i read this in the daily express gossip column.
i assume it was extracted from an interview somewhere - which doesn't appear to have manifested itself online.
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harry potter actor daniel radcliffe take note - being a child star is not all it's cracked up to be.
just ask sebastian rice-edwards who at nine, was in the acclaimed 1987 movie Hope And Glory.
now rice-edwards reveals for the first time that he has turned his back on the profession because he was teased by his classmates and hated the attention.
"i found the whole thing pretty terrifying", says rice-edwards, now a 25-year-old commercials director.
"i was the focus of a lot of attention which i did not enjoy.
"i think i knew in my heart that acting was not for me".
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postscript about hope and glory - new autobiography - john boorman - reviewed in times literary supplement :
John Boorman's holy grail
David Lodge
16/10/2003
His mythical journey from Metroland to Hollywood
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John Boorman
ADVENTURES OF A SUBURBAN BOY
314pp. Faber. £20.
0 571 21695 1
I have a personal reason to feel grateful to John Boorman. In 1981, I was making notes for a comic novel about academics and writers jetting about the world to international conferences. I could think of plenty of amusing episodes and situations and representative character-types, but for a long time I was held up by the lack of a narrative structure to contain them all. In my notebook I wrote, "Could some myth serve, as in Ulysses ? E.g, the Grail legend". But I did nothing with the idea until, a little later, I happened to see Boorman's Excalibur , and was swept away by its exuberant retelling of the Arthurian story. It set me thinking about correspondences between the Grail legend as it appears in chivalric romance and a modern story of professors and novelists competing with each other for professional glory and amorous conquest in various exotic settings. I started writing Small World.
There are many pleasures to be derived from Adventures of a Suburban Boy , John Boorman's excellent autobiography, but its most interesting revelation is that the myth incorporated by Mallory in the "matter of Britain", and reinterpreted in modern times by Jessie Weston, T. S. Eliot and John Cowper Powys, among others, has roots in Boorman's own life and psyche, and is the key to his oeuvre. The book's deceptively bland title encodes a heroic meaning: the quest for the cinematic Grail, the transcendent film, was the serial adventure that allowed Boorman to escape the spiritual wasteland of suburban Surrey. His first childhood home was a semi-detached house in Rosehill Avenue, Carshalton, on the outskirts of London - one of 4 million built between the wars. "Four million of them! . . . Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?" he asks rhetorically. "They all missed it, or got it wrong the academics, the politicians, the upper classes. While they worried about socialism and fascism, the cuckoo had laid its egg in their nests and Margaret Thatcher would hatch out of it." When he came to recreate his childhood in Hope and Glory (1989), he was obliged to build a simulated Rosehill Avenue on an abandoned airfield, because those streets of inter-war semis had been irrecoverably gentrified - festooned with television aerials, satellite dishes, double-glazed porches and other accoutrements of post-war affluence.
The Boormans had been affluent once. His paternal grandfather was a cheerfully eccentric inventor and businessman, sufficiently well off to send his sons to public school, who lost all his money shortly after the First World War. John's father George came back from military service in India to painfully reduced circumstances, and was obliged to take a clerical job which he hated. He and his friend Herbert were equally captivated by Ivy, the beautiful daughter of a Wimbledon publican. George popped the question first and won her hand, but Ivy had always secretly preferred Herbert, and as the joy slowly leaked out of her marriage in the confines of Rosehill Avenue she turned increasingly to Herbert for solace. Thus was the triangular relationship of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot re-enacted in Metroland. The young John sensed what was going on, and felt guiltily complicit in the betrayal of his father, but George, embittered by the boring routine of
his life, did not inspire filial affection. Sometimes, John disloyally wished that Herbert
had been his dad.
The outbreak of the Second World War offered a kind of deliverance for all from this drab existence. "How wonderful was the war!
. . . it gave us the essential thing we lacked: it gave us a myth, a myth nurtured by the wireless, newspapers, the cinema, that allowed us semi people to leap our garden gates, vault over our embarrassments into the arms of patriotism." George couldn't wait to join up, though he was forty, but ironically, like many servicemen, found himself consigned to safe barracks in the country while the bombs were falling on Rosehill Avenue. "We kids rampaged through the ruins, the semis opened up like doll's houses, the precious privacy shamefully exposed. We took pride in our collection of shrapnel." The pleasure and wonder that young boys, untroubled by adult anxieties, could derive from the Blitz were vividly evoked in one of Boorman's best films, Hope and Glory , but its most memorable scene belongs to a later phase of the war. During the First World War, Ivy and her sisters had fled the threat of German Zeppelins by retreating to the Thames-side village of Shepperton where their father owned a summer house. Now, driven by some atavistic urge, she took her own children back to Shepperton (still undeveloped and unspoiled) for safety, and so began John Boorman's lifelong romance with rivers, of which the Thames was the archetype. He swam, and fished, and boated and punted, and fell into a lock while the sluice was open, narrowly escaping drowning.
He attended the local Church of England school and sang in the parish choir, but when he failed his 11-plus, his mother sent him to a private Catholic grammar school run by the Salesian order, where he experienced the culture of corporal punishment then sadly characteristic of Catholic education. "The young brothers and priests seemed pent up, over-wound, their only release the infliction of pain." (I can vouch for the accuracy of that description.) No attempt was made to convert him, but a devout chum with a shaky grasp of the relevant theology insisted on baptizing him secretly in the school toilets, pulling the chain and catching the water in his hand before it was polluted by the toilet bowl. "I became, in a manner of speaking, a closet Catholic." Perhaps Boorman did in fact acquire from this schooling a feeling for ritual and symbolism that is more Catholic than Protestant, and which left its mark on his films.
Towards the end of the war the school was destroyed by a "doodlebug", just as the academic year was due to begin - the episode with which Boorman ends Hope and Glory . Blazered schoolboys deliriously celebrate on the bomb-site, and the director says in voice-over: "In all my life nothing has quite matched the perfect joy of that moment as my school lay in ruins and the river beckoned with the promise of stolen days". The idyll that followed was marred when Boorman shot a kingfisher with an airgun and suffered pangs of remorse. Imposing an adult interpretation on the event he
comments: "I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored". When the family's uninsured house burned down shortly afterwards
he regarded it as a punishment for this sin and for his complicity in his mother's infidelity. Whether that relationship was consummated is not clear, but when Herbert fell mortally ill, Ivy nursed him devotedly and made no attempt to disguise her love for him from her husband. Her adolescent son purified himself by a ritual dip in the Thames, believing that if he could swim without causing a single ripple on the surface of the water he would recover the state of grace he had lost.
A maverick Salesian teacher, Fr John McGuire, encouraged Boorman to think he might become a writer, but the family's circumstances prevented him from even thinking about going to university. He left school and scraped a living from a door-to-door dry cleaning business in partnership with a friend, reading promiscuously and haunting the cinema, while he waited for his call-up to National Service. He wrote articles on spec, a few of which were published by the Manchester Guardian , and did some broadcasting. With another friend, Barrie, he formed a Jules-et-Jim threesome with a girl called Pat. One day, in Barrie's absence, he and Pat succumbed to
sexual desire, and both confessed the deed to Barrie, who was devastated - but only for a
few hours, after which he announced that he now realized how shallow and banal Pat was.
It was another, comic, re-enactment of the Arthurian triangle. . . .
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