Latest news with #WalkontheWildSide
Irish Examiner
7 days ago
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Ernest Cantillon: 'An empty restaurant, built to have lots of people enjoying themselves. It was strange, haunting'
Electric on the South Mall, an art deco building, built in the 1930s by the O'Shea brothers who came back from Chicago after the 1929 crash. I bought it in 2009, and O'Shea Brothers renovated it for me. It had a lot of history – for me, an emotive place. I opened it as a bar and restaurant in 2010, I was 27, my biggest undertaking before or since. Quite quickly, it became a big business. We were open all hours – at its busiest, we had 60 employees. I lived nearby, on the Grand Parade. Effectively, I lived in Electric for 13 years – everything bar slept. I adored it. My father's office was two doors down, my grandfather was a GP next door – they used to live over the surgery. We have a phenomenal history with that part of town. My mother, brother, and sister were in and out multiple times a day. I met my wife, Sally, there in 2011. My family, Sally's family, ate there every Christmas Eve. So, Electric was more than a job, there was a big emotional connection. We were very busy, vibrant, heading into covid – we never really emerged out of covid. It was like turning around a ship – I couldn't re-ignite it, could never seem to catch up. So the 24-hour period: December 23, 2023. I didn't necessarily know that day it would be the last day. Our plan was to close from Christmas into January while I assessed what to do. I knew something dramatic would happen: it was no longer going to be Electric with me at the helm. It was the end of a chapter – I was no longer the best person to run that business, I was out of ideas. That last day was bittersweet. Bizarrely, it was a very nice day. By that time in December, most people are on holidays, everyone's in good form. That day every year, lots of people home for Christmas would call in. Hundreds worked there over the years – we took on lots of college students in the summer – so people back from Dublin, the UK, would call in. But it was a highly emotional day. There were staff who'd been there since it opened. We were a crew who enjoyed working together, and I was breaking that up. My life was so interconnected with it – routine-wise my default was to go to Electric. It would be strange not having that anymore. I was very proud of Electric, my name synonymous with it. It was scary, terrifying – someone would come the next day and the door would be closed. There was a feeling of having let down colleagues. There was also relief. I wasn't going to have to keep slogging on – it had been a hard slog since covid. My family came in for dinner, my three sons too – the last time we'd eat there as a family. Walking out, 9pm, Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' playing, Sally and I stopped. In that moment, I knew I was walking out on a chapter that had dominated my life for 13 years. Even covid, while initially stressful, I knew the world couldn't fail. Whereas now, we were the only ones closing. On your own, it's a very public failure, particularly when your identity's tied up in it. I was on top of the practical side – I had good advisors, accountants. It was: What will I do with myself? I felt people's perceptions of me would change. There was a period when I was almost embarrassed, self-conscious, walking down the Mall. It was almost like the death of a friend, like losing a bit of yourself. It took a year to sell the building. An empty building takes lots of maintenance – I went in most days. Definitely not good for the soul. An empty restaurant, built to have lots of people enjoying themselves... It was strange, haunting. Supporters of the Cork City Hospital's Children's Club gathered at the Lough, Cork, to announce details of their upcoming fundraiser, "Lap the Lough," where a trail of coins will circle the Lough on June 2nd. Included are John Looney, Mick Finn, Ernest Cantillon, Pat Fitzgibbon, Emer O'Mahony and Eimear McCarthy. Picture Dan Linehan. The staff of Electric were so unbelievably understanding and supportive, all of them so concerned for me. Small acts of kindness meant a massive amount. People sending messages, saying they'd got engaged there, brought their parents when they'd got their first job, people with fond memories of summers they'd worked there, picking up glasses – those messages were hugely consoling. I'm disappointed Electric failed. Knowing I gave it my best shot – just all my ideas had run their course – makes it easier. And I'm still here – involved in other business projects, less encumbering, less stressful. There's a whole other part of you besides your job, your business. My life's happy, I have healthy children. I like what I do. Losing Electric is one of the biggest bad things to happen to me, which puts it in perspective – makes me realise how happy my life has been. Getting back up, dusting yourself off – I didn't know I had resilience. I discovered I've a bit of steel in me. If I'd known at the outset, 'I'll have 12 great years with Electric and on the 13th I'll fail', I'd say all day long: I'd do it again. It was worth it, I wouldn't change it. Ernest Cantillon is an organiser with the 'Lap The Lough' fundraiser in aid of Cork City Hospitals' Children's Club taking place this Bank Holiday Monday, June 2, 11am to 2pm. The fundraising event aims to create a full circle of Euro coins in a ring of hope to help bring sick children to Disneyland Paris. Donate here. Read More Bernard O'Shea: Five things Peppa Pig needs to know about having three siblings in the family
New European
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Capucine, the French cover girl turned Hollywood star
What could be done to improve the acting of Capucine, the French cover girl that Hollywood wanted to turn into a movie star? On the New Orleans set of Walk on the Wild Side in 1961, her co-star Laurence Harvey had an idea. When one of her big scenes took an age to get right, Harvey told director Edward Dmytryk: 'You'd better shoot it in the dark.' The antipathy between the leading pair made for a miserable and much-delayed production, Harvey telling anyone who would listen that Capucine was only in the movie because its producer Charles Feldman was her agent, her responding that Harvey 'wasn't man enough' to play her lover, he firing back 'perhaps if you were more of a woman, I would be more of a man… kissing you is like kissing the side of a beer bottle.' If this back-and-forth sounds particularly like a bit of cinematic dialogue, there's a reason. More than six decades on, we know that the man who complained that the woman wasn't womanly enough and the woman who did the reverse were both bisexual and well-versed in all the subterfuge that an era of morality clauses demanded. When filming on Walk on the Wild Side took place, Capucine was officially the fiance of Dirk Bogarde, sharing a home in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, with the British actor and his manager Anthony 'Tote' Forwood, who was Bogarde's real lover. Meanwhile, she was serving up quotes like this for the press: 'Every time I get in front of a camera, I think of it as an attractive man I am meeting for the first time'. Looking at the pictures and the films now, we can see the cheekbones, the aquiline nose, the full lips, the icy stare. But who was the real Capucine? We know that she was born Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre in 1927, in the south-eastern village of Saint-Raphaël. Depending on which account you believe – and Capucine was a deeply unreliable narrator – her parents were either completely disinterested or too strict and controlling. There are suggestions that Germaine may have spent the first two years of her life in medical institutions, either because of parental neglect or (according to wild rumours in the French press) that she was born intersex and needed a series of operations. According to the established Capucine legend, it was while the 22-year-old Germaine Lefebvre was walking down a Parisian street that her life was forever changed. Instead of telling fashion photographer Henry Coste where to get off when he asked whether she would model for him, Germaine agreed to a photo session. No sooner were the pictures put in front of Hubert de Givenchy than the newly monikered Capucine – it means 'nasturtium' – was the fashion house's new face. There's little to suggest she cared much for the fashion world. Of more interest were the movie offers that came her way, on the back of which she became involved with the actor Pierre Trabaud. Married in early 1950, the pair would divorce within the year, the model refusing to accept Trabaud's violence towards her. Alone again in the world, the bored but beautiful Capucine took herself to New York where the modelling work was better paid and you bumped into a better class of stranger. The films were also bigger in America. After bit parts in European pictures and an eye-catching turn as Franz Liszt's lover in the Bogarde picture Song Without End , Capucine was cast in the John Wayne vehicle North to Alaska ; the start of her relationship with Feldman, who was also Wayne's agent. In taking on Capucine, Feldman let it be believed that he'd taken up with the stunning newcomer. He insisted she learn English – though this was not fully successful – and pushed other clients to work with his protege. And so Capucine starred in Walk on the Wild Side , played opposite William Holden in The Lion , and stood up to Rex Harrison in The Honey Pot . In all of them, she looked stunning, but her performances were uneven. She was best at comedy, and excellent as Inspector Clouseau's libidinous wife Simone in the first Pink Panther movie. She got on so well with Peter Sellers that they worked together again in What's New Pussycat? Until his death in 1980, Capucine always referred to the notoriously temperamental actor as 'a marvellous man.' The screen spouses had something in common: today, both would probably have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. If Capucine's time at the top was limited, it was in part due to Feldman's untimely death in 1968. Then there were Federico Fellini's remarks upon casting her in Satyricon – 'She has a face to launch a thousand ships… but she was born too late.' Her kind of elegance now less in demand, there remained a place in film and TV for Capucine but it tended to be thanks to old friends like Pink Panther co-star Robert Wagner, who cast her in an episode of Hart to Hart . She bemoaned the lack of good parts for women over 40 but did not bear grudges – apart from one. Despite receiving a belated apology from her Walk on the Wild Side co-star she once said: 'Of all the men I have worked with, John Wayne, Dirk Bogarde, William Holden… are my friends. But I hate Laurence Harvey! Write that down, please, write it! I hate him with a passion!' The spotlight having moved away, Capucine made a life for herself in Lausanne, Switzerland, looking after her cats and spending time with an old friend from her modelling days, Audrey Hepburn. She was more open about her sexuality, telling an interviewer who asked if she would describe herself as heterosexual: 'Oh, I wouldn't. But if the publicity people would see a need to say that, I don't care… most publicity is not true.' The relative isolation of her new life gave the star ample time to contemplate the one obstacle she'd never been able to come to terms with, the bipolar disorder that had long threatened to claim her life and did exactly that on a March afternoon in 1990, with a deliberate fall from the balcony of her eighth-floor apartment. A decade later, once Bogarde too had died, the BBC screened a documentary about his life. Home movie footage – presumably shot by Tote Forwood – shows Bogarde and Capucine on the terrace of their house in the home counties. Sometimes wooden on the big screen, here Capucine is wonderfully animated. Such is her joie de vivre, one almost forgets that this too is a performance. But for someone whose life was often not what it appeared to be, it's lovely to see that, at least from time to time, there were roles she clearly enjoyed playing.
