R.I.P. Sheridan Morley
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Big Magilla
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Boy, does this make me feel old. Seems like only yesterday when his grandmother died. I remember well that early 1971 issue of Time Magazine which included both Gladys Cooper's scolding letter to the editors for their recent cover story on Jesus Christ Superstar, a work she considered highly blasphemous, and her own obituary.
2/17/07 London Guardian
Sheridan Morley
Sheridan Morley, the author, critic and broadcaster who died yesterday aged 65, was the son of the actor Robert Morley and the grandson of Dame Gladys Cooper, and thus grew up intimately acquainted with the theatre; he wrote or edited more than 30 books, including biographies of Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor and James Mason, as well as the first authorised biographies of David Niven, John Gielgud and Noël Coward.
Fondly known as "Sherry", Morley described the theatrical world with affection and understanding, though, as a critic, he could be scathing when circumstances required. "If you can bring yourself to imagine Liberace as King Lear," he wrote after an evening at Cliff Richard's musical Heathcliff, "you will perhaps have some concept of what takes place in what is indubitably the worst musical since Mel Brooks's Springtime For Hitler."
Yet at the same time Morley was a trusted friend and confidant of leading actors, writers and directors, whose pleasure in his company and conversation (he was a brilliant anecdotalist) encouraged them to overlook his somewhat disreputable calling. John Gielgud once telephoned Morley with urgent news: "You'll never believe this: in America they are actually about to name a theatre after a drama critic." Then, remembering whom he was talking to, Gielgud exclaimed: "Oh my God, you are one!" and slammed down the receiver.
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Nor was it easy being an authorised biographer in an age when the public demands to know about aspects of the subject's private life that he or she would rather keep hidden. Few of Morley's subjects were as obliging as Noël Coward, who furnished Morley with two sets of telephone numbers to help him with his biography, A Talent To Amuse (1969): "Those are my friends and those are my enemies," Coward explained. "Start with the enemies, dear boy, and you'll get a better book."
Coward, whose diaries Morley also co-edited in 1982, was famously indiscreet. Once, crossing Leicester Square, Morley and Coward saw a poster for an adventure movie starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde entitled The Sea Shall Not Have Them. "I fail to see why not," Coward remarked. "Everybody else has."
One problem was the theatrical tendency to embroider the past. While researching his biography of David Niven, The Other Side of the Moon (1985), Morley went to see the ageing Laurence Olivier to ask him about his 1939 film Wuthering Heights, in which Niven and Merle Oberon had been his co-stars.
Was it true, Morley asked, that Niven and Oberon had been lovers? Yes, it was, Olivier replied; "but there's one thing you have to understand - that although both Niven and I were deeply in love with Merle Oberon, I was the one who married her." "Er, no you didn't", Morley replied. "It wasn't Merle Oberon you married, it was Vivien Leigh." "My dearest boy," Olivier exclaimed, "you are so right!"
John Gielgud commissioned Morley to write his biography in 1988, but made the stipulation that he had the right to veto anything he did not like when the book was finished. Although Morley agreed, he delayed the book's completion, realising he would have to discuss Gielgud's arrest for homosexual soliciting in 1953, a crisis that drove the actor to the brink of prison and suicide. The incident had been public knowledge, widely reported in the papers of the time; but by an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" had not been discussed since. Because Gielgud preferred not to have the painful episode resurrected, subject and biographer evolved an unspoken agreement that Morley's book would not be finished until Gielgud's death.
When it was published in 2001, it detailed Gielgud's impressive achievements as an actor and director, but showed him to be a thoroughly human figure whose foibles and frailties, indecision and insecurities came as a surprise to many of his admirers. Among other things, Morley revealed that the actor had been sustained for the last 40 years of his life by his affair with Martin Hensler, a cantankerous and reclusive Hungarian exile 20 years his junior.
Morley dealt with Gielgud's homosexuality with frankness but without sensationalism, and the biography was just as memorable for its affectionate account of Gielgud's charmingly dotty otherworldliness.
Morley recounted how, one Sunday in 1939, with Europe on the brink of war, Gielgud returned to a friend's home carrying the newspapers and wearing a devastated look. When asked if war had been declared, he responded: "Oh, I don't know anything about that, but Gladys Cooper has just got the most terrible reviews\u2026 "
Morley recalled an occasion in the 1980s when, walking along Piccadilly with Gielgud, they spotted Margaret Thatcher, then at the height of her powers, coming towards them. As they both knew her slightly, they stopped. Gielgud asked where she was now living. "No 10, Downing Street," replied the Prime Minister with some surprise. "Oh, you women!" exclaimed Gielgud, full of admiration. "Always so clever at buying the right kind of property!"
Sheridan Robert Morley was born on December 5 1941, the weekend of Pearl Harbor, in a nursing home overlooking Ascot racecourse, his father Robert Morley's spiritual home. His mother, Joan, was the daughter of the actress Gladys Cooper and Herbert Buckmaster, creator of the Buck's Fizz. He was christened Sheridan not in honour of the playwright but after Sheridan Whiteside, the irascible dinner guest in George S Kaufman and Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, a part Robert Morley was then playing on the London stage.
Sheridan spent much of his early life in California, where he knew, albeit fleetingly, Garbo and Dietrich and the colony of English actors known as the "Hollywood Raj". In 1983 he would write Tales from the Hollywood Raj, in which he concluded that most of the Britons who had made their way to Hollywood were second-raters even by Shepperton standards. Yet he recalled George Cukor's proud boast of his 1935 David Copperfield: "We shot the white cliffs of Dover near Malibu and I have to say that our white cliffs were altogether better. They were altogether whiter and cliffier." Hollywood, he judged, had produced "a far better England than England".
When the time came for the young Sheridan to go to secondary school, he placed an advertisement in the personal columns of The Times: "Father with horrible memories of his own schooldays at Wellington," it read, "is searching for a school for his son, where the food matters as much as the education and the standards are those of a good three-star seaside hotel."
The lucky respondent was Harry Tuyn, a jovial Dutchman who had taken a long lease on Sizewell Hall, on the Suffolk coast, and turned it into a progressive, co-educational establishment where pupils could study what they liked, if they liked; subjects such as geography, maths and Latin were not taught at all on the ground that they were too boring.
But Morley's academic interests were awakened by a visit to Oxford, which he found so fascinating that he decided to take urgent steps to rectify the deficiencies with which his education had left him. After enrolling at a crammer in Kensington High Street, he won a place at Merton College. His father was far from thrilled, although Morley junior followed in the family tradition by becoming involved in theatricals as secretary of the Oxford University Dramatic Society before graduating with an indifferent degree in French.
After coming down from Oxford, Morley joined Independent Television News and worked as a newscaster, reporter and scriptwriter, covering two elections, the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill and the birth of Milton Keynes. He once interviewed Mrs Thatcher when she was a junior minister for pensions. "It has been said, Mrs Thatcher," he began, "that England is a great place to live if you are neither very poor nor black." "Well, I'm not, am I?" she replied with finality.
But Morley was uninterested in politics and news, and he resigned from ITN in 1967 to join BBC2's arts showcase Late Night Line-Up before becoming presenter of BBC2's Film Night. Later he became a regular presenter of Kaleidoscope on Radio 4 and of Meridian for the BBC World Service. On television he presented Theatreland for LWT and Sheridan Morley Meets for the BBC, and he appeared as a panellist on such game shows as Call My Bluff and Countdown. From 1990 he presented Radio 2's Arts Programme.
At the same time he became a writer, first as deputy features editor, and later arts diarist and television critic, of The Times, and then as arts editor and drama critic of Punch. He was a regular contributor to The Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard; London drama critic for the International Herald Tribune from 1979; film critic of the Sunday Express (1992-95); and theatre critic of The Spectator from 1990 to 2001, and afterwards of the New Statesman. Latterly he had been employed for a time as drama critic of the Daily Express.
Morley devised and directed several theatrical revues, including Noël and Gertie (1982), an acclaimed musical biography of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence; Spread a Little Happiness, a Vivian Ellis anthology (1991); and Much Revue about Nothing (1998).
Morley was always close to his father and, after his death in 1992, he wrote an entertaining and affectionate memoir of the great boulevardier, Robert, My Father (1993). He recalled how Robert Morley's robust sense of humour had often landed him in trouble. During the 1950s, after a trip to Rome, he decided to regale the novelist Graham Greene with a fantastical tale about how the Pope had entertained him to a gargantuan lunch at his palace, questioned him closely about the film industry, then invited them to stay to tea - and to meet his wife. Greene never spoke to him again.
Morley's other publications included biographies of Oscar Wilde, Sybil Thorndike, Gladys Cooper, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Dirk Bogarde, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe (the last three with Ruth Leon), as well as several anthologies. His memoirs, Asking for Trouble, were published in 2002.
Sheridan Morley married first, in 1965 (dissolved 1990), Margaret Gudejko, with whom he had a son and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1995, Ruth Leon.
Sheridan Morley
Sheridan Morley, the author, critic and broadcaster who died yesterday aged 65, was the son of the actor Robert Morley and the grandson of Dame Gladys Cooper, and thus grew up intimately acquainted with the theatre; he wrote or edited more than 30 books, including biographies of Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor and James Mason, as well as the first authorised biographies of David Niven, John Gielgud and Noël Coward.
Fondly known as "Sherry", Morley described the theatrical world with affection and understanding, though, as a critic, he could be scathing when circumstances required. "If you can bring yourself to imagine Liberace as King Lear," he wrote after an evening at Cliff Richard's musical Heathcliff, "you will perhaps have some concept of what takes place in what is indubitably the worst musical since Mel Brooks's Springtime For Hitler."
Yet at the same time Morley was a trusted friend and confidant of leading actors, writers and directors, whose pleasure in his company and conversation (he was a brilliant anecdotalist) encouraged them to overlook his somewhat disreputable calling. John Gielgud once telephoned Morley with urgent news: "You'll never believe this: in America they are actually about to name a theatre after a drama critic." Then, remembering whom he was talking to, Gielgud exclaimed: "Oh my God, you are one!" and slammed down the receiver.
advertisement
Nor was it easy being an authorised biographer in an age when the public demands to know about aspects of the subject's private life that he or she would rather keep hidden. Few of Morley's subjects were as obliging as Noël Coward, who furnished Morley with two sets of telephone numbers to help him with his biography, A Talent To Amuse (1969): "Those are my friends and those are my enemies," Coward explained. "Start with the enemies, dear boy, and you'll get a better book."
Coward, whose diaries Morley also co-edited in 1982, was famously indiscreet. Once, crossing Leicester Square, Morley and Coward saw a poster for an adventure movie starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde entitled The Sea Shall Not Have Them. "I fail to see why not," Coward remarked. "Everybody else has."
One problem was the theatrical tendency to embroider the past. While researching his biography of David Niven, The Other Side of the Moon (1985), Morley went to see the ageing Laurence Olivier to ask him about his 1939 film Wuthering Heights, in which Niven and Merle Oberon had been his co-stars.
Was it true, Morley asked, that Niven and Oberon had been lovers? Yes, it was, Olivier replied; "but there's one thing you have to understand - that although both Niven and I were deeply in love with Merle Oberon, I was the one who married her." "Er, no you didn't", Morley replied. "It wasn't Merle Oberon you married, it was Vivien Leigh." "My dearest boy," Olivier exclaimed, "you are so right!"
John Gielgud commissioned Morley to write his biography in 1988, but made the stipulation that he had the right to veto anything he did not like when the book was finished. Although Morley agreed, he delayed the book's completion, realising he would have to discuss Gielgud's arrest for homosexual soliciting in 1953, a crisis that drove the actor to the brink of prison and suicide. The incident had been public knowledge, widely reported in the papers of the time; but by an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" had not been discussed since. Because Gielgud preferred not to have the painful episode resurrected, subject and biographer evolved an unspoken agreement that Morley's book would not be finished until Gielgud's death.
When it was published in 2001, it detailed Gielgud's impressive achievements as an actor and director, but showed him to be a thoroughly human figure whose foibles and frailties, indecision and insecurities came as a surprise to many of his admirers. Among other things, Morley revealed that the actor had been sustained for the last 40 years of his life by his affair with Martin Hensler, a cantankerous and reclusive Hungarian exile 20 years his junior.
Morley dealt with Gielgud's homosexuality with frankness but without sensationalism, and the biography was just as memorable for its affectionate account of Gielgud's charmingly dotty otherworldliness.
Morley recounted how, one Sunday in 1939, with Europe on the brink of war, Gielgud returned to a friend's home carrying the newspapers and wearing a devastated look. When asked if war had been declared, he responded: "Oh, I don't know anything about that, but Gladys Cooper has just got the most terrible reviews\u2026 "
Morley recalled an occasion in the 1980s when, walking along Piccadilly with Gielgud, they spotted Margaret Thatcher, then at the height of her powers, coming towards them. As they both knew her slightly, they stopped. Gielgud asked where she was now living. "No 10, Downing Street," replied the Prime Minister with some surprise. "Oh, you women!" exclaimed Gielgud, full of admiration. "Always so clever at buying the right kind of property!"
Sheridan Robert Morley was born on December 5 1941, the weekend of Pearl Harbor, in a nursing home overlooking Ascot racecourse, his father Robert Morley's spiritual home. His mother, Joan, was the daughter of the actress Gladys Cooper and Herbert Buckmaster, creator of the Buck's Fizz. He was christened Sheridan not in honour of the playwright but after Sheridan Whiteside, the irascible dinner guest in George S Kaufman and Moss Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, a part Robert Morley was then playing on the London stage.
Sheridan spent much of his early life in California, where he knew, albeit fleetingly, Garbo and Dietrich and the colony of English actors known as the "Hollywood Raj". In 1983 he would write Tales from the Hollywood Raj, in which he concluded that most of the Britons who had made their way to Hollywood were second-raters even by Shepperton standards. Yet he recalled George Cukor's proud boast of his 1935 David Copperfield: "We shot the white cliffs of Dover near Malibu and I have to say that our white cliffs were altogether better. They were altogether whiter and cliffier." Hollywood, he judged, had produced "a far better England than England".
When the time came for the young Sheridan to go to secondary school, he placed an advertisement in the personal columns of The Times: "Father with horrible memories of his own schooldays at Wellington," it read, "is searching for a school for his son, where the food matters as much as the education and the standards are those of a good three-star seaside hotel."
The lucky respondent was Harry Tuyn, a jovial Dutchman who had taken a long lease on Sizewell Hall, on the Suffolk coast, and turned it into a progressive, co-educational establishment where pupils could study what they liked, if they liked; subjects such as geography, maths and Latin were not taught at all on the ground that they were too boring.
But Morley's academic interests were awakened by a visit to Oxford, which he found so fascinating that he decided to take urgent steps to rectify the deficiencies with which his education had left him. After enrolling at a crammer in Kensington High Street, he won a place at Merton College. His father was far from thrilled, although Morley junior followed in the family tradition by becoming involved in theatricals as secretary of the Oxford University Dramatic Society before graduating with an indifferent degree in French.
After coming down from Oxford, Morley joined Independent Television News and worked as a newscaster, reporter and scriptwriter, covering two elections, the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill and the birth of Milton Keynes. He once interviewed Mrs Thatcher when she was a junior minister for pensions. "It has been said, Mrs Thatcher," he began, "that England is a great place to live if you are neither very poor nor black." "Well, I'm not, am I?" she replied with finality.
But Morley was uninterested in politics and news, and he resigned from ITN in 1967 to join BBC2's arts showcase Late Night Line-Up before becoming presenter of BBC2's Film Night. Later he became a regular presenter of Kaleidoscope on Radio 4 and of Meridian for the BBC World Service. On television he presented Theatreland for LWT and Sheridan Morley Meets for the BBC, and he appeared as a panellist on such game shows as Call My Bluff and Countdown. From 1990 he presented Radio 2's Arts Programme.
At the same time he became a writer, first as deputy features editor, and later arts diarist and television critic, of The Times, and then as arts editor and drama critic of Punch. He was a regular contributor to The Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard; London drama critic for the International Herald Tribune from 1979; film critic of the Sunday Express (1992-95); and theatre critic of The Spectator from 1990 to 2001, and afterwards of the New Statesman. Latterly he had been employed for a time as drama critic of the Daily Express.
Morley devised and directed several theatrical revues, including Noël and Gertie (1982), an acclaimed musical biography of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence; Spread a Little Happiness, a Vivian Ellis anthology (1991); and Much Revue about Nothing (1998).
Morley was always close to his father and, after his death in 1992, he wrote an entertaining and affectionate memoir of the great boulevardier, Robert, My Father (1993). He recalled how Robert Morley's robust sense of humour had often landed him in trouble. During the 1950s, after a trip to Rome, he decided to regale the novelist Graham Greene with a fantastical tale about how the Pope had entertained him to a gargantuan lunch at his palace, questioned him closely about the film industry, then invited them to stay to tea - and to meet his wife. Greene never spoke to him again.
Morley's other publications included biographies of Oscar Wilde, Sybil Thorndike, Gladys Cooper, Gertrude Lawrence, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Dirk Bogarde, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe (the last three with Ruth Leon), as well as several anthologies. His memoirs, Asking for Trouble, were published in 2002.
Sheridan Morley married first, in 1965 (dissolved 1990), Margaret Gudejko, with whom he had a son and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1995, Ruth Leon.