Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

Paul McGuigan (2017)

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool recreates Gloria Grahame’s affair, in the last two years of her life, with a young Liverpudlian actor called Peter Turner.  The film ends with her death from cancer, at the age of fifty-seven, in October 1981. The screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh (Control, Nowhere Boy) is based on Turner’s memoir of the same name.  He was nearly thirty years Grahame’s junior and a jobbing actor.  She had behind her four marriages, only one of which lasted more than a few years (her ex-husbands included both Nicholas Ray and Anthony, his son from a previous relationship), and movie stardom that was also short-lived.  Perhaps their relationship has come to seem increasingly extraordinary to Turner with the passing years (during which he’s had work but hasn’t achieved fame).   It’s certainly not surprising that he decided to write an account of his love affair with Grahame and it’s a tale worth telling.   Paul McGuigan works his way competently through the unhappy events of the story but it’s hard to dramatise this material on screen without certain elements (such as the key stages and crises of a terminal illness) coming over as generic – an effect occasionally reinforced by McGuigan’s choice of image (bereft Peter standing alone in an empty street).  Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool features fine performances but it left me feeling glum – I think because, as well as being miserable, it felt somewhat routine.

In an absorbing opening sequence, in her dressing room at a Lancashire theatre, Gloria (Annette Bening) prepares to go on stage as Amanda Wingfield, in a touring production of The Glass Menagerie.  At the end of the sequence, she collapses in pain.  Admitted to hospital, she makes contact with Peter (Jamie Bell) in Liverpool.  The narrative that follows is divided into the present tense of late summer 1981 and flashbacks to the earlier phase of her relationship with Peter.  They first meet in 1979, when each is renting a room in the same Primrose Hill house.  He has never heard of her; it’s only when they’re in a pub and the barman recognises Gloria that Peter realises she was once a Hollywood name.  (The barman is film-buff enough to tell Peter that she ‘won an Oscar too, as I recall’.)  After discharging herself from hospital, Gloria comes to stay with Peter and his family – his parents (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) and brother (Stephen Graham).  They welcome her warmly as an old friend:  Gloria has stayed with the Turners before although the film doesn’t cover those relatively happy times.   Its past tense concentrates largely on the time the couple spends together in America, where Gloria’s concealment of her ill health is the cause of increasing friction between them.  An exasperated Peter eventually returns alone to Liverpool, after getting a part in an Alan Bleasdale stage play.

Annette Bening has played real-life figures before but not ones with well-known voices.  Her vocal impersonation of Gloria Grahame takes a while to get used to but only a short while:  the voice is soon an integral part of the character she creates.  In the early stages, I wondered too whether the keen intelligence that Bening naturally projects was right for Grahame, before realising I was making unfair assumptions about the latter, based purely on her screen personae (Ado Annie in Oklahoma! as well as her trademark tarnished beauty in a succession of noir roles).  Playing a dying woman, Annette Bening’s vividity takes on a special poignancy.  Her Gloria is funny and charming but painfully brittle – physically as well as psychologically.  Jamie Bell’s emotionally fine-tuned Peter is impressive:  there’s a convincing rawness about him – callowness and sensitivity are two sides of the same coin.  It’s great to see Bell dancing again, albeit briefly (and not with Julie Walters this time), in Peter and Gloria’s dynamic groove to a disco track in her room in Primrose Hill.  The choice of music works well throughout, especially the repeated extracts from Elton John’s ‘Song for Guy’, which becomes in effect the theme song of the love affair.

You take for granted Julie Walters’s excellence in a role like Mrs Turner; what’s remarkable is that she still makes it fresh.  Kenneth Cranham partners her admirably.  He has a very strong moment when Tim Ray (Tom Brittney), one of Gloria’s four children, appears on the scene, determined to take his mother back to America.  (She died in New York City the day after leaving Liverpool, hence the title.)  Mr Turner calmly tells the distraught Peter that he must accede to Tim’s wishes; Cranham’s eyes show the father’s distress at his son’s distress.  Stephen Graham is good, as always – in spite of a wig that makes him look less like Peter’s brother than kin to the Scousers in the Harry Enfield sketch.  Vanessa Redgrave is miscast in her cameo as Gloria’s mother Jeanne, who recites John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II grandly but falteringly.  Redgrave’s very presence fundamentally contradicts the theatrical fraud this woman seems meant to be.  As Gloria’s rancorous elder sister, Frances Barber is funny when she first opens her mouth, with a flat, scornful prompt to her mother:  ‘Eden’.   It’s a pity the script then requires Barber virtually to repeat herself with each of her subsequent one-liners.

Gloria’s long-held, never fulfilled ambition to play Juliet is, against the odds, a more successful Shakespearean element of the film.  Shortly before their final parting, Peter arranges with a contact at a local theatre for him and Gloria to visit while there’s nothing going on there.  They sit together on stage reading, very well and affectingly, lovers’ lines from Romeo and Juliet.  Paul McGuigan makes the right decision, when Peter watches Gloria in her Hollywood heyday in Naked Alibi (1954), to show the actual film instead of attempting a reconstruction.   This links nicely with the closing clip of the real Gloria Grahame in 1953 receiving her Academy Award, as Best Supporting Actress for The Bad and the Beautiful, from Edmund Gwenn.  I’d seen this before and been amused by the brevity of her acceptance speech (four words:  ‘Thank you very much’) and hurried exit from the stage. ‘She just made it’, jokes Bob Hope, the MC, as she disappears.  Coming at the end of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, the clip, though still funny, is also a saddening confirmation of the transience of Grahame’s time in the limelight and of her far from long life.

12 October 2017