TWO REASONS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20930, 8 January 1938, Page 18

TWO REASONS

“HOLLYWOOD IS MY GOAL” “Hollywood is my goal.” said Gertrude Lawrence in "The Sunday Sun” film supplement recently. "For two reasons; I am not exactly impervious

to the lure of money. I want lots of it, to spend on my house and my daughter, and for travel. I want enough money saved when I retire so I that I can afford to write—or to try, anyway. And I want, desperately, vacations between pictures. “Making a film is terribly hard work for five or six weeks. Doing a play is terribly hard work for 12 months, if the piece is successful, and if it’s not you’ve got nothing to show for your pains. “One of my objections to the stage is the necessity to over-play if the vehicle is weak. ‘Charm under com-

pulsion.’ I call it. “When you have to squeeze your personality dry night after night to keep the audience from coughing or dozing off, you can't very well give your best to a part. After a play has been running for some time you find yourself shamelessly using little obvious tricks to bolster up the performance, and often by the end of the run your characterisation is a comic-strip caricature of the one created by the author. There is no such danger in films. Your best performance—the one that is right and true —is selected out of the many you have given. Between films your nerve are reconditioned by rest and change, and you are fresh for the next ‘performance.’ “That is the kind of life I want. My cottage in Buckinghamshire <1 like to call it a cottage, although it has 19 rooms and a ghost) would serve as a haven 'between film assignments, and when curling-up-with-the-book-of-the-month palled I would week-end in Bali. “I’m tired of twentieth-century service, lifts and cablegrams and lun-cheons-under-glass. What I need is more civilised living in uncivilised places. “Hollywood can make my dream come true.”