RIP Eric Braun

[hoggers]

From The Times
November 24, 2007


Eric Braun

Colourful writer and publicist whose generous reviews were much valued by older actors

The showbusiness writer and publicist Eric Braun wrote biographies of stars such as Deborah Kerr, Doris Day and Elvis Presley and represented many leading West End actors including Peter Sellers, Beryl Reid, Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.
A larger-than-life, Rabelasian figure, who was gay and alcoholic, he was an arresting sight at showbusinesss functions, often arriving on a bicycle - complete with gin and tonic in hand - and dressed in green tweeds with bright red trouser clips.
He was much respected by older actors who valued his generous reviews but in his later career he became something of a liability, especially at first nights when, well refreshed, he often passed out cold in the stalls before the interval. On one occasion he had to be removed from the theatre on a stretcher.
Eric Douglas Hugo Braun was born in Marylebone, London, in 1921, the son of the Swiss-born millionaire Hugo Braun. Educated at the Oratory School, Reading, he took a degree in English literature at Christ's College, Cambridge.
He was a keen West End theatregoer as a teenager and as a young man often wore make-up and nail varnish “as a gesture of defiance, just as I had encouraged my hair to hang on my shoulders in a manner highly inadvisable during wartime”.
In 1941 he received his call-up papers to the 244 Light AA Battery of the Royal Artillery but his military career ended when he was forced to confess his homosexuality to his commanding officer. He was sent to a psychiatrist and then, briefly, to a mental hospital in Sunderland. Discharged at the age of 22, he took a job as a trainee manager at a cinema in Hornchurch.
In 1945 Braun became assistant director to the Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal at Denham Studios, where Pascal was producing Trevor Howard and Deborah Kerr in I See a Dark Stranger. Braun struck up a friendship with Kerr, who was to be the subject of his first biography.
The same year he went on to work on David Lean's classic Great Expectations, and later, at Pinewood Studios, the Sidney Gilliat thriller Green For Danger, starring Alastair Sim.
Moving into publicity he began representing leading London stage actors, as well as pop singers of the day, including Jill Day and Ruby Murray.
In July 1953 he was sent to prison for 12 months for “disseminating obscene literature to a minor”, after lending a copy of the anonymously written novel Fruits of Passion to a 16-year-old railway porter.
He interviewed numerous Hollywood stars during his career, including Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Mae West. In 1991 his biography of Doris Day alleged a relationship between the actress and Ronald Reagan, but before publication Day took exception to the passages and asked for the book to be pulped. Weidenfeld & Nicholson replaced the offending sections at a cost of £2,000 to Braun.
Braun was a longstanding contributor to Films and Filming and the British Film Institute's Monthly Film Bulletin for which, as well as writing about Hollywood, he was often asked to review British soft-porn films. “Other reviewers get Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman,” he said. “I'm sent to see Confessions of a Window Cleaner.”
He wrote an unpublished memoir in which he claimed to have had affairs with both Noël Coward and John Gielgud.
As well as being a keen cyclist Braun took a morning swim in the Serpentine every day for more than 50 years.
He had been resident in Brinsworth House, the retirement home for actors in Middlesex, since 2003.
Eric Braun, journalist and publicist, was born on March 31, 1921. He died on November 21, 2007, aged 86

[orpheum]

I well remeber Brauns articles for Films and Filming(which i still have)and am sad to hear of his passing.

[Richard Dacre]

Sad news.

One of the most memorable reviews I got as a distributor – Respectable Films – was from Eric. Bit off-topic as not a British film, it was for George Kuchar’s THE DEVIL’S CLEAVAGE:-

DEVIL’S CLEAVAGE, flickering in worlds apart,
Where do your motives begin?
Hybrid movie, have you a secret heart,
Waiting for viewers to win?
Were you spawned by some queer magic;
In your coprophilias way
Is there something arcanely tragic
That you’re trying to say?
‘Respectable’ movie, what are those painted eyes
Vainly trying to see –
Scanning Box-Office horizons,
Pondering what the end may be…
Hellfire? Purgatory? Crap?

Shows he still loved his Noël Coward – but to this day not sure whether he liked the film! RIP