randy_byers | Entries tagged with elsa lanchester

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'I'm never more witty than when I've had a little nip. I see better, I hear better, and I feel much better.'

-- Elsa Lanchester as Mrs. Oates in The Spiral Staircase (1946). I've got a thing for Elsa. She is mostly comic relief in this film, and she's perfect in that niche, wearing big clothes to make her seem plumper, a kindly clown. The beautiful girls are murdered in the dark, but Mrs. Oates just gets drunk on stolen brandy and passes out by the kitchen fire. There's also a strange scene where the mute girl gives out a strangled cry that sounds remarkably like Elsa's iconic screech as the Bride of Frankenstein.

French was followed in 1934, both at the Old Vic and at Sadler's Wells, by Elsa Lanchester, playing a very art-deco and decidedly feminine Ariel in a silver tunic, wings, and a cape, and wearing lipstick and mascara. James Agate praised her extravagantly for the lightness and radiance she brought to the part, compared her (perversely, surely) to Nijinsky's Faun, and claimed that 'until Miss Elsa Lanchester the part of Ariel has never been acted'.

-- Stephen Orgel, Introduction to The Tempest, Oxford University Press, 1987

Ariel as Tinkerbell? Makes me wish, possibly obscurely, that Julie Taymor was using Tilda Swinton as Ariel in her movie adaptation. And yes, that's also Charles Laughton as Prospero.