HOME AT LONG LAST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 58, 9 March 1935, Page 5 (Supplement)

HOME AT LONG LAST.

CLIVE BROOK IN JX>Nl>Oir.

"I'VE BEEN KT THE MOVIES."

"Of course, what I'd really like to do is a play in the West End," is one of the oldest lines handed out to sceptical reporters by returning English actors and actresses greeting England's shores after varying degrees of success m tne American theatres and cinemas. Sometimes it actually happens; more often not. Douglas Fairbanks, jun., Constance Cummings, and Laura la Plante are three who have come, said and done. . When Olive Brook arrived in London recently after ten unbroken years of highly remunerative exile in California he made the old familiar announcement. But he meant it. He has been looking for a play ever since, and now he hae found one which really interests him. It is a new play by Clifford Bax about the Borgias, that colourful Italian family of the fifteenth century. Not So Famous. Clive Brook's last stage appearance was with Iris Hoey at the Ambassadors in 1023, in a play called "Clothes and the Woman." Three years before that, in another Iris Hoey play, there might have been seen a young actress, Mildred Evelyn by name. When she became Mrs. Clive Brook one Saturday morning some 14 years ago, the event rated six lines in the local papers. _ Before the screen discovered nim Brook could earn about £10 a "week on the stage. It went up £100 before he left Britain for Hollywood's £600. He was not out of work for a single day all the time he was there. Clive Brook is extraordinarily modeet. He remarked to his interviewer that from the commercial point of view hi 3 appearance in a play now "might have the added meretricious attraction of his having 'been in the That, no doubt, is a distinct possibility.