Joan Maud Littlewood (6 October 1914 – 20 September 2002) was a British theatre director, noted for her work in developing the left-wing Theatre Workshop. She has been called "The Mother of Modern Theatre". ^[1]

She also conceived and developed along with architect Cedric Price the Fun Palace, an experimental model of participatory social environment that, although never realized, has become an important influence in Architecture of the 20th and 21st Centuries.^{[citation needed]}

Early years[link]

Littlewood was born at Stockwell, London, England and trained as an actress at RADA but left after an unhappy start and moved to Manchester in 1934 where she met folksinger Jimmie Miller who would later become known as Ewan MacColl. After joining his troupe, Theatre of Action, Littlewood and Miller were soon married. After a brief move to London, they returned to Manchester and set up the Theatre Union in 1936.

Career[link]

In 1941, Littlewood was banned from broadcasting on the BBC. The ban was lifted two years later when MI5 said she had broken off her association with the Communist Party. She was under surveillance by MI5 from 1939 until the 1950s.^[2]

In 1945, after the end of World War II, Littlewood, her husband, and other Theatre Union members formed Theatre Workshop, touring for the next 8 years. Shortly afterwards, when Gerry Raffles joined the troupe, MacColl and Littlewood divorced, though they still worked together for many years and Littlewood was godmother to MacColl's two children. Littlewood and Raffles were life partners until his death in 1975.

In 1953, after an attempt to establish a permanent base in Glasgow, Theatre Workshop took up residence at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London, where it gained international fame, performing international plays across Europe and in the Soviet Union. One of Littlewood's most famous productions was the British première of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1955), which she directed and also starred in the lead role. Her production of Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, a musical about the London underworld, became a hit and ran from 1959 to 1962, transferring to the West End.

The works for which she is now best remembered are probably Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958), which gained great critical acclaim, and the satirical musical Oh, What a Lovely War! (1965), her stage adaptation of a work for radio by Charles Chilton. Both were subsequently made into films. Theatre Workshop also championed the work of Irish playwright Brendan Behan, and Littlewood is often rumoured to have a significant role in his work.

After Raffles's death in 1975, Littlewood left Theatre Workshop and stopped directing. After a time of drifting she settled in France and became the companion of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, the vintner and poet, and wrote his memoirs, Milady Vine. In the mid-1980s, she commenced work on her 1994 autobiography, Joan's Book.^[3]

Film of Joan Littlewood rehearsing young actors is available on the DVD of Bronco Bullfrog.

Personal life[link]

Littlewood died, in 2002, of natural causes at the age of 87 in the London flat of Peter Rankin, her UK base for the previous 23 years.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Goorney, Howard, and Ewan MacColl (1990). Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop: Political Playscripts, 1930-50. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-2211-8
• Littlewood, Joan (2003). Joan's Book: The Autobiography of Joan Littlewood. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-77318-3
• MacColl, Ewan (1990). Journeyman: An Autobiography. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. ISBN 0-283-06036-0

External links[link]

• Joan Littlewood at Find a Grave
• Joan Littlewood at the Internet Broadway Database
• Joan Littlewood at the Internet Movie Database
• History of Theatre Workshop at Stratford East
• Theatre Archive Project Interview with Harry Greene
• A tribute to Joan Littlewood by Jackie Fletcher
• Joan Littlewood (1914 - 2002) (The British Theatre guide)

William Gerald Forbes (Bill) Douglas (17 April 1934 – 18 June 1991) was a Scottish film director best known for the trilogy of films about his early life.

Biography[link]

Born in Newcraighall on the outskirts of Edinburgh, he was brought up initially by his maternal grandmother; following her death, he lived with his father and paternal grandmother. He undertook his National Service in Egypt, where he met his lifelong friend, Peter Jewell. On returning to England, Douglas moved to London and began a career of acting and writing. After spending some time with Joan Littlewood’s ‘Theatre Workshop’ company at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, he was cast in the Granada television series, The Younger Generation in 1961 and had a musical, Solo, produced in 1962 at Cheltenham.

Filmmaking career[link]

Having been interested in film-making all his life, in 1968 Douglas enrolled at the London International Film School, where he wrote the screenplay for a short autobiographical film called Jamie. After initial difficulties in finding support for the project, he eventually obtained funding from the British Film Institute to make the film, now called My Childhood (1972). The film gained critical acclaim on the international festival circuit, which paved the way for the second and third instalments of what became a trilogy of Douglas's formative years: My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978).

The Bill Douglas Trilogy recounts the harrowing experiences of a young boy, Jamie, growing up in crippling poverty: material and emotional impoverishment; harrowing privations at the hands of his paternal grandmother; incarceration in a children’s home; living in a hostel for down-and-outs. Eventually the call-up for national service allows Jamie to find freedom through his friendship with Robert, a young middle class Englishman who introduces him to books and the possibility of a more optimistic and fulfilling future. The austere black and white images of the films embody a stillness and intensity reminiscent of silent cinema and this visual style is augmented by the equally spare and precise use of sound. Just as the stillness of the image forces the audience to look, so the relative silence encourages greater attention to specific sounds – boots scraping on asphalt, the chirping of birds and the timbre of voices – granting an emotional power lost in the aural bombardment characterising much contemporary cinema.

The Trilogy gained a wealth of critical plaudits but Douglas struggled to raise financing for his next project, and was forced to find other ways of earning a living. Mamoun Hassan, the former head of BFI Production, invited him to teach at the National Film and Television School from 1978 and he proved to be an inspiring presence. Hassan was also able, in his role as director of the National Film Finance Corporation to help realize the project of Comrades, Douglas’s film about the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, six Dorset farm labourers who in 1834 were arrested and tried for forming a trade union and subsequently transported to Australia. Even so, the film did not appear until 1987, seven years after the screenplay had been completed. Dubbed a ‘poor man’s epic’, Comrades continues Douglas’s interest in the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of material adversity. It also brings to the fore his fascination with the world of optics and image-making, through a number of references to various forms of Victorian optical entertainments such as the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the peep show and the camera obscura. The story itself is mediated by the character of an itinerant magic lanternist who reappears in a number of roles.

Comrades was to be Bill Douglas’s last film. He died of cancer and is buried in the churchyard of Bishop's Tawton in Devon. He left behind him two unmade screenplays: Justified Sinner, an adaptation of James Hogg’s celebrated novel, and Flying Horse, based on the life of pre-cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. Another posthumous script, Ring of Truth, written during a fellowship to Strathclyde University in 1990, was produced by BBC Scotland in 1995.

Legacy[link]

Douglas's legacy was not confined to his films. Along with Peter Jewell (Robert of the Trilogy) he was a voracious collector of books, memorabilia and artefacts relating to the history and prehistory of cinema. This collection was the base for the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture (housed at the University of Exeter), when it opened six years after Douglas's death, and it remains the core of the Centre’s collections.

In 2012, the Glasgow Short Film Festival announced the inaugural 'Bill Douglas Award' for their International Short Film Competition, named in his honour.

Filmography[link]

As director[link]

Student films (London Film School)[link]

• Charlie Chaplin's London (1969)
• Striptease (1969)
• Globe (1969/70)
• Come Dancing (1970)

Feature films[link]

• The Bill Douglas Trilogy:
  • My Childhood (1972)
  • My Ain Folk (1973)
  • My Way Home (1978)
• Comrades (1987)

As writer[link]

As Co-Writer:

• Home And Away (A BFI Production, directed by Michael Alexander, 1974)

Unproduced scripts:

• Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1988)
• Flying Horse (1990)
• The Ring of Truth (1990) (Produced by BBC Scotland in 1996)

Documentaries about Bill Douglas[link]

• Arena (1979) BBC TV documentary on Douglas after he had completed the Trilogy
• Bill Douglas: On Stony Ground (1992) BBC Scotland documentary
• Bill Douglas: Intent on Getting the Image (2006) Documentary on Douglas's life and work by 400Blows Productions/Andy Kimpton-Nye
• Visions of: COMRADES (2009) by 400Blows Productions/Andy Kimpton-Nye
• Lanterna Magicka: Bill Douglas & the Secret History of Cinema (2009) Documentary on Douglas's fascination with pre-cinema optical devices, and how he integrated them into Comrades. By Sean Martin and Louise Milne

Bill Douglas on DVD[link]

• The Bill Douglas Trilogy (BFI, 2008, Blu-ray: 2009; in the U.S. the trilogy was released on DVD by Facets) — Also includes Douglas's graduation film, Come Dancing, a brief 1980 interview with Douglas, and Andy Kimpton-Nye's documentary.
• Comrades (BFI, also Blu-ray, 2009) — Also includes Home and Away, Martin/Milne's Lanterna Magicka, and interviews with Bill Douglas from 1978 and the Comrades shoot.

External links[link]

• Bill Douglas Museum
• Bill Douglas at the Internet Movie Database
• Bill Douglas biography and filmography at British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Honor for forgotten star
• Top 20 Scottish films of all time
• [1]

Queenie Watts (21 July 1926, London, England, UK – 25 January 1980 London, England, UK) was an English actress and singer of film and television.

She appeared in many British films, including the Joan Littlewood production Sparrers Can't Sing (1963) as herself in scenes set in the Iron Bridge Tavern, Millwall, which she ran in real life and in which she starred in the TV series Stars and Garters] (1963). She also appeared in the film version of Up the Junction (1968) and as a pub landlady in All Coppers Are.. (1972) and in television programmes through the 1960s and 1970s, including the successful, but critically panned, Romany Jones (1972–75) and its sequel Yus, My Dear (1976) in which Arthur Mullard featured as her husband. She appeared in three episodes of the Play for Today anthology series for the BBC, including Waterloo Sunset transmitted on 23 January 1979.

Watts appeared in Dad's Army in the role of Mrs Edna Peters, also in several episodes of Dixon of Dock Green in different roles, and in the comedy-drama Beryl's Lot (1973–75) and one episode of Steptoe and Son (1972).

Watts also appeared with Arthur Mullard, again as a married couple, and the On the Buses cast in the 1973 film Holiday on the Buses as well as the popular sitcom George and Mildred as the former neighbours of the characters played by Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy.

She ran pubs (including the Iron Bridge Tavern, East India Dock Road, London and the Rose and Crown, Pennyfields, Poplar) with her husband, "Slim Watts", where she also sang and played piano with an eight-piece band to pull in more customers. She appeared in the 1966 film version of Alfie, singing "Goodbye, Dolly Gray" in a memorable, riotous bar-room brawl sequence.

Queenie Watts died from cancer in 1980.

External links[link]

• Queenie Watts at the Internet Movie Database

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Sylvia Pankhurst

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was an English campaigner for the suffragist movement in the United Kingdom. She was for a time a prominent left communist who then devoted herself to the cause of anti-fascism.

Early life[link]

Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester, a daughter of Dr. Richard Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst, members of the Independent Labour Party and (especially Emmeline) much concerned with women's rights. She and her sisters attended the Manchester High School for Girls. Her sister Christabel would also become an activist.

Sylvia trained as an artist at the Manchester School of Art, and in 1900 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington.

Suffragism[link]

Pankhurst protesting against British policy in India, at Trafalgar Square, 1932.

In 1906 Sylvia Pankhurst started to work full-time with the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) with her sister and her mother. In contrast to them she retained an affiliation with the labour movement, and unlike them she concentrated her activity on local campaigning with the East London Federation of the WSPU, rather than leading the national organisation. Sylvia Pankhurst contributed articles to the WSPU's newspaper, Votes for Women, and in 1911 she published a propagandist history of the WSPU's campaign, The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement. ^[1] By 1914 Sylvia had many disagreements with the route the WSPU was taking: while the WSPU had become independent of any political party, she wanted an explicitly socialist organisation tackling wider issues than women's suffrage, aligned with the Independent Labour Party. She had a very close personal relationship with anti-war Labour politician Keir Hardie. In 1914 she broke with the WSPU to set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), which over the years evolved politically and changed its name accordingly, first to Women's Suffrage Federation and then to the Workers' Socialist Federation. She founded the newspaper of the WSF, Women's Dreadnought, which subsequently became the Workers' Dreadnought. It organized against the war, and some of its members hid conscientious objectors from the police.

First World War[link]

During the First World War, Sylvia was horrified to see her mother and her sister Christabel become enthusiastic supporters of the war drive, and campaigning in favour of military conscription. She herself was opposed to the war. Her organization attempted to organize the defence of the interests of women in the poorer parts of London. They set up "cost-price" restaurants to feed the hungry, without the taint of charity. They also established a toy factory in order to give work to women who had become unemployed because of the war. Sylvia worked incessantly to defend soldiers' wives rights to decent allowances while their partners were away, both practically by setting up legal advice centres, and politically by running campaigns to oblige the government to take into account the poverty of soldiers' wives. She supported the International Women's Peace Congress, held during the war at The Hague, support which lost her some of her allies at home.

Communism[link]

The group continued to move leftwards and hosted the inaugural meeting of the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). Workers' Dreadnought published "A Constitution for British Soviets" at this meeting. This was an article by Sylvia, in which she highlighted the role of Household Soviets - "In order that mothers and those who are organisers of the family life of the community may be adequately represented, and may take their due part in the management of society, a system of household Soviets shall be built up".^[2] The CP(BSTI) was opposed to parliamentarism, in contrast to the views of the newly founded British Socialist Party which formed the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in August 1920. The CP(BSTI) soon dissolved itself into the larger, official Communist Party. This unity was to be short-lived and when the leadership of the CPGB proposed that Pankhurst hand over the Workers Dreadnought to the party she revolted. As a result she was expelled from the CPGB and moved to found the short-lived Communist Workers Party.

Sylvia by this time adhered to left or council communism. She was an important figure in the communist movement at the time and attended meetings of the International in Russia and Amsterdam and also those of the Italian Socialist Party. She disagreed with Lenin on important points of Communist theory and strategy and was supportive of "left communists" such as Anton Pannekoek.

International Auxiliary Language Movement[link]

Pankhurst also applied her energies to the consideration of a satisfactory International Auxiliary Language. To this end, she wrote and published a monograph on the topic in which she considers the history of the movement, historical and contemporary attempts at creating a non-national interlangauge and delves into the issues of how the ideal interlanguage should look, what conditions it should satisfy and how it should be implemented.

Partner and son[link]

Sylvia Pankhurst objected to entering into a marriage contract and taking a husband's name. At about the end of the First World War, she began living with Italian anarchist Silvo Corio and moved to Woodford Green for over 30 years. A blue plaque and Pankhurst Green opposite Woodford tube station commemorate her link to the area. In 1927 she gave birth to a son, Richard. As she refused to marry the child's father, her own mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, broke with her and did not speak to her again.

Supporter of Ethiopia[link]

Pankhurst's grave

In the early 1930s, Pankhurst drifted away from communist politics but remained involved in movements connected with anti-fascism and anti-colonialism. In 1932 she was instrumental in the establishment of the Socialist Workers' National Health Council.^[3] She responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by publishing The New Times and Ethiopia News from 1936, and became a supporter of Haile Selassie. She raised funds for Ethiopia's first teaching hospital and wrote extensively on Ethiopian art and culture; her research was published as Ethiopia, a Cultural History (London: Lalibela House, 1955).

From 1936, MI5 kept a watch on Pankhurst's correspondence.^[4] In 1940, she wrote to Viscount Swinton as the chairman of a committee investigating Fifth Columnists, sending him a list of active Fascists still at large and of anti-Fascists who had been interned. A copy of this letter on MI5's file carries a note in Swinton's hand reading "I should think a most doubtful source of information."^[4]

After the post-war liberation of Ethiopia, she became a strong supporter of union between Ethiopia and the former Italian Somaliland, and MI5's file continued to follow her activities. In 1948, MI5 considered strategies for "muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst".^[4]

Pankhurst became a friend and adviser to the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and followed a consistently anti-British stance. She moved to Addis Ababa at Haile Selassie's invitation in 1956^[4] with her son, Richard, (who continues to live there), and founded a monthly journal, Ethiopia Observer, which reported on many aspects of Ethiopian life and development.

She died in 1960, and was given a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her "an honorary Ethiopian". She is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in the area reserved for patriots of the Italian war.

Writings (selection)[link]

• The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement (London: Gay & Hancock, 1911)
• The Home Front (1932; reissued 1987 by The Cresset Library) ISBN 0-09-172911-4
• Soviet Russia as I saw it (Workers' Dreadnought, 16 April 1921)
• The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931; reissued 1984 by Chatto & Windus)
• A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader, ed. by Kathryn Dodd (Manchester University Press, 1993)
• Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (includes Pankhurst's "Communism and its Tactics"), (St. Petersburg, Florida: Red and Black Publishers, 2007). ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8
• Delphos or the Future of International Language (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., undated, but probably around 1927)

Secondary literature[link]

• Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (Pluto Press, 1999) ISBN 0-7453-1518-6
• Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist and Crusader, An Intimate Portrait (Virago Ltd, 1979) ISBN 0-448-22840-8
• Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: Counsel for Ethiopia (Hollywood, Calif.: Tsehai, 2003) London: Global
• Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, A Crusading Life 1882–1960 (Aurum Press, 2004)
• Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, Citizen of the World (Hornbeam Publishing Ltd, 2009), ISBN 978-0-9553963-2-8
• Barbara Castle, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst (Penguin Books, 1987) ISBN 0-14-008761-3
• Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (Penguin Books, 2002)
• Patricia W. Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst. Portrait of a Radical (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987)
• Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996) ISBN 0-312-16268-5

See also[link]

• History of feminism
• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• Women's suffrage in the United Kingdom
• Pankhurst Centre in Manchester

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sylvia Pankhurst

• Sylviapankhurst.com - a comprehensive information resource about Sylvia Pankhurst from Hornbeam Publishing Limited, sponsored by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund
• Sylvia Pankhurst - a biography page from Spartacus Educational
• Sylvia Pankhurst Archive - in the libcom.org library
• Archival material relating to Sylvia Pankhurst listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst Papers at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam
• Application for naturalisation of Mrs Margarethe Morgenstern and her husband Erwin including pleading letter from Sylvia Pankhurst
• Communism or Reforms two articles by Sylvia Pankhurst and Anton Pannekoek, first published in the Workers Dreadnought in 1922. First published as a pamphlet in 1974 by Workers Voice, a Communist group based in Liverpool.
• Three pamphlets detailing the work of Sylvia Pankhurst as an anti-Bolshevik Communist Anti-Parliamentarism and Communism in Britain, 1917-1921 by R. F. Jones, Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain,Class War on the Home Front
• Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible - A documentary that chronicles the life and political campaigns of Sylvia Pankhurst and includes an exclusive interview with her son Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita. The accompanying website includes images of a large number of security files held on Sylvia Pankhurst, from the collection at the National Archives.

This article may need to be rewritten entirely to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. You can help. The discussion page may contain suggestions. (May 2010)

Tab Hunter
Hunter in April 2010
Born	Arthur Andrew Kelm (1931-07-11) July 11, 1931 (age 80) New York, United States
Occupation	Actor, writer, singer
Years active	1952–1996
Partner	Allan Glaser (1982–present)[1]
Website
http://www.tabhunter.com

Tab Hunter (born Arthur Andrew Kelm; July 11, 1931) is an American actor, singer, former teen idol and author who has starred in over forty major films.

Background[link]

Hunter was born in New York to Charles Kelm and Gertrude Gelien. His parents were German immigrants - his father Jewish and his mother Lutheran.^[2] Hunter's father was an abusive man and within a few years of his birth, his parents divorced and his mother moved with her two sons to California.^{[citation needed]} She reassumed her maiden surname Gelien and changed her sons' name to that as well. As a teenager Hunter was a figure skater,^[3] competing in both singles and pairs, and a horseback rider.^{[citation needed]}

He joined the Coast Guard at the age of fifteen, lying about his age to enlist. While in the Coast Guard he gained the nickname "Hollywood" for his penchant for watching movies rather than going to bars while on liberty.^[4]

In later years Hunter's mother was institutionalized and underwent shock treatments, and he supported her financially until her death.^{[citation needed]}

Career[link]

Arthur Gelien was given the stage name "Tab Hunter" by his first agent, Henry Willson.^[5] His good looks landed him a role in the film Island of Desire opposite Linda Darnell. However, it was his co-starring role as young Marine Danny in 1955's World War II drama Battle Cry, in which he has an affair with an older woman, but ends up marrying the girl next door, that cemented his position as one of Hollywood's top young romantic leads. His other hit films include The Burning Hills with Natalie Wood, That Kind Of Woman with Sophia Loren, Gunman's Walk With Van Heflin and The Pleasure Of His Company with Debbie Reynolds He went on to star in over forty major films and became a cult star in the 1980s appearing in "Lust in the Dust", "Polyester" and "Grease 2".

In September 1955, the tabloid magazine Confidential reported Hunter's 1950 arrest for disorderly conduct. The innuendo-laced article, and a second one focusing on Rory Calhoun's prison record, were the result of a deal Henry Willson had brokered with the scandal rag in exchange for not revealing his more prominent client Rock Hudson's sexual orientation to the public. Not only was there no negative effect on Hunter's career, but a few months later he was named Most Promising New Personality in a nationwide poll sponsored by the Council of Motion Picture Organizations.^[6] In 1956 he received 62,000 Valentines. Hunter, James Dean and Natalie Wood were the last of the actors placed under exclusive studio contract to Warner Bros.

Hunter had a 1957 hit record with the song "Young Love", which was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for six weeks and became one of the larger hits of the Rock n' Roll era. .^[3] He also had the hit "Ninety-Nine Ways", which peaked at #11. His success prompted Jack Warner to enforce the actor's contract with the Warner Bros. studio by banning Dot Records, the label for which Hunter had recorded the single (and which was owned by rival Paramount Pictures), from releasing a follow-up album he had recorded for them. He established Warner Bros. Records specifically for Hunter.

Hunter in Damn Yankees (1958)

Hunter starred in the 1958 musical film Damn Yankees, in which he played Joe Hardy of Washington D.C's American League baseball club. The film had originally been a Broadway show, but Hunter was the only one in the film version who had not appeared in the original cast. The show was based on the 1954 best-selling book The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant by Douglass Wallop. Hunter later said the filming was hellish because director George Abbott was only interested in re-creating the stage version word for word. Hunter was Warner Bros. top money grossing star from 1955 through 1959.

Hunter's failure to win the role of Tony in the film adaptation of West Side Story prompted him to agree to star in a weekly television sitcom. On July 9, 1960, prior to the program's debut, he was arrested by Glendale, California police for allegedly beating his dog Fritz. His 11-day trial started in mid-October, a month after The Tab Hunter Show debuted on Sunday evenings on NBC. It was proved that the neighbor who initiated the charges had done so for spite when Hunter declined her repeated invitations to dinner, and he was acquitted by the jury.^[7] The Tab Hunter Show had moderate ratings (due to being scheduled opposite The Ed Sullivan Show) and was hence cancelled after one season, however it was a huge hit in the UK where it ranked as one of the top situation comedies of the year.

For a short time in the latter 1960s, Hunter settled in the south of France, where he acted in spaghetti westerns. His career was revived in the 1980s, when he starred opposite actor Divine in John Waters' Polyester (1981) and Paul Bartel's Lust in the Dust (1985). He is particularly remembered by later audiences as Mr. Stewart, the substitute teacher in Grease 2, who sang "Reproduction." Hunter had a major role in the 1988 horror film Cameron's Closet. He also wrote and starred in Dark Horse (1992).

A documentary about Tab's life called "Tab Hunter Confidential" is being developed by producers Allan Glaser, Neil Koenigsberg, and Jeffrey Schwarz of Automat Pictures.

In January 2012, Tab Hunter appeared opposite Joyce DeWitt in A. R. Gurney's play Love Letters at Judson Theatre Company in Pinehurst, North Carolina.

Personal life[link]

Hunter's 2006 autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star became a New York Times best-seller as did the paperback version in 2007. It is still currently in publication and was nominated for several prestigious writing awards. In the book he acknowledged his homosexuality, confirming rumors that had circulated since the height of his fame. According to William L. Hamilton of The New York Times, detailed reports about his alleged romances with very close friends Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood were strictly the fodder of studio publicity departments. As Wood and Hunter embarked on a well-publicized and groundless romance, promoting his apparent heterosexuality while promoting their films, insiders developed their own headline for the item: 'Natalie Wood and Tab Wouldn't'.^[8]

Hunter did become close enough with Etchika Choureau, his co-star in Lafayette Escadrille, and Joan Cohn, widow of Harry Cohn, to contemplate marriage, but thought he never could maintain a marriage and remained merely platonic friends with both women.

During Hollywood's studio era, Hunter says, life "was difficult for me, because I was living two lives at that time. A private life of my own, which I never discussed, never talked about to anyone. And then my Hollywood life, which was just trying to learn my craft and succeed..." The star emphasizes that the word 'gay' "wasn't even around in those days, and if anyone ever confronted me with it, I'd just kinda freak out. I was in total denial. I was just not comfortable in that Hollywood scene, other than the work process."^[9] "There was a lot written about my sexuality, and the press was pretty darn cruel," the actor says, but what "moviegoers wanted to hold in their hearts were the boy-next-door marines, cowboys and swoon-bait sweethearts I portrayed."^[8]

Hunter had long-term relationships with actor Anthony Perkins and champion figure skater Ronnie Robertson, before settling down with his partner of 30 years, Allan Glaser.^[10]

Hunter has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6320 Hollywood Blvd.

Filmography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tab Hunter

• Tab Hunter official website
• Tab Hunter at the Internet Broadway Database
• Tab Hunter fansite
• 2009 Half-Hour TV Interview on The Creative Community