Travels with My Aunt (film)
Travels with My Aunt is a 1972 American comedy film directed by George Cukor. The screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler is based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Graham Greene.
Plot
While attending the cremation of his mother's remains, London bank manager Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) meets aging eccentric Augusta Bertram (Maggie Smith), a flaming redhead who claims to be his aunt and announces that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. She invites him back to her apartment, where her lover, an African fortune teller named Zachary Wordsworth (Louis Gossett Jr.), is waiting for her. Shortly after she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti (Robert Stephens), with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $100,000 ($433,000 in 2013 dollars).
Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris and he agrees, unaware she actually is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder (Robert Flemyng) in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom. The two board the Orient Express, where Henry meets Tooley (Cindy Williams), a young American hippie who takes a liking to him and gets him to smoke "French cigarettes" (marijuana) with her. When the train reaches Milan, Augusta is greeted by her illegitimate son Mario (Raymond Gérôme), who presents her with a bouquet of flowers and an ear that supposedly belongs to Ercole.
Travels with My Aunt
Travels with My Aunt (1969) is a novel written by English author Graham Greene.
The novel follows the travels of Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, and his eccentric Aunt Augusta as they find their way across Europe, and eventually even further afield. Aunt Augusta pulls Henry away from his quiet suburban existence into a world of adventure, crime and the highly unconventional details of her past.
Plot summary
The novel begins when Henry Pulling, a conventional and uncharming bank manager who has taken early retirement, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at his mother's funeral. Despite having little in common, they form a bond. On their first meeting, Augusta tells Henry that his mother was not truly his mother and we learn that Henry's father has been dead for more than 40 years.
As they leave the funeral, Henry goes to Augusta's house and meets her lover Wordsworth – a man from Sierra Leone. Henry finds himself drawn into Aunt Augusta's world of travel, adventure, romance and absence of bigotry.
Travels with My Aunt (play)
Travels with My Aunt is a 1989 comedy adapted by Scottish dramatist by Giles Havergal from the Graham Greene novel of the same title. The play was first staged at Citizens Theatre in Glasgow on 10 November 1989 with Havergal, Derwent Watson, Patrick Hannaway, and Christopher Gee, and has since been performed in London West End theatres, off-Broadway in New York, and in San Francisco.
From 2 May to 29 June 2013, Travels with My Aunt is being staged at London's Menier Chocolate Factory, starring David Bamber and Jonathan Hyde.
This stage version was reduced to a 50-minute, one act version (with permission from Giles Havergal) and first presented by the Backwell Playhouse Theatre Company as an entry into the Avon Association of Drama One Act Festival on 21 February 2015. The performance won best play and was put forward to the All England Theatre Festival Quarterfinals in the Western Division: Wessex area. Performed on 18 April 2015, it was again awarded best play. The production performs in the Western Division final in Ferndown, Dorset, on 16 May 2015.
Travels with My Aunt (disambiguation)
Travels with My Aunt may refer to:
