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Two brief, related one-page TLS (17 Mar. & 3rd Apr. 1967) on white paper: both typed in black, featuring a 8, Burton Bank, London, N.1. address, signed in blue-black ink. Three folds to each, a little creased, nick to righthand edge of the March TLS. Very good Two apologetic TLS from the British actor, Eric Porter, to the literary biographer and translator, Margaret Crosland, acknowledging receipt of an unnamed play, during a break from filming the BBC adaptation of John Galsworth's family saga, in the first: "I have just finished a rather concentrated fortnight of activity on "The Forsyte Saga", and consequently have had no time to keep pace with my correspondence." He hopes to read the play during the next week "as I have been given five days off in order to recover from the aforementioned slog!"; the second TLS acknowledges Crosland's follow-up letter and one enclosed from Roger Bancroft, notes that he is re-reading the play and closes with: "Sorry to cause this delay, but I am quite busy at the moment with 'The Forsyte Saga'". During the spring of 1967, Porter (1928 1995) was filming his role as the tortured solicitor Soames Forsyte in the BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (1967), which proved a huge international success; his performance won the 1968 BAFTA Best Actor award and made him a star. From Margaret Crosland's archive. Crosland (1920-2017) was an important and prolific British literary biographer and translator of French and Italian authors, "who pioneered Cocteau" in Britain (Owen, 2009). She was the French literature consultant for the British publisher Peter Owen, who issued many of her biographies and translations, and thus she played a crucial role in introducing French authors, such as Jean Cocteau and Colette, as well as the Marquis de Sade, Apollinaire and Anaïs Nin, to mid-century British audiences. Owen observed that Crosland was "very important in advising us on books to publish. It was Margaret who pioneered Cocteau [. and] led us to Dalí, as she knew his novel Hidden Faces" (ibid). Her biographical subjects included both Colette and Jean Cocteau (titles much under discussion in her archive), Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Radiguet and Edith Piaf, and she translated works by writers including Sade, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt and Cesare Pavese, as well as Colette and Cocteau. She was also a voluminous correspondent, literary broker and networker, as her letters evidence in rich and fascinating detail. Peter Owen (2009) Interview with Steven Fowler, Vice Magazine.
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