, she was asked to leave - and she did so 'with much ill feeling' to live in a small hotel at Lymington in the New Forest.

As an established star, Sim's defensive attitude to questions about his private life never wavered. Not only did he refuse interviews, he also steadfastly avoided signing autographs.

As the comedian Ronnie Corbett, who met the actor near the end of his life, explains, Sim was 'quite a formidable soul to go up and have an idle word with'. Fellow actors described him as 'distant'. Yet that did nothing to dim his appeal. In 1951 he played the title role in the film Scrooge - which is broadcast on TV at Christmas to this day.

Actor and writer Stephen Fry calls his performance the 'perfect Dickensian character'.

In recognition of his success Sim was awarded a CBE in the Coronation honours list in June 1953, which he reluctantly accepted, although when offered a knighthood two decades later he turned it down, insisting he was a 'lifelong socialist' and believed 'everyone was equal'. His greatest film success came the following year, when he played the formidable Miss Fritton in The Belles Of St Trinian's, alongside his protege George Cole as Flash Harry.

To play a woman with such conviction on the screen raised inevitable questions.

One friend told his biographer: 'I have no reason to think he was homosexual,' but added, 'even if he was a little bit the other way.'

Sir Ian McKellen, who directed Sim at the end of his life, observes enigmatically: 'Alastair, as a man, used to know how to get out of scrapes.'

Despite a second success as Miss Fritton in Blue Murder At St Trinian's in 1957, Sim's star in the British cinema was on the wane, with the arrival of gritty kitchen sink dramas and Carry On films.

Even as his fame declined, however, he continued to invite impressionable young male actors to stay with him. His wife called them 'unofficially adopted young ones'. As John Howard Davies puts it: 'Alastair was very friendly - though this could be mistaken for something more sinister.'

Despite forays into TV and a triumphant return to the stage at the newly established Chichester Festival Theatre in the early Seventies, Sim was never to recapture his place at the pinnacle of the British cinema, and he retired into his carefully protected private world.

He died of cancer in August 1976, insisting that his body be used for medical research - and that there should be no memorial service for him. Even beyond the grave he was anxious to maintain his privacy.

The tragic conclusion is that, for all his talent, part of Alastair Sim's legacy remains the mystery of his true nature - and his strange obsession with the young.

* Alastair Sim: The Real Belle Of St Trinian's by Mark Simpson, is published by The History Press on July 7 at £18.99. To order a copy at £17.10 (P&P free), call 0845 606 4206

alan french

Hi Steve Crook.
Just seen your last comment. Yes. I agree that there are many people who do try to be decent in the news and writing business. But as you say, there are some who do make it bad and gives the press a badf name. I do not tar the same brush to the reporter who reports on the local village fete or flower show. But the newsreel film of Marilyn Monroe showed a woman who was still under stress. She was accompanied by a nurse. The press just fired questions at her at a fast pace, while photographers' cameras flashed very frequently. Unless she was doing a good piece of acting, Marilyn did not seem to know what day it was. If I had been a reporter, I would have found that I too might be firing questions at this woman as it was my job. I do not think that I could merclessly interview someone under stress without having some qualms. Therefore it may have been a good thing I did not become a newspaper reporter. I probabaly would have got the sack.
As far as the original article is concerned. Yes gutter information, true or false, sells unfortunately. Perhaps some members of the public are just as guilty from another perspective. If we do not buy, then such publications would not sell.
Food for thought.
Alan French.

Wicked Lady

You know the sad thing about that article is: if you told it straight, it's the not-so-exciting story of a nice man who met his wife early in (her) life, who supported up-and-coming actors and who played the occasional role in drag like every other actor since the time of Shakespeare.

But this writer has tried to soup it up in his own buffoonish way by throwing in the odd (usually completely irrelevant) question on Sim's character t odd points. And he's so clumsy at it, only a reader with an IQ below that of a house plant would not fail to see what he was up to.

Let's face it: scandal sells. Mommie Dearest STILL sells to this day, whereas bios on Gregory Peck (a man not even this biographer could come up with an insinuation about) don't tend to shift many copies.

batman

I read a Greg Peck biography and he didn't come out of it squeaky clean. There was no scandalous gossip just a portrait of a very driven individual who put himself first in all things. However, he had a strong commitment to his family and firends and actually came across as being a bit dull. I still admire him.

The least scandalous autobiography I've read is John Mills ..... he comes across as such a nice man that he had nothing bad to say about anyone else. IIRC that sold quite well so there is a market for 'nice' books.

Daddy .... the frisbee has gone in the water .... what a finger puppet drama queen I am!

silverwhistle

It's also odd that the writer fails to consider a simpler, innocent explanation: that perhaps the Sims would have liked a larger family, but, given the evident difficulties Naomi had with childbearing, extended their nurturing to other young people around them instead? If they first started taking their protégés under their wings after her series of miscarriages, but before their daughter was born, doesn't it raise the possibility that Naomi may have been a driving force in this, for maternal reasons, if she feared she would never be able to have children of her own?

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

EHV_Emmetts

George Cole, who was Sims main protege, has never said, or indicated in any manner, that their relationship was untoward or suspicious.

I will not be purchasing a copy of this travesty.

Steve Crook

Why do you think the book is anything like the Daily Hate Mail made it out to be?
Why not wait until you've heard some reviews from people who don't see dirt and sleaze in everything?

Steve

TimR

Fifty years from now people all over the world will still be enjoying The Happiest Days of Your Life and A Christmas Carol and The Belles of St. Trinian's and Laughter in Paradise while that book and its author will have disappeared.

Sim will have the last laugh in more ways than one.

It's a shame because I would like to read a first-rate biography of Sim. I did read his wife's book - but it was very brief. This was an opportunity lost.

Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; and in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety

Wicked Lady

You know, that's the feeling I got. I got the impression that Sim was just a man who liked children and young people. It's really sad that men can't like kids in this day and age. There has to be an implication of impropriety.


And I quite agree about John Mills autobiography, batman. He was just a lovely, lovely man with some great stories. He must have been a hoot to be next to at dinner parties.