HENRY FORD RIVALS THE PASSION PLAY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19240, 29 November 1930, Page 22 (Supplement)

HENRY FORD RIVALS THE PASSION PLAY.

CROWDS MOB AMERICAN CAR MANUFACTURER. (Special to the “Star.”) LONDON, September 27. A serious rival to the last performance of this year’s Passion Play arrived in the village of Oberammergau this afternoon in the person of Henry Ford. Mr Ford is supposed to have arrived incognito, but within one minute of stepping from his motor-car visitors of twenty nations had crowded round his hotel. Pie was mobbed all the afternoon and evening as he went from shop to shop and house to house visiting leading actors in the Passion Play and returning an afternono tea visit with Anton Lang, the Christ of 1922, who paid him a visit in Detroit the same year. Mr Ford took the salute to-night from the balcony of his hotel, when the village band marched round followed by visitors arm-in-arm, and there is little doubt that the majority of people who will go into the theatre to-morrow morning will have their eyes for the motor-car magnate. The ex-Queen of Greece, another i visitor to the village, passes almost unrecognised. The Mary Magdalene of this year’s play, Hansi Preisinger, is the most excited girl in the village. She has been engaged for some time to a professor in Munich, but could not get married in the summer because she was appearing in the play. On Tuesday week she is to marry her sweetheart, and half the village of Oberammergau will be at the church at Munich for the ceremony. An army of barbers has invaded the village to-night ready f or work on Tuesday morning at eight o’clock, when the whole village, men and girls, will queue up to be shorn of the locks they have grown for a whole year in readiness for the play. What happens to the yards of hair that is cut off nobody knows, but I hear weird stories. Some sav that the men have their hair made into mittens or ankle pads to keep them warm in the winter.