1990s

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Sacrifice: The Sacred Voice of Belkis Ayón

On 12th September 1999, the Cuban art world was left reeling reeling by the news that one of its brightest stars had fatally shot herself at the age of 32. No note was found, and she had been considered in good spirits by her family and friends. To this day, as her sister Katia has sadly remarked, the reason for Belkis Ayón’s suicide remains a secret that she took with her ‘to the grave.’ Her legacy is a collection of images that are at once terrifying, tragic and haunting, yet exuberant, invigorating and exhilarating. As a visual manifestation of Ayón’s perceptions of her native Cuba, her art is both powerful and valuable; furthermore it speaks not only of her feelings about life, but also her attitude towards death.

Born in Havana on 23rd January 1967, Belkis Ayón Manso was one of two daughters from a relatively affluent Afro-Cuban family. At the age of 6, she began to show an interest in painting, leading her parents to enter her into a school competition, which she won. In 1979, she enrolled at the School of Plastic Arts, and two years later, she entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” – Cuba’s most prestigious art school, graduating in 1986 before starting a degree in printmaking at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). As she studied for her degree, her work was displayed in over thirty exhibitions across Cuba and Latin America. Continue reading →

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Inside Out: The Secret Games Of Catya Sassoon

Catya Sassoon was born in New York on 3rd September 1968. As the daughter of the world-famous hairdresser, Vidal Sassoon and his actress wife Beverly Adams, she was thrust into the limelight from an early age, destined to follow in the footsteps of her celebrity parents. Their divorce in 1980 was a traumatic experience for Catya, and as a result, she began to rebel against the strong, yet understated hairstyles that were her father’s signature, instead cutting her own hair into a eye-catching multi-coloured mohawk. Abandoning her studies, she instead spent most of her time partying with her older friends, on one occasion causing mayhem at her father’s Hollywood mansion by filling the swimming pool with his own-brand shampoo. But as Catya would always claim, ‘I never listen to what people say. I mean, I don`t care what they say. I’m not living for my dad, I’m not living for my mother. I’m living for me. Me!`

At 14, she moved to Manhatten from California, leaving the prestigious Beverly Hills High School to become a model. With her willowy figure, luxuriant auburn hair and piercing gray eyes, Catya was immediately signed by one of the city’s top agencies, and was soon gracing the covers of magazines like Seventeen and Cosmopolitan. Appearing in Rolling Stone in 1985, the caption beside her photograph declared, ‘Catya Sassoon defines the word nubile.’

Yet as she recalled, in many respects, it was a far from glamorous existence and at times ‘was sheer hell living there with 12 girls fighting for one of the two available showers every morning at 6.’ After hearing his daughter’s complaints about the daily clamour for the bathroom, Vidal Sassoon bought her a penthouse apartment. Continue reading →

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Diamond Geezer: George Cole’s Lobster

Born in Tooting on 22nd April 2015 and adopted at ten days old, George Cole spent his childhood in Morden, his earliest memory being his mother’s ire when she discovered he had sold a pair of new shoes to a rag-and-bone man in exchange for a toy windmill. Whilst he excelled academically, Cole first love was acting, and as he later remembered, ‘I was always in plays at school and in school concerts – you could say I liked to show off.’

After leaving school at the age of 14, he worked first as a butcher’s delivery boy and dreamt of joining the Merchant Navy, a dream that was hastily abandoned when he landed a role in the musical comedy The White Horse Inn and then Cottage to Let, which was turned in to a film in 1941, starring Alastair Sim and John Mills. Sim and his wife offered Cole and his mother lodgings and Cole was to live with them until he married the actress Eileen Moore in 1954.

Between 1941 and 1947, Cole would appear with Sim in eight films, most notably The Belle’s of St. Trinian’s and Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s in which Cole played Flash Harry, a spiv who encouraged the girls to get up to all sorts of mischief, and Sim their indulgent headmistress, Miss Fritton. Oher significant roles included the part of ‘the Boy’ in Olivier’s Henry V (1944) and Curley, a member of the Lancaster Crew in the 1945 war film Journey Together, with Richard Attenborough and Jack Watling. The latter enabled Cole to draw upon his own experiences as an R.A.F. radio operator from 1944 to 1947. Continue reading →

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The English Boy: Richard Warwick’s Great Performances

The third of four sons, Richard Carey Winter was born in the Kent village of Longfield on 29th April 1945, but grew up near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. He would always consider the county his true home and speak fondly of it, marvelling at its rich history and once telling a friend that, as he sat in a local dentist’s chair, he delightedly realised that he was in the very room from which Margaret of Anjou had observed the bloody aftermath of the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.

With a father who was an aeronautical engineer, and no familial acting connections, it came as a surprise to his parents when Richard won a place at RADA after leaving the Dean Close School in Cheltenham. From RADA, Richard joined the National Theatre, and, having adopted the stage name ‘Warwick’ for Equity reasons, at the age of 23, he was cast as Gregory in Franco Zeffirelli’s lavish Romeo and Juliet.

At the same time, he appeared as the recusant sixth-former Wallace in If…., Lindsay Anderson’s brutal dramatisation of the English public school system. Catching the counter-cultural wave that was spreading across Britain and other parts of Europe in the 1960s, the film was a cinematic triumph, and was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969. Malcolm McDowell, may have been the film’s main protagonist, but as Anderson said of Warwick, ‘I never met a young actor like Richard! Without a touch of vanity, completely natural yet always concentrated, he illumines every frame of the film in which he appears.’ His enormous talent, stage presence and charmingly boyish looks made Warwick ideal for the televised plays then loved by British audiences.

Above: Trailer for If…. (1968)

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