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Review
'A winningly queer little book about a winningly queer little man.' Matthew Sweet, Independent on Sunday; 'A pungent, opinionated and brilliantly intuitive biography of the saddest act in the history of British cinema... Lewis, in this diverting little book, hits on Hawtrey... and distils something alchemical from his sadness: a quintessence of a sort of Englishness.' New Statesman
This is one for connoisseurs of camp. Charles Hawtrey appeared in all the Carry On films. Wizened and outrageous, he was the butt of everyone else in the movies, with even more excruciating double entendres than Kenneth Williams or Sid James. So emaciated he almost seemed not to be there at all ('you could read a newspaper through him', Lewis says) he made a career almost exclusively out of the Carry Ons, and after they ended was unemployed - but also so given to drink that he was unemployable. He was pretty unemployable from the beginning (born George Hartree, he got his first job by pretending that he was the son of the great light comedian whose name he adopted), though he had his successes - in revue, for instance, as Farola the Female Fakir, and in drag in a comedy thriller - he was billed as 'Charlotte Tree' and deceived all the critics into thinking he was an extremely promising actress. Roger Lewis's book is highly discursive (in the main text and innumerable footnotes there is almost as much about Kenneth Williams, Will Hay and the Ealing comedies as about the chief subject), and written in a familiar style which is from time to time so casual that it becomes almost illiterate. He is also occasionally careless about facts, and sometimes too lazy to check his quotations. But his book is fascinating and occasionally scabrously funny - as when the elderly Hawtree sets fire to his bed and is rescued by a fireman who carries him, naked, down a ladder, the helmet he is offered to cover his genitals placed firmly on his head. He then insists on being carried up again, to rescue his boyfriend. (Kirkus UK)
Evening Standard, November 2001
Roger Lewis’s small but perfectly formed biography. . . like its subject, Lewis’s book may be slim but it packs a surprising amount between its covers.
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'A winningly queer little book about a winningly queer little man.' Matthew Sweet, Independent on Sunday; 'A pungent, opinionated and brilliantly intuitive biography of the saddest act in the history of British cinema... Lewis, in this diverting little book, hits on Hawtrey... and distils something alchemical from his sadness: a quintessence of a sort of Englishness.' New Statesman
This is one for connoisseurs of camp. Charles Hawtrey appeared in all the Carry On films. Wizened and outrageous, he was the butt of everyone else in the movies, with even more excruciating double entendres than Kenneth Williams or Sid James. So emaciated he almost seemed not to be there at all ('you could read a newspaper through him', Lewis says) he made a career almost exclusively out of the Carry Ons, and after they ended was unemployed - but also so given to drink that he was unemployable. He was pretty unemployable from the beginning (born George Hartree, he got his first job by pretending that he was the son of the great light comedian whose name he adopted), though he had his successes - in revue, for instance, as Farola the Female Fakir, and in drag in a comedy thriller - he was billed as 'Charlotte Tree' and deceived all the critics into thinking he was an extremely promising actress. Roger Lewis's book is highly discursive (in the main text and innumerable footnotes there is almost as much about Kenneth Williams, Will Hay and the Ealing comedies as about the chief subject), and written in a familiar style which is from time to time so casual that it becomes almost illiterate. He is also occasionally careless about facts, and sometimes too lazy to check his quotations. But his book is fascinating and occasionally scabrously funny - as when the elderly Hawtree sets fire to his bed and is rescued by a fireman who carries him, naked, down a ladder, the helmet he is offered to cover his genitals placed firmly on his head. He then insists on being carried up again, to rescue his boyfriend. (Kirkus UK)
Evening Standard, November 2001
Roger Lewis’s small but perfectly formed biography. . . like its subject, Lewis’s book may be slim but it packs a surprising amount between its covers.
See all Product Description
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66% buy the item featured on this page: Charles Hawtrey 1914-1988: The Man Who Was Private Widdle £5.24 |
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