Unit Price: $39.95 $26.00
(trade paperback original, high quality art stock), 9 x 12, 224 pages
ISBN: 1-55783-674-4
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HIRSCHFELD'S BRITISH AISLES
(NOT AVAILABLE OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA)
“These drawings document Hirschfeld’s Anglomania. . . . Its subject matter may not rank with the Battle of Trafalgar, but this is inmost England, and is indispensable.”
—John Russell
“Al Hirschfeld was the Mozart of pen and ink.”
—Peter Shaffer
“Hirschfeld was the greatest American caricaturist of the 20th century and his passion was theater” —Sheridan Morley, The Telegraph
Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Sabotage
with producer Ivor Montague
The rotund gentleman in the tight suit is unmistakable — you have seen him briefly in most of his movies, the great thriller director, Alfred Hitchcock. He looks fiercer than he probably was; he was a great practical joker and wit. Hitchcock’s career owed much to the man on the left, with the electric hair and magnified eyes. This was a peer of the realm who rejected his status. Ivor Montagu, who might have been Lord Swaythling had he not been a dedicated Communist, rescued Hitchcock’s first great film, ‘The Lodger,’ from limbo. Distributor CM Woolf considered it unshowable. Montagu’s discreet re-editing enabled the film to have a second wind and it was a stunning success, establishing Hitchcock as the boy wonder of British cinema
(he was 27).
— Kevin Brownlow
Charles Laughton
England’s finest film actor, still. Every inch of that odd body and that curious face expressing something, a thousand teeming impulses visible just beneath the surface. A voice all cellos and basses and the occasional thwack from the tympani sounding every implication of every word.
— Simon Callow
King Lear
Even if you know nothing about ‘King Lear,’ the composition of this drawing tells you that the play is no trifle. The wonderfully rendered Paul Scofield explodes at the centre whilst the other characters swirl and disintegrate in his orbit.
— Michael Blakemore
Cecil Beaton with the Queen Mother
This is my absolute favorite Hirschfeld drawing. Cecil Beaton, court photographer, flanneur and acclaimed designer of sets and costumes for ‘My Fair Lady’ is here seen in the role of Henry Higgins in colloquy with Mrs. Higgins in her luxuriant conservatory. Mrs. Higgins is, of course, the Queen Mother, the penultimate royal matriarch sipping some gin-based tincture. As a royal vignette it equals Max Beerbohm’s celebrated drawing of Alfred Lord Tennyson reading ‘In Memoriam’ to Queen Victoria. In Hirschfeld’s drawing the royal personage is gazing lovingly into her cocktail and Cecil, poised in a wicker chair, has a beady eye on posterity. I once sat next to the Queen Mother at dinner during which she sotto voce sang me a series of old fashioned and slightly naughty vaudeville songs. ‘You might put some of those into your next show, Mr. Humphries,’ she advised. Cecil, always the courtier, is assuming an appreciative expression as the Queen Mother teeters on the brink of song.
— Barry Humphries
Hamlet
Ralph Fiennes. I worked with him in David Cronenberg’s film ‘Spider.’ He has the quietest, most zen-like focus when he works. There’s an aura that surrounds him. You don’t want to invade that space. His thoughts are private. In his chair he waits for the director to call the scene. Like a panther who appears to be dozing on a rock but is aware of everything. ‘The readiness is all.’
Medea
Two great Australian actresses vie for supremacy in Euripides’ tragedy. By slipping to her knees, Judith Anderson has contrived to get her raised face in a blaze of light. Zoe Caldwell, standing above, and just a touch upstage of her, recognizes the strategy and is thinking about stepping on her fingers. Murder is definitely in the air.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
The most commercially successful composer/producer/manager ever to have emerged from the West End, Lord Lloyd Webber followed a path laid out at home and abroad by Sir Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, but given modern marketing techniques and the rise in world travel, he was able to market himself with still greater global results. Though he now tends to go through lyricists faster than Kleenex, an early start with Tim Rice established his career both on Broadway and in the West End. Born in 1948 (no, that is not a misprint), he was a published composer at 11 and was just 21 when his ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ was first released as a single. Now a Peer of the Realm, his interest in all things Victorian has been reflected by his latest (2005) musical ‘The Woman in White’; he writes scores at the rough rate of one every couple of years, usually vastly more popular with the public than with critics, but then again, what do we know?
Joan Collins
Joan Collins is one of my favourite women, and many people think we’re sisters. I must admit, we do have a lot in common in the charisma department and although she has the looks, I have the bone structure. Joan and I are both survivors and if ever there is a photo opportunity, we are it. Although there are a few silver threads in my wisteria locks, amazing Joan still retains her brunette coiffure, untouched by time. Like me, she can laugh at herself, which is probably just as well. She is married to an adorable Peruvian possum named Percy, who could leave his poncho on my bedpost anytime he likes.
— Dame Edna Everage
Betrayal
Here Hirschfeld captures a portentous dramatic moment, one of many which have given to the theatrical vocabulary the epithet ‘Pinteresque.’ The distinguished playwright borrowed freely from Samuel Beckett in the employment of the indefinite pause. It is one of these enigmatic caesuras that Hirschfeld depicts here, from which the audience desperately struggles to divine some profound meaning. It should be noted that this is one of Hirschfeld’s few drawings where the protagonists’ mouths are firmly shut.
— Barry Humphries
AL HIRSCHFELD was designated a “Living Legend” by the U.S. Library of Congress. The U.S. Post Office issued -fifteen stamps of Hirschfeld drawings. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush. Hirschfeld was the recipient of two Lifetime Achievement Tony awards. His work is represented in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Fogg Museum and the Harvard Theatre Collection. For seventy-five years, his work was the centerpiece of The New York Times’ Art & Leisure section. To commemorate his centenary, a Broadway theatre, formerly the Martin Beck, was re-christened The Al Hirschfeld.
That Al Hirschfeld drew New York and that Hirschfeld drew Hollywood is hardly news.
But it will come as a revelation to even the artist’s most ardent fans that in the
Hirschfeld archive more than five hundred works are dedicated to his British subjects. Until Louise Kerz Hirschfeld connected all the dots, evidence of the artist’s lifelong Anglomania had remained dispersed among hundreds of portfolios in different locations. Mrs. Hirschfeld has convened the first-ever reunion of actors, directors, playwrights, politicians, publicans, musicians—enough to gloriously fill a new volume populated with nearly eight decades of Hirschfeld’s British Aisles!
Here are the fabled luminaries of the West End—Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier, Coward, Guinness, Scofield—dramatized on the page as only Hirschfeld can, captured in their moments of stage glory by the only recording device allowed in the theatre: Al Hirschfeld’s pencil.
Here are past luminaries brought vibrantly back to life: Beatrice Lillie,
Peter Ustinov, Gertrude Lawrence, Margaret Rutherford, Rex Harrison. And here too are the newer waves of British thesps: Jeremy Irons, Tracey Ullman, Natasha Richardson, Roger Rees, Julie Andrews, Jonathan Pryce, Lynn Redgrave.
Even Twiggy, the only human thinner than a Hirschfeld line, makes an appearance—with plenty of room for Tony Walton’s skinny on his old friend.
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