Harry Mount reveals the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read, saw and heard in 2021
Christmas commonplaces When a director told me, ‘A drunk is a man trying to walk straight and speak properly. You’re an actor trying to walk crooked and slur your speech.’ Michael Caine’s defining moment
Great minds: Michael Caine; Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips (1813); Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (1941)
He had learned by the age of 20 a lesson it took me half a lifetime to learn: namely that there was nothing that could not be said and no one to whom one could not say it. Alan Bennett on Russell Harty (1934-88) Don’t just do something. Sit there. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (b 1926) The ventriloquist’s big problem: six letters of the alphabet – m, b, p, v, w and f – are impossible to pronounce without moving your lips. You’re a mix of butler, cheerleader, Hitler, psychiatrist and artist. Michael Winner on being a film director Dialogue is the ‘part of a book readers never skip’. Elmore Leonard All nice rooms are a bit shabby. The Mitford test of interior décor Show the dance from head to toe without close-up, film it in as few takes as possible and run it from start to finish without reaction shots. Fred Astaire’s rules for filming dance. ‘Either the camera will dance,’ he said, ‘or I will.’ 22 The Oldie January 2022
There are some men who mind more about enjoying their work than about what they are paid for it and where they stand in the hierarchy. So why, when a woman does the same, should it be taken for granted that she is brainwashed? Diana Athill, Stet It was not until 887, when he was nearly 40, that Alfred the Great started reading and translating Latin. Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity and all the virtues of man without his vices. Lord Byron’s epitaph to his dog, Boatswain (1803-08)
Money, fame and wisdom are the booby prizes of the elderly. Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high-born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink, which after all are easy to bear, as troubles go nowadays. Evelyn Waugh writes to Coote Lygon about Brideshead Revisited, 1944
