AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Alfred hitch cock7/28/2023 June herself provided an account of Hitchcock’s methods in The Glass Ladder, which was published before his notorious mistreatment of Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds came to light. In another, the Evening News printed a photo of the director playfully threatening her with a poker, along with a vivid portrait of “the autocrat of the studio” at work. In one, by the Daily Mail’s Iris Barry, she emerged from her dressing room “to discuss the merits of an intensely golden wig she must wear”. Naturally enough, June appeared in reports from the set of The Lodger that appeared in the press in early 1926. June, Malcolm Keen and Alfred Hitchcock in the Evening News, 1926. The Barnatos enabled Gainsborough to survive the American onslaught: a month after The Lodger was released in February 1927, the government brought in the famous Cinematographic Films Act, designed to protect the British studios by establishing a quota. Blackwell was given a job on the board and is credited as producer on The Lodger. June had barely been in a film before, and every previous Gainsborough film had had a US female lead. In return for the Barnato’s money, their two partners, June and Blackwell, were given roles. British films were at a low ebb in the mid-1920s, kept off the screen by the all-conquering Americans to compete with the new empire, Gainsborough drew on inherited wealth accumulated under the old one. One source says it explicitly, but it was the Barnato fortune that paid for Gainsborough’s studio. At one point he had been up there with Cecil Rhodes.Īs it happened, June’s Riding for a King co-star Carlyle Blackwell was a beneficiary of the same legacy, through his (initially bigamous) marriage to Babe’s sister, Leah. His father Barney, “a poor Jewish lad who, born in London’s ghetto”, as June later put it, had gone out to South Africa in the 1870s, made millions in diamonds, then gone mysteriously overboard on a voyage back from the Cape in 1897. When they met, June was unaware just how rich, and how married, Babe was. What was not reported, though, was that this was another aspect of June’s contribution to The Lodger, through her secret romance with the racing-car driver Woolf “Babe” Barnato. The morning after production began in February 1926, with a night shoot on the Victoria Embankment, it was reported that Gainsborough had bought Poole Street outright. The Lodger, his third film but “the first true Hitchcock movie” as he put it to François Truffaut, was derived from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as a comic stage adaptation, Who is He?, that he had seen as a teenager. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock in 1926. You will act beautifully and we shall have fun.” It was there that she received a telegram from her old friend Ivor Novello, who offered film work. By February, she was recuperating on the Riviera. Daily Express readers subsequently learned that she would “not be able to dance for six months”. Two days later, she collapsed during a performance of Mercenary Mary and shortly after underwent an appendectomy. The short, Riding for a King, starred the celebrated jockey Steve Donoghue and had its premiere in January 1926, with June in attendance. The studio was at Poole Street, Islington, in north London, built five years earlier by Paramount but now rented out, most often to a British company, Gainsborough, run by Michael Balcon. She spent the days rehearsing for a musical, Kid Boots, the evenings starring in another, Mercenary Mary, and then would “rush to the studio at midnight”, to act in a horse-racing short film opposite the fading American film star Carlyle Blackwell. A fixture of the West End stage since childhood, her surname, Tripp, had been excised by the impresario Charles B Cochran because it “sounds a bit comical for a dancer”. D ecember 1925 was a busy month for June.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |