Word: ouida
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last joint Martin & Lewis enterprises, in which Shirley ("I was a forward comedienne in a yellow sunsuit") distinguished herself chiefly by becoming the first performer ever to steal a scene from Jerry Lewis. In Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), she tripped into a memorable bit of miscasting-Ouida, the Hindu princess. Despite wig and dark makeup. Shirley looked about as Indian as Miss Rheingold, but she had no regrets. "Golly," she wrote a New York roommate about Producer Mike Todd, "he never came within three feet of pinching...
...corpses. Lady Diana Duff Cooper is able to evoke a world as fragile and opulent as an Edwardian conservatory filled with orchids, and still face the time when the glass broke in 1914 and the killing four-year frost came in. Her personal story is romantic enough to make Ouida-lady laureate of the plush paradise-blush for modesty. It is offset by the tough self-knowledge of an aristocracy that called a pretty fast tune but was prepared to pay a stiff price for the piper. One-fourth of the book is occupied by the war diaries and letters...
...trouble for any reader who tackles her today is that Ouida usually wrote with a perfume atomizer about aristocratic characters now very nearly extinct. None loved a lord more dearly than Ouida, and, mounted on the plush Pegasus of her imagination, she wrote to hounds with the best of them. She was a hopeless romantic-but she had the sense to know it. "I do not object to realism in fiction," she wrote, "but the passion flower is as real as the potato...
Scented Boudoirs. Amid the frostbitten tubers of modern fiction, no one, but no one, digs Ouida's passion flowers. Her heroes and heroines had names like Fulke Ravensworth, Marion Lady Vavasour and Vaux or Sir Fulke Erceldorme. Elinor Glyn and her tiger skin were nothing to Ouida's scented boudoirs. Yet, in an age before Cinerama, she was a great descriptive writer, able to evoke Venice, Vienna, Chamonix without ever having paid them so much as a courtesy call...
...born Louise (hence, from a childish lisp. Ouida) Rame, in Bury St. Edmunds. Her father, a mysterious Frenchman, may or may not have been a spy for Louis Napoleon. As she grew up, she displayed a tough mind and an absurd imagination-something between Racine and Edward Lear, says Biographer Stirling. When she insisted on behaving like her own fictional characters (e.g., flinging an ivory cigar case from her opera box at the feet of an Italian tenor), it became clear that England was not for her nor she for England...