WORLD FAMOUS WOMEN

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 28 June 1935, Page 9

WORLD FAMOUS WOMEN

HELEN MOODY; GRACE MORE ONE WANTS WIMBLEDON CROWN THE OTHER COVENT GARDEN. (Our Own Correspondent—By Air Mail) LONDON, June 8. Two women famous all over the world arrived in England this week on the same liner—Mrs Helen 'WillsMoody, lawn tennis star, anu Miss Grace Moore, prima donna and film star. Mrs Moody succumbed to the “fatal lure of Wimbledon,” and came over without her husband to try to win batik the championship. Miss Moore’s husband was with her; he is Valentin Parera, the Spanish film actor. . Mrs Wills-Moody said: “Am I aiming at the biggest star jn the sky ? Undoubtedly. Why not? It is not the star, anyway, that attracts me this time; it is the strong desire to be in the middle of everything that lawn tennis means at Wimbledon again. Unless you have played there you can never know what it means.’’. When Miss Grace Moore arrived everybody who is anybody at Covent Garden was there to welcome the prima donna. But this time dignity was out. Movie cameramen, Press agents and autograph hounds surged round and engulfed the American blonde who is the singing idol of the world. A single film, “One Night of Love,” has done it. Its success has been so terrific—the British public has paid £330,000 to see it—that Grace Moore already has at her feet as big a public as any carefully built-up Hollywood queen. London fell for Grace Moore in two minutes. She is so natural and human that shop-worn adjectives need not apply. She neither dresses nor acts like a Queen of Song.

“The success of my picture seems to have done something to prima donnas,” she said. “They are all reducing like mad. The two hundred pounders are now 150’s and the ISO’s are 130’s. And they are all on the way to Hollywood. Goodness knows 'that will happen. “1 hope with all my heart that the films they make are good, and not just copies of mine. If they are not, it is probably the end. of m .V ambition to do a full-length opera on the screen.”