Anthony Newley

[julian_craster]

Any other Anthony Newley fans out there?



Jonathan Ross describes him (Newley, that is....) as a 'genius' - and he should know !



Jonathan is currently presenting a 4 part series on Anthony Newley on BBC Radio Two, Fridays at 7.00PM. (and on-line)



This Friday, he focuses of the film career of Anthony Newley....





Here is the article on Anthony Newley.....from DN:eek:



Anthony (George) Newley (1931–1999), entertainer and songwriter, was born

on 24 September 1931 at 230 High Street, Hackney, London, the son of

(Frances) Grace Newley, of Clapton Park, London. His father (whom he did not

know as a child) was a local builder. At a later stage Newley acquired

another name, George, but he was always known as Anthony. He attended

Mandeville School for Boys in Clapton but was evacuated, during the blitz,

to Morecambe, Lancashire, where George Pesckett, a former music-hall

performer, engendered his interest in the theatre. Back in London after the

war, he worked briefly in an insurance office before answering an

advertisement for the Italia Conti stage school. This led almost immediately

to the launch of his career when he was picked, aged sixteen, for the title

role in a film, The Adventures of Dusty Bates (1947). His cheeky cockney

personality made him a natural for the Artful Dodger in David Lean's Oliver

Twist (1948). With a contract from the Rank Organisation, he became an

established character actor of plucky vitality in films like Here Come the

Huggetts (1948, during the filming of which he later claimed to have lost

his virginity to Diana Dors) and The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), a tale of

dashing wartime exploits, also starring Jose Ferrer and Trevor Howard.



An important development in Newley's stage career was an appearance in the

surreal West End revue Cranks (1955), devised by the choreographer John

Cranko. On 30 August 1956 he married the dancer and actress (Elizabeth) Ann

(b. 1933/4), daughter of Basil Lynn. There were no children of the marriage.

Newley spent the late 1950s touring England with his own variety show and

finally secured pop-star status in the film Idle on Parade (1959), a send-up

of an Elvis Presley movie. He became a national heart-throb. His ambitions

fired, he cut records, made a bizarre comedy television series called The

Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960), and finally moulded these various

strands into one of the defining stage musicals of the era, Stop the World—I

Want to Get Off (1961), a zany morality tale of the Newley character,

Littlechap, seeking fame and fortune (‘Gonna build a mountain’) and

lamenting his wasted life in a song that became an instant and enduring

popular classic, ‘What kind of fool am I?’



The co-author with Newley was the composer and lyricist Leslie Bricusse, and

the two men tried to repeat their huge success with another Chaplinesque,

allegorical sequence of ‘little man’ routines in The Roar of the

Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd (1964). The show never opened in London,

but did well in America, where its ebullient, audience-pleasing score,

including songs like ‘A wonderful day like today’, ‘The Joker’, and ‘Who can

I turn to?’, added to Newley's reputation among such fellow artistes as

Sammy Davis jun., Andy Williams, and Tony Bennett, all of whom recorded many

items, and enjoyed many hits, from the Bricusse–Newley catalogue.



Newley was a high-profile success story of the 1960s. His marriage to Ann

Lynn ended in divorce in 1963, the year in which he met and married, at the

height of his West End fame, the actress and film star Joan Henrietta

Collins (b. 1933), with whom he had two children, Tara and Sacha. The couple

divorced in 1970, by which time Newley was more at home in America, living

in Hollywood (he made his American film début as Matthew Mugg in Doctor

Dolittle in 1967), belting out his songs in Las Vegas, and greeting his

audience with a signature gesture, his raised right arm, at the end of a

noisy bid for their sympathy. This show of a public bleeding heart was more

appealing in America than in Britain. He bore the scars of a disrupted

childhood—his father made himself known to him only late in life—like a

badge, one felt, in his stage persona. But this facet of his personality

undoubtedly fuelled his extraordinary talent for producing songs of searing

emotional power and melodic vigour. And he sang them with a rasping

intensity and a curdling vibrato that sometimes made him an object of

parody.



Newley's third marriage, to the airline hostess Dareth Dunn, also produced

two children, Shelby and Christopher, but it too ended in divorce (in 1989).

From the mid-1980s Newley suffered from cancer. He had one kidney removed

and returned to England in 1992 to live with his mother in Esher, Surrey. A

West End comeback in a long-cherished project, Scrooge (1996), written by

Leslie Bricusse, was a disappointing failure. He shared the last seven years

of his life with the fashion designer Gina Fratini, succumbing finally to

his disease at Jensen Beach, Florida, on 14 April 1999. Gina Fratini

survived him.



Newley's two big stage shows did not survive well. London revivals of both

in the late 1980s were unkindly received by the critics. But the songs

survived. One of Newley's later collaborators, the lyricist Herbert

Kretzmer—with whom Newley worked on what the magazine Playboy called ‘a zany

erotobiography’, the movie Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe

and Find True Happiness? (1969)—rated him a true original, ‘driven by the

need to innovate and contemptuous of repetition or the following of fashion’

(The Independent).



Michael Coveney

[Dame Starry]

I used to love Tony Newley but, unfortunately, have read too many unforgiveable things about him since his death that changed my view entirely. I would not have taken much notice at one or two things (none of us are Saints) - but there were too many confirmed things. He comes across as a very uncaring and selfish man.

However, he was very clever and I saw him in "The Good Old Bad Old Days" in the 1970s which he wrote and starred in. He spent much of the time in front of the curtain at the side of the stage attempting to peel an apple and keeping the skin in one piece! Of course, it was completely distracting and you had to be careful not to miss the show!



Starry

[samkydd]

I was interested to learn than David Bowie adopted Anthony Newley's singing style in his early days. One of Bowie's early recordings which was released a few years later after he'd become successful was The Laughing Gnome, and the vocals are definitely Newley-esque.



I saw Anthony Newley live in a stage musical production of Scrooge in around 1997/98 and he was excellent. I don't know anything about his private life, but I tend to find that many favourites have skeletons in the cupboard or demons in their heads. I quite like the woman in our cobblers but I certainly don't feel the need to find out what she does in her private life, unless it affects her cobbling skills!

[penfold]

I couldn't stand him...and then I saw a brief section of his TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade.... and I couldn't believe how far ahead of its time it was...really quite self-reflexive, and what we would now call post-modern...and this was 1960. Would love to see more...

[Merton Park]

I loved Anthony Newley from my first memory of him in a small role in Battle of the River Plate. After that i always looked out for him, and became a big fan. He seemed to appear in a lot of films made by Warwick Productions a Company owned by Cubby Brocolli and Irving Allen in the 1950's.



Saw him live in Las Vegas in 1976, couldn't believe my luck being there whilst he was appearing, he was excellent. Watched most of his films and thoroughly enjoyed Scrooge on stage in the 90's.



The last time I saw him was when he was appearing in the Green Room of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street, London, late 90's. I booked a table there and when I arrived found out that the brother of a friend of mine was putting on the show. He asked if I wanted to meet the great man and of course I said yes. I was introduced to him but was greatly suprised to see how he had aged, he was virtually walking with a stoop. If you didn't know you would have thought he was in his 80's. It was explained that he was living with quite an elderly woman and it was the effect of that. Well that's what I was told!



Anyway, once he went out front he came alive and was excellent, the old Newley magic totally captivating the audience. Everyone there loved it and showed their appreciation. He was brilliant, singing old and new songs and giving an insight into a show he had been working on for more than 10 years, I think about the Hunchback of Notre Dame.



I read a book about him a couple of years ago, Stop The World, which wasn't bad but if I remember, painted a mixed picture of him. It seems as soon as someone dies these days someone else can't wait to get the hatchet out and bury them deeper. The are no libel laws against the dead, maybe that's the reason.



He was unique in his talent, and one of the few British entertainers to have been a big success in America. I always thought he was great anyway, a true all round entertainer as well as a very talented actor,singer,writer,composer.



He could do the lot! Sorely missed.

[David Brent]

I preferred the young Anthony Newley.

Featured in such films as - 'A Boy, A Girl and A Bicycle' (1949), 'Oliver Twist' (1948), 'Top Of The Form' (1953) and 'Vote For Huggett' (1949).



He was certainly a multi-talented performer but I think the US changed him and in latter years he became just a parody of himself.



Dave.

[MrDrakesDuck]

I enjoy watching him in Vice Versa (1948) & Don't Ever Leave Me (1949)

[julian_craster]

Anthony Newley fans might be interested in this new CD release from

MUST CLOSE SATURDAY RECORDS :

http://www.must-close-saturday-records.co.uk/html/catalogue.html



The revue CRANKS, which played on the London [over 200 performances] and Broadway stages, features the recording debut of actor

Anthony Newley, and is a fascinating cultural document of its time (1956), quite surreal and avant-garde in its day. 'Free Cinema', Look Back in Anger,

modern jazz, CRANKS.....something was definitely in the air in 1956....







CRANKS and WILD GROWS THE HEATHER

Two Original West End Cast Recordings on one CD

(26 tracks total) - MCSR 3037

One of the wittiest and most original intimate revues of the 1950s, written

by a new enfant terrible of British theatre (the choreographer John Cranko),

CRANKS has an atmospheric score by John Addison, and brought two new stars

to the attention of London audiences - Anthony Newley (his recording debut)

and Annie Ross. With its haunting amalgam of jazz and blues, this really is a show with a feel

all of its own, transferring to Broadway with the same cast. It was British

revue's contribution to surrealism, now

restored to new life in Alan Bunting's audio restoration.

The 1956 musical WILD GROWS THE HEATHER is a colourfully Scots romance

based on J M Barrie's

play The Little Minister, with rich choral and orchestral passages. Och aye!



Tracks:



CRANKS

Who's who / Adrift

Where has Tom gone?

Cold comfort

Passacaglia

Who is it always there?

Chiromancy

New blue

Valse anglaise

Don't let him know you

Sea song

Telephone song

I'm the boy you should say yes to

Metamorphosis

Would you let me know?

Dirge

Arthur, son of Martha

Goodnight



WILD GROWS THE HEATHER

Overture / Along the way

Law and order

I see everything I love in you

A little bit of devil

Wild grows the heather

Walking to the Kirk

I want the stars to see you

I once had a wonderful day

Finale





MUST CLOSE SATURDAY RECORDS :

http://www.must-close-saturday-records.co.uk

[bhowells]

Have any of the following Anthony Newley films been seen on mainstream telly or Sky in recent years.



Idle On Parade, Small World of Sammy Lee,and Jazzboat. The last time I remember the lattermentioned film being on tv was on a monday afternoon slot in the seventies.

[faginsgirl]

How fab was he as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist? AMAZING!!!!!!



Sorry, that doesnt answer your question. Just thought I`d blurt that out!



xx

[bhowells]

I have only seen clips of his perfomance in Oliver Twist, but I am sure its one of his greatest celuloid moment. Shame his film career wasnt as distinguised as his recording and stage musical work.



Glad to see that his work is being recognised since his death.



Michael Ball payed a fine tribute to him by peforming a special show at Hackney Empirefor .Radio two in 2006.

[donna]

although very talented , the man got me feeling edgy especially when he sang.

[Merton Park]

In reply to bhowells



I don't remember any of those films being shown for some time, but Cockleshell Heroes and Battle of the River Plate have. Sammy Lee was on at the NFT a few weeks ago.



He was an underrated actor and a very talented individual. The last time I saw him live was at the Green Room in London's Regent St a few years before he died. He still had the ability to captivate an audience. Sadly missed.

[dpgmel]

A very talented individual and IMHO sadly under rated, saw him in Scrooge at the Dominion Theatre and he was wonderful. Likewise his performance in "Sammy Lee " is excellent.

[Joe Fraguela]

If my memory serves me right The Small World of Sammy Lee was last shown on the Sky Channel Bravo, about 12 years ago, back in the good old days when they showed lots of rarely seen british films from the 40's, 50's and 60's, as well as all the old TV shows from that era too.

[bhowells]

In reply to bhowells



I don't remember any of those films being shown for some time, but Cockleshell Heroes and Battle of the River Plate have. Sammy Lee was on at the NFT a few weeks ago.



He was an underrated actor and a very talented individual. The last time I saw him live was at the Green Room in London's Regent St a few years before he died. He still had the ability to captivate an audience. Sadly missed.

Thanks for the info, very interested to hear that you saw him at the Green room, I remember seeing a review in "The Stage."

[George Bailey]

Another wonderful little film of Newley's was called Let's Get Married with Anne Aubrey. I have never seen it on TV at all. In fact the only time I have seen it was when it was on the cinema in the very early 60s.

[CaptainWaggett]

I saw an Anthony Newley tribute show in Edinburgh last year. There was free candy - it was excellent.

[CALF28]

Seeing the article in 'Films on T.V.' about Athony Newley it reminded me to ask this question. I have a vague memory of Anthony Newley in a film (colour I think) where he's in the R.A.F. and the only bit I can remember is that he flies a model flying saucer, possibly through some French windows. Also the flying saucer was quite smokey. Not a lot to go on but any help would be appreciated.

[julian_craster]

High Flight ?