Latest news with #TheBridgeOnTheRiverKwai
Ottawa Citizen
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Ottawa Citizen
Graydon Carter's toques to riches story began with 'instructive failures' in Ottawa
One of the most celebrated magazine editors of his generation, Graydon Carter grew up in Ottawa an unlikely success. Article content Article content His altogether miraculous rise from university dropout — he was a distracted student at both uOttawa and Carleton — to the editor's chair at Vanity Fair during the golden age of magazines is chronicled in his new memoir, 'When The Going Was Good.' Article content Article content Carter, now 75 and the eminence grise of New York City style, spent his formative years in Manor Park, where he was a resentful victim of Ottawa's winter, much burdened by its wools and flannels. Article content Article content The book reveals he was so directionless as a young man that he fell into the federal bureaucracy — and narrowly escaped a career as a public servant. Article content 'I had dreams, but nobody would have ever called me ambitious,' writes Carter. 'It could also be said that my parents, and indeed a good number of my friends, thought that life, in the professional sense, had little in store for me.' Article content Carter's Saskatchewan-born father, Edward, was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot and Second World War veteran who loved nothing more than to fart and to collect wood. He won the heart of Graydon's mother, by among other things, farting loudly in a crowded movie theatre and blaming her for the crime, and he boasted to friends of his ability to bum trumpet the theme song from 'The Bridge On The River Kwai.' Article content Article content Carter remembers being press-ganged to poach firewood from the Greenbelt. His father was 'a bit tight,' Carter reports, and would regularly enlist him and his brother to help troll National Capital Commission forest in search of felled logs. Article content Article content 'Like moonshiners,' he writes, 'we did all this in the near dark, with just the jerky movements of my father's spotlight casting an eerie silent-movie aspect to the agony.' Article content Carter's mother, Margaret Kelk, was considerably more refined. The daughter of a soap executive, she grew up in Toronto's Forest Hill neighbourhood, attended Havergal College, and summered at the family's Muskoka cottage. She was dating the captain of the University of Toronto football team when Edward Carter suddenly blew into her life. Article content They married in September 1946, and welcomed their first son, Graydon, three years later. In the early 1950s, the family moved to Zweibrücken, Germany, where Edward Carter was stationed with the RCAF.
Evening Standard
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Tom Cruise reveals chance encounter in London takeaway led to Rain Man role
Sir David is considered one of the most important figures of British cinema, behind epics such as The Bridge On The River Kwai and Lawrence Of Arabia.
