Gertie

[sangfroidwoolf]

Beatrice Lillie, Jack Buchanan and Gertrude Lawrence during the Broadway run of Charlot’s Revue, 1926.

[utsukushiki-ohgonki]

Gertrude Lawrence Radio Digest June 1931

[operaqueen]

GL

[sangfroidwoolf]

It was impossible to persuade Gertie to rest. On a Thursday evening, after the performance, we were off, as usual, in search of recreation, but Gertie collapsed in our host’s living room. Someone took her back to the hotel. She woke me early next morning and asked me to take her temperature. One hundred and four degrees.  ‘Back to bed,’ I said, suddenly wide-awake. ‘You need a doctor.’ An ambulance whisked her off to Wellesley Hospital. Double pneumonia and pleurisy. She was desperately ill for three months and more, too ill to understand when the revue completed its Toronto run and the company had to move onto Detroit.  I didn’t want to leave. I tried to tell her how I felt, but she was delirious. I wondered if I should ever see her again.

(Beatrice Lillie on her close friend Gertrude Lawrence’s brush with death in the 1920s, in her autobiography, Every Other Inch a Lady, 1972)

[sangfroidwoolf]

Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence filmed by Pathe on HMS Aquitania, departing for America to star in Charlot’s Revue of 1924.

[sangfroidwoolf]

Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, 1930s.

[operaqueen]

Gertrude Lawrence, on Broadway, in a production of Pygmalion.

[hunkhollywood]

Gertrude Lawrence,and  her husband Richard Aldrich - in the early 40s (maybe)

[operaqueen]

Gertrude Lawrence in the original Broadway production of The King and I, 1951.

[deborahkerr]

Gertrude Lawrence photographed by Florence Vandamm for Candle Light, 1929

[operaqueen]

Gertrude Lawrence meeting Anna Leonowens Grandson, Backstage during the original Broadway production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King & I. 1951.

[ladylizaelliott]

Gertrude Lawrence and Raymond Massey in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, 1945 (source)

[je-randolf]

Gertrude Lawrence 005

[beatonandbeyond]

Gertrude Lawrence by Dorothy Wilding (from The Sketch, June 24, 1925)

[britishstageandscreen]

Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, John Gielgud and Gertrude Lawrence at the Roehampton Theatrical Garden Party, 1949

[sangfroidwoolf]

Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie, c. 1926.

[sangfroidwoolf]

In the first few weeks of our knowing each other, she had stood up so well to my supercilious airs that we were happily laying the foundation of a friendship that endured years of playing together in the same shows, sharing rooms together and then a house we took in New York. In the not too distant future, we’d be pictured with arms entwined round each other’s necks or clasping hands, for all the world like the Dolly Sisters or Miss Tweedledum and Miss Tweedledee.

Bea Lillie, on her close friendship with Gertrude Lawrence. (via sangfroidwoolf)