Stop the World: The Biography of Anthony Newley |
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Garth Bardsley
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Pages: 247 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 1840022744
Pub: Oberon Books Ltd
Pub date: 2003-09-15
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 249803
Reader Reviews:
The sad yet happy world of Gurney Slade (11/12 people found this helpful)
Have just read this and really enjoyed it - sense of objectivity, trustworthiness in the narrative voice. The biographer acted alongside Newley in Scrooge but there are no axes to grind - nor does it feel like he's looking through beer or other goggles (Lesley Bricusse seems to approve as he's written the foreword).
What comes through most is a sense of the way in which the young Newley's deprivations mapped out his personal and professional life ever after - characters such as Littlechap being pretty much how he felt about himself. There was an extraordinary amount of industry, as well as times when Newley took to his bed, but apart from the gigs he had to take to make a living (or to keep going in the style he felt his due) just about everything he did seems to have come out of a compulsion to tell his story, often with painful honesty and lacking in judgement - but hey, the guy was an artiste, and lucky enough most of the time to have collaborators who could refine his ideas - though the ideas were most definitely his.
It's moving to read about the time when stardom began to ebb: Newley having to readjust when his style of cabaret was no longer the big puller in Vegas, coming to London in his final years (and being being reunited with a love from the fifties at a time when both of them were ready and appreciative) but always ploughing on, trying to understand himself, finally seeking out his father, weathering the disappointments of dud shows or underwhelming revivals (I find it touching that he apparently laboured for years on a musical version of Richard III possibly to be entitled, Bart-style, Hump - if not HUMP!). An ill-judged attempt to revive a show at the King's Head in Islington is partly about his ego but also, maybe, about the fact that he's a certain sort of animal who has to keep making voyages (even if he ought to listen to those who acted as his ships' navigators over the years a bit more).
The honesty of journal entries - most touchingly when he tries to tell himself that fame - the fame he could once take for granted - is a bonus, that it's the work, the life, that matters - gives Newley's tale a particular poignancy and universality, artiste-wise. To paraphrase Keith Moon, he was the best Anthony Newley-type performer there was, and the highs and lows of his career seem unavoidable in that light - he could do no other.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Biography -> General
Books -> Subjects -> Poetry, Drama & Criticism -> Drama
Books -> Subjects -> Music, Stage & Screen -> Performing Arts -> Plays & Drama -> Bestsellers
Books -> Refinements -> Language (feature_browse-bin) -> English