Latest news with #NoëlCoward
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Playwright Noel Coward's $10.3 Million Former Connecticut Estate Overlooks the Long Island Sound
A Connecticut estate with ties to film and theater royalty has just hit the market for $10.3 million. Dubbed Pebbles, the Fairfield property was designed in 1927 by the architect Francis Hamilton. Later on, the English playwright Noël Coward and his partner John C. Wilson, a Broadway producer, owned the stately spread, and over the years, several stars of screen and stage used Pebbles as a summer getaway, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and Richard Rodgers. Wendy Ryan and Andrew Whiteley at Brown Harris Stevens hold the listing. More from Robb Report BMW Just Unveiled the Most Powerful Rear-Wheel Drive M Car Yet An L.A. Home With Ties to Leonardo DiCaprio and Adrian Grenier Can Now Be Yours for $25 Million Here's How You Can Attend the Premiere of Brad Pitt's 'F1' Movie The six-bedroom, nine-bath Georgian Revival mansion sits on almost three acres with views of the Long Island Sound and Manhattan skyline. Over the years, it's been both carefully maintained and updated by a lineage of owners, meaning that classic details are paired with modern-day features. Off the foyer are both a formal living room and a more casual family room, both with wood-burning fireplaces. The large eat-in kitchen is done up with stark white cabinetry, while the adjacent dining area is surrounded by picture windows that look out toward the water. The bedrooms are all located upstairs, with yet another fireplace found in the primary suite. Here, you can also relax in the bathroom's soaking tub or kick back in the private lounge. The home's basement level, meanwhile, has been turned into a rec room, offering plenty of space for children or adults to play. Out back, ample green space surrounds the pool, which can be seen in the 1968 film The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster. A couple of garden plots are scattered around. One is centered around a fountain, while another has more of a southwestern, desert vibe. Manicured hedges line the walkways and the perimeter of the lot. A little more than 50 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, Fairfield has long been a favored commuter suburb of New York City. With easy access to both nature and the beach, it offers the best of the city and country. The town is also known for some pretty spectacular homes. To wit: a $7 million mansion inspired by the Vanderbilt family's Shelburne Farms estate in Vermont and built by architect Jack Franzen for the late businessman Mickey of Robb Report The 10 Priciest Neighborhoods in America (And How They Got to Be That Way) In Pictures: Most Expensive Properties Click here to read the full article.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Adrian Fisher obituary
My friend Adrian Fisher, who has died aged 67 of a heart attack, was an actor and opera singer. He lived for many years in Antwerp, Belgium, appearing in more than 700 performances with the local Vlaamse Opera House from 1992 to 2004, before touring extensively across Europe in solo roles, including as Stárek in Jenůfa (2007) at the Muziektheater Amsterdam and on a national tour of the Netherlands, and as Charles Guiteau in Assassins (2010) at the Teatergarasjen Bergen in Norway, followed by a tour to Poland and France. Fascinated by the parallel lives of Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, in 2009 Adrian collaborated with Stuart Barham to write and star in The Two Most Perfect Things at the Jermyn Street theatre in London, at the Edinburgh festival and at the Hotel Hermitage in Monte Carlo. For a long time he had also picked up work as an English language teacher for international singers, and as the years passed he gradually scaled back on performing to focus more on coaching – his strong affinity for Benjamin Britten's operas led him to work with international casts for several productions of Peter Grimes for the director David Alden. For a time he ran his own agency, representing singers and liaising with opera houses around Europe. Adrian was born in Leeds to Janos Fischer, a renowned industrial chemist, and Marieanne Frank, a technician, Jewish refugees who had fled Germany to the UK in 1939, just days before the outbreak of the second world war. He went to Bradford grammar school and then the University of Kent (1975-78), from where he graduated with a degree in drama and English. He then did another drama degree at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, which included the study of speech production and breathing technique. Embarking initially on an acting career, he appeared in two musicals in 1981 with the London-based Spectrum theatre company, one of which, Oh, Coward!, went on a national tour. He worked in children's theatre with several touring companies from 1982 to 1984, before setting up his own company, Smalltime. Deciding to retrain as an opera singer, in 1987 and 1988 he completed a final degree at the Royal College of Music Opera School, after which he worked successfully for a number of years in the UK and Ireland with various opera companies, including at Glyndebourne, predominantly in the chorus but also as a principal. He made his West End debut in 1988 at the Donmar theatre in the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis), written by Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kien while they were in Theresienstadt concentration camp, where coincidentally many of Adrian's relatives were interned before being murdered in Auschwitz. His international solo debut came with the Wexford Festival Opera in 1989, performing as Friar Tuck in Marschner's Der Templer und die Jüdin, before his long stint in Antwerp. Charismatic and dynamic, Adrian was a kind-hearted, generous and funny man who helped many people throughout his life, including aspiring singers and several godchildren. He is survived by his sister, Rosalind, and his nieces, Katie and Nikki.
New European
22-04-2025
- Politics
- New European
Britain needs a new national story
On the eve of the war, in his play This Happy Breed, the writer Noël Coward summed up the attitude that would sustain the British people from the blitz to VE Day. In its final scene, a lower-middle-class south Londoner delivers a soliloquy to his newborn grandson: Amid the twin geopolitical and tariff crises inflicted on us by Donald Trump, Millennials and Gen Z-ers are having to learn something that we, who grew up in the aftermath of the second world war, have always understood. Freedom of action in the world comes to countries who possess armed force and consensus around a national story. 'The ordinary people like you and me know something better than all the fussy old politicians put together – we know what we belong to, where we come from, and where we're going. We may not know it with our brains, but we know it with our roots.' Since the Trump-induced crisis hit us, I've been wondering to what extent any of us can make this claim. At the extremes we are a divided country, with Islamists and white racists in a mental state of civil war with one another; with refugees reduced to pariah status in the popular press; and with all kinds of disinformation proponents – including the US vice-president and the world's richest man – operating in our information space, alongside the familiar cast of Chinese, Russian and Iranian bots. And because friction sells newspapers, the culture war has become the leitmotif of the opinion columns, the podcasts and the Substacks even of mainstream journalists. We are, in short, punch drunk on divisiveness, to an extent the Labour and Liberal Democrat leaderships recognise, but can do little about – not least because the Tory, Reform, SNP and Plaid leaderships seem determined to use every issue as a cultural wedge. Is there consensus on what we belong to? Not between the centre and the extremes: Nigel Farage gets paid good money to disparage everything about this country. Tommy Robinson gets his attacks on the British rule of law and criminal justice system amplified by global disinformation networks. Meanwhile, an alliance of Islamists and left wing antisemites make the outrageous claim that the UK is 'responsible for genocide' in Gaza. Is there consensus about where we come from? Actually, in a bizarre confirmation of the horseshoe theory, the extremes agree: we come from a 400-year experiment in white racist empire building. One side thinks that was brilliant, while the other thinks it exempts them from showing any affinity with the UK's national interest today. Is there consensus about where we are going? There is not. Reform, currently scoring above 20% in the polls, wants to align the UK strategically with Trump's isolationism and protectionism, while the Lib Dems, Greens and nationalist parties want to align with Europe. Labour, its voice paralysed by the government's duty to use diplomatic language, can't even explain to its most loyal voters the true nature of Trump's perfidy. From now on this country's security will have to rely on military coalitions of the willing, and on an economy re-industrialised sufficiently to convince Russia that we can sustain ourselves in the face of aggression. It is likely, and in our national interest, that we will have to extend our nuclear deterrent to our European allies – or see countries like Ukraine and Poland seek their own nuclear weapons. And it is certain that we will need to spend more on defence. I am confident that, at Westminster, a broad political consensus can be established around rearmament, deterrence and a security-focused growth and energy strategy. I am not confident that such a strategy will be either widely accepted or even understood. Pollsters report that, above all among the young, there is no appetite for even a minor increase in defence spending, no real understanding of the danger Trump poses, and no consensus about what our national story actually is. Until we address this, the government can produce all the shiny national security strategies it likes, and the defence community can attend any number of well-heeled conferences, but without a consensus about who we are, where we come from and where we're going, none of it can be actioned. In Coward's play, the soliloquy ends like this: 'We 'aven't lived and died and struggled all these hundreds of years to get decency and justice and freedom for ourselves without being prepared to fight 50 wars if need be – to keep 'em.' Robert Donat, the actor originally chosen to say these lines in the wartime movie version, refused the part – because he thought the speech embodied the hubris that had got Britain into the war. There are probably many among Gen Z who might think the same now. But Coward understood that what was about to happen was an anti-fascist war. The only thing that was going to unite a country divided by class, much in the same way we are divided by region, income and ethnicity, was if everyone could sign up to an overarching narrative. As we approach the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the starting point of every conversation I want to have with young people is the sentiment in Coward's play. We are fighting fascism on all sides. We did it before. We can do it again.
