Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool - Softcover

Turner, Peter.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140103678 ISBN 13: 9780140103670

Publisher: Penquin, 1988

Synopsis

Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, and Vanessa Redgrave

The Golden Age of Hollywood, a young British actor, a love affair, and a tragedy, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool is Peter Turner's touching memoir of the last days of Hollywood icon Gloria Grahame, the Oscar-winner best known for her portrayal of irresistible femme fatales in films such as The Big Heat, Oklahoma and The Bad and the Beautiful.

On September 29, 1981, Peter Turner received a phone call that would change his life. His former lover, Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, had collapsed in a Lancaster hotel and was refusing medical attention. He took her into his chaotic and often eccentric family’s home in Liverpool to see her through her last days. Though their affair had ended years before, it was to him that she turned in her final hour of need.

Taking place over the course of three weeks in Turner’s larger-than-life working-class family home, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is an affectionate, moving, and wryly humorous memoir of friendship, love, and stardom.

About this title

About the Author

PETER TURNER was born in Liverpool in 1952 the youngest of nine children. He was educated at a local comprehensive school and started acting at the age of sixteen with The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. He worked extensively in British theatre both in London and the regions. He played Terry Adams in three seasons of the hit television drama series Spearhead and his film parts included playing Trinculo in Derek Jarman’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He met the Academy Award–winning American film star Gloria Grahame in London in 1978. They became lovers and their relationship lasted until the end of her life, dying from cancer in 1981. He wrote his memoir Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool in 1984. Peter has also written screenplays and devised and written scripts, British television, plays, and serials.

From Publishers Weekly

Turner recalls the dying days of the late Gloria Grahame, a movie actress who had some success in the '50s and '60s, winning an Oscar for her performance in The Bad and the Beautiful. In England in 1981 to appear in a play, Grahame reached the terminal stage of stomach cancer and called on Turner, her ex-lover, for support. He took her to his parents' home in Liverpool, where her condition continued to deteriorate; along with being a food faddist, she was so distrusting of doctors that she would not enter a hospital. Eventually Turner contacted two of her children, who went to England and flew her to New York, wher she died. As a picture of a caring lower-middle-class British family, willing to make great sacrifices to help a stranger, the story is heartwarming, but there is little else to recommend it.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penquin
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140103678
• ISBN 13: 9780140103670
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1