The Empress of Ireland: Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship. Christopher Robbins - Softcover

Robbins, Christopher

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9780743220729: The Empress of Ireland: Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship. Christopher Robbins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743220722 ISBN 13: 9780743220729

Publisher: Scribner Book Company, 2005

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Very funny and genuinely moving, THE EMPRESS OF IRELAND is an inspiring portrait of the unique and improbable friendship between Christopher Robbins, then an impoverished writer in his twenties, and Brian Desmond Hurst, Ireland's most prolific film director. It began when the author -- a journalist who had never read a script -- was asked to write the screenplay for Hurst's swansong movie, an ambitious biblical epic intended to be his ticket to heaven. As work commenced on the 'Box Office Blockbuster', and later the director's life story, the 'Big Bestseller', an unlikely but uproarious rapport was born. Full of character, incident and humour, Robbins' memoir is a warm and wonderful tribute to friendship and to one of life's true originals.

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About the Author:

Christopher Robbins is a screenwriter and author. His previous books include AIR AMERICA, which was made into a film starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr, and THE TEST OF COURAGE, a biography of the wartime Resistance hero and language expert Michel Thomas. He currently lives in France.

From Publishers Weekly:

Brian Desmond Hurst (1900–1986) hadn't made a movie in nearly a decade when Robbins met him in the early '70s, but the director was able to persuade the struggling young journalist to write an epic screenplay about the birth of Christ. The film was destined to remain in perpetual development and confound Robbins's expectations at every turn (a brief encounter with Sir Michael Redgrave, for example, turned out not to be about casting the role of Herod, but about soliciting Robbins's help in discreetly paying off a male prostitute blackmailing the famous actor). By this point, it becomes readily apparent to readers that the real story here is about the unlikely bond Robbins developed with Hurst, an old-school queen who barreled through life with an engaging combination of flamboyance and guardedness. Anecdotes haphazardly follow one another, held together by the force of Hurst's personality (and Robbins's willingness to mock his own youthful sexual insecurity). For the most part, it's all one extended lark, although Hurst pulls back the curtain of self-invention in moving interludes to reveal the truth about his Irish childhood and the brutal suffering on the battlefields of Gallipoli. Though this title may primarily be of interest to gay readers, anyone who loved Withnail & I will be entertained by Robbins's comic misadventures. (May)
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