You are author, actor and producer. What you give an audience is all your own; the rest of us have to content ourselves with at the best an approximation of what we see in the mind’s eye.
said W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) to Noël Coward (1899-1973).
Having ...
You are author, actor and producer. What you give an audience is all your own; the rest of us have to content ourselves with at the best an approximation of what we see in the mind’s eye.
said W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) to Noël Coward (1899-1973).
Having enjoyed commercial success internationally during their lifetimes – with astonishingly, four productions running concurrently in London’s West End – both men grew wealthy. Maugham settled in France on the Côte d’Azur at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat whilst Coward was our neighbour for the last decades of his life at Les Avants, wintering in Jamaica.
A prolific international talent – high society and royalty having showered him with favour – Coward succeeded in securing a knighthood, an honour denied Maugham.
In 1955, his performances and resulting live album Noël Coward at Las Vegas (available through Apple) proved a triumph.
Masquerade:
The Lives of Noël Coward
by Oliver Soden
ISBN 978-1474612807
Currently available in Gstaad at Cadonau for CHF 45
What matters in Noël Coward is not what lies beneath the mask but the mask itself… Dismiss Oscar Wilde as he would, Coward had inherited Wilde’s belief that the gravest things in life were too important to be taken seriously; that triviality was the only thing about which one should be truly in earnest; and that performance is something inseparable from authenticity. As Wilde put it: ’Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’
observed Coward’s latest biographer, Soden, 33, the first never to have known his subject personally. Annoyingly, he peppers this volume with his own scripts of plays in which his subject features. The most misguided of these sad attempts is the last and longest, on Coward’s death, and a sad end to this well-researched and richly-illustrated biography.
