... Day made the last of her 39 films, and in every one of them she had a starring role. But one would have to be a dyed-in-the-wool fan, which Eric Braun obviously is, to remember the names of more than half a dozen of them. Yet there is no douot sne does linger in the memory, but more, I would suggest, because of her singing, for her records are still played on the easy listening stations ...

... publishers claim, this is the successor to Ephraim Katz's International Encyclopaedia, last revised ten years ago. In that time, hun dreds of new actors and directors have arrived on the scene, and this book, compiled by the head of Baseline, which has a database of over 750,000 entries, contin ually updated, is obvi ously much more con temporary. It is also rather more arty than its ...

... with actresses, and one of the main impressions is of the varying routes these actresses took to reach what is in all cases an established niche in the profession. Only one, Eileen Atkins, had a mother who really wanted her daugh ter to go on the stage hui as a singer and dancer rather than a serious actress. Most of the others made a con- ?cious dedsior to gc into the theatre, out from ...

... on to the early post-war entertainment scene like a pair of Transatlantic meteors. He was drily witty in the manner of some of the great American humorists, to whom we had become accustomed during the war years, she was an exceptionally promising young actress who matched her husband in possess ing a sense of comedy. Together and separately, they prac tically monopolised the airwaves in the ...

... Hollywood Stars on at least two counts: it is self-evidently written by the lady herself, with a degree of literacy and emotional maturity that make it a work of art to be cherished, and it is refreshingly free of any trace of bitterness or complaint over a life that has had more than its share of heartbreak and lost opportu nities careerwise. Although in over 75 films her direc tors have ...

... Morley (Hodder and Stoughton, £10.95) I cannot think of anybody in the modem theatre world who gets about quite as much as Sheridan Morley, cropping up as he does on radio and television, in the national and magazine press, in theatre programmes, even on occasion in the theatre itself, usually as a narrator, and on one occa sion, as narrator ot his on compilation Noel and Gertie. When he is ...

... the difference between a companion, a guide and an encyclopaedia? Not a lot, if present-day publishers are anything to go by. Encyclopaedia is obviously considered too daunting, but whatever you call it, the encyclopaedic form is followed here, with 2,000 alphabetical entries. This volume will inevitably be com pared with last year's Penguin tome on the same subject, and on the whole I think I ...

... HOW FORTUNATELY coincidental it is that three books recently published about the theatre cover between them three of its most important strands- the establishment, the fringe and the committed. What they all have in ;ommon, of course, is a shortage jf money, except that on the Tinge it does not matter quite so nuch, love will find a way. Peter Lewis' The National: a Dream Made Concrete ...

... Harrap's Book of Film Directors and their rilms, by Alison J. r timer and Andre Golay (Harrap, £14.95) This book, listing over 26,000 films made by over 3,300 directors, is a complement to other film reference books, which generally list only the most significant films in a director's output. This one includes practically every known English language direc tor, and it is noticeable that the ...

... British Theatre Yearbook 1990. edited by David Lemmon (Christ opher Helm Publishers Ltd, £12.95) It is good to see that this book, which first appeared last year, looks like lasting, for it is an excellent guide to the year in the theatre, not just the West End and the major subsidised companies, but the best of the fringe, including the Gate, Latchmere and New End, and the regional theatres. ...

... IF EVER a musician lived the jazz life it was clarinettist Pee Wee Russell, whose story is told by Robert Hilbert (Pee Wee Russell; The Life Of A Jazzman, Oxford University Press, £17.50). Russell was one of those men of legend, somebody who rose in the afternoon, drank a bottle of milk, stumbled out to the liquor store to buy a quart of whisky, went back to his apartment to drink it and then ...

... They're country traditions never to be forgotten Compiled by PETER HEPPLE STILL standing in Gloucester Street, Cirencester, that most attractive of all West Country towns, is a building that for 40 years housed a the atre. What is more, it was part of a circuit, run by John Boles Watson, that encompassed other theatres stretching from Leicester and Daventry in the east to Carmarthen in the ...