Anne Bancroft
Anna Maria Louisa Italiano, known professionally as Anne Bancroft, was an American actress, director and singer associated with the method acting school, having studied under Lee Strasberg. Respected for her acting prowess and versatility, Bancroft was acknowledged for her work in film and television, she won one Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globes, two Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards, several other awards and nominations. After her film debut in Don't Bother to Knock and a string of supporting film roles during the 1950s, she won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her lead role in The Miracle Worker as the teacher of teenage Helen Keller, reprising her role in the Broadway stage play, winning a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. On Broadway in 1965, she played a medieval nun obsessed with a priest in John Whiting's play The Devils, based on the Aldous Huxley novel The Devils of Loudun, she was best known as the seductress, Mrs. Robinson, in The Graduate, a role that she said had come to overshadow her other work.
Bancroft continued in lead roles until the late 1980s. In 1987, she starred with Anthony Hopkins in 84 Charing Cross Road, she appeared in several movies directed or produced by her second husband, comedian Mel Brooks, including the award-winning drama The Elephant Man, as well as comedies To Be or Not to Be and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. She received an Emmy Award nomination for 2001's Haven, a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, she died two years in 2005, after battling cancer. Bancroft was born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano in the Bronx, New York, the middle of three daughters of Mildred, a telephone operator, Michael G. Italiano, a dress pattern maker. Bancroft's parents were both children of Italian immigrants. In an interview, she stated her family was from Muro Lucano, in the province of Potenza, she was brought up Roman Catholic. She was raised in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx moving to 1580 Zerega Ave. and graduated from Christopher Columbus High School in 1948.
She attended HB Studio, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the Actors Studio and the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women at the University of California, Los Angeles. After appearing in a number of live television dramas under the name Anne Marno, she was told to change her surname, as it was "too ethnic for movies". In 1958, Bancroft made her Broadway debut as lovelorn, Bronx-accented Gittel Mosca opposite Henry Fonda in William Gibson's two-character play Two for the Seesaw, directed by Arthur Penn. For Gittel, she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play, she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play in 1960, again with playwright Gibson and director Penn, when she played Annie Sullivan, the young woman who teaches the child Helen Keller to communicate in The Miracle Worker. She appeared in the 1962 film version of the play and won the 1962 Academy Award for Best Actress, with Patty Duke repeating her own success as Keller alongside Bancroft.
She had returned to Broadway to star in Mother Courage and Her Children, so Joan Crawford accepted Bancroft's Oscar on her behalf, presented the award to her in New York. Bancroft is one of ten actors to have won both a Tony Award for the same role. Bancroft co-starred as a medieval nun obsessed with a priest in the 1965 Broadway production of John Whiting's play The Devils. Produced by Alexander H. Cohen and directed by Michael Cacoyannis, it ran for 63 performances. Bancroft received a second Academy Award nomination in 1965 for her performance in the 1964 film The Pumpkin Eater. Bancroft was known during this period for her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, for which she received a third Academy Award nomination. In the film, she played an unhappily married woman who seduces the son of her husband's business partner, the much younger recent college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman. In the movie, Hoffman's character dates and falls in love with her daughter. Bancroft was ambivalent about her appearance in The Graduate.
Despite her character becoming an archetype of the "older woman" role, Bancroft was only six years older than Hoffman. A CBS television special, Annie: the Women in the Life of a Man, won Bancroft an Emmy Award for her singing and acting. Bancroft is one of few entertainers to win an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony award, she followed that success with a second television special and The Hoods, telecast on ABC and featured her husband Mel Brooks as a guest star. She made an uncredited cameo in the film Blazing Saddles, directed by Brooks, she received a fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 1977 for her performance in The Turning Point opposite Shirley MacLaine, a fifth nomination for Best Actress in 1985 for her performance in Agnes of God opposite Jane Fonda. Bancroft made her debut as a screenwriter and director in Fatso, in which she starred with Dom DeLuise. Bancroft was the original choice to play Joan Crawford in the film Mommie Dearest, but backed out, was replaced by Faye Dunaway.
She was a front-runner for the role of Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment, but declined so she could act in the remake of To Be or Not to Be
The League of Gentlemen (film)
The League of Gentlemen is a 1960 British criminal comedy film directed by Basil Dearden and starring Jack Hawkins, Nigel Patrick, Roger Livesey, Richard Attenborough. It is based on the 1958 novel The League of Gentlemen by John Boland and adapted by Bryan Forbes, who starred in the film. A manhole opens at night in an empty street and out climbs Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Hyde in a dinner suit, he gets into a drives home. There, he prepares seven envelopes, each containing an American crime paperback called The Golden Fleece, halves of ten £5-notes and an unsigned invitation from “Co-operative Removals Limited” to lunch at the Cafe Royal; the envelopes are sent to former army officers, each in humiliating circumstances. When they all turn up looking for the other halves of the £5-notes which are handed out, Hyde asks their opinion of the novel, about a robbery, they show little enthusiasm but Hyde reveals each person's misdemeanours. Hyde has no criminal record but holds a grudge for being made redundant by the army after a long career.
He intends to rob a bank using the team's skills, with equal shares of £100,000 or more for each man. The gang meet under the guise of an amateur dramatic society rehearsing Journey’s End to discuss the plan before moving into Hyde’s house and living a military regimen of duties and fines for being out of line. Hyde knows that a million pounds in used notes is delivered to a City of London bank and has details of the delivery, they raid an army training camp in Dorset for supplies. Hyde, Mycroft and Race distract soldiers by posing as senior officers on an unscheduled food inspection; the others steal weapons while posing as telephone repairmen, speaking in Irish accents to divert suspicion to the IRA. Hyde has explained the reasoning behind this ruse by stating the one nationality to whom the British will never give the benefit of the doubt is the Irish; the gang rent a warehouse to prepare. Race steals vehicles including a truck which are fitted with false number plates, they are disturbed by a passing policeman.
In Hyde's basement, the gang train with models. On the eve of the operation, Hyde recalls his former military glory; the robbery is precise. Using smoke bombs, sub-machine guns, radio jamming equipment, the gang raids the bank, near St Paul’s; the money is seized without the robbers escape. At Hyde’s house, celebrations are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Hyde’s old friend, Brigadier “Bunny” Warren, who drunkenly recalls the old days. One by one the members leave carrying suitcases filled with notes; the telephone rings. Leading the police is Superintendent Wheatlock from whom Hyde learns the flaw in his plan. A small boy outside the bank had been collecting car registration numbers, a common hobby at the time; the police, discovering the number, found it had been noted by the policeman who visited the warehouse. The policeman had noted the number of Hyde's own car, thus a link was established between Hyde. Hyde is escorted to a police van in which the rest are "all present and correct", each having been captured as he left the house.
Allied Film Makers was a short-lived production company founded by Dearden, actors Hawkins and Attenborough, producer Michael Relph. Forbes contributed many of the company's scripts. Dearden had directed The Blue Lamp; the portrait of Hyde's wife is a close copy of a portrait of Deborah Kerr, used in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in which Roger Livesey starred. Forbes points out in his commentary on the DVD that in most films of the time Hyde's wife would be described as dead and not dismissed in such a manner. A scene in the script following the dinner party has Hyde, followed by Race, visiting a teenage girl at school—her photo is on his desk, it is implied. A scene which did not make the film has Weaver the teetotaler reaching for the brandy after Hyde has left the dinner. Lexy reminds him he shouldn't but Weaver drinks anyway. In the original script, Race addressed others as "old dear". Cary Grant turned it down. Queens Gate Place Mews, SW7, was used as the filming location for Edward Lexy's garage.
The magazines in Mycroft’s suitcase at the beginning of the film were borrowed from the set of Peeping Tom, being filmed at the same time at Pinewood. The film was successful, being the sixth most popular movie at the UK box office in 1960. By 1971 it had earned a profit of £250,000 Over twenty years Bryan Forbes estimated the profit as between £300,000 and £400,000; the League of Gentlemen, was mentioned in the film The Wrong Arm of the Law as one of the films that “Pearly Gates” was going to show his gang of crooks as a part of his training programme. The film was included, along with three other Dearden films, as part of the box set Basil Dearden’s London Underground by the Criterion Collection. In 2006, a restored version of the film was released as a special edition DVD in the UK; the extras include a South Bank Show documentary on Attenborough and a PDF version of Forbes' original script. An audio commentary for the film was provided by Forbes and his wife Nanette Newman who features in the film as Major Rutland-Smith's wife.
The book and film inspired both Alan Moore's comic series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and its spin-off movie, the British comedy troupe The League
St Giles Circus
St Giles Circus is a road junction in the St Giles district of the West End of London at the eastern end of Oxford Street, where it connects with New Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road. It is near to Soho, Covent Garden and Fitzrovia; the word Circus is used although the buildings around the traffic junction are not all rounded, as with for example Oxford Circus. From the Middle Ages until the fifteenth century, gallows were located at St Giles Circus alongside a cage for prisoners, a cattle enclosure known as St Giles's Pound; the area was an infamous rookery until it was cleared in the mid-19th century with the creation of New Oxford Street parallel to St Giles High Street by clearances. Tottenham Court Road Underground station was opened in July 1900 as part of the Central London Railway, with the platforms under Oxford Street to the west of St Giles Circus, the station opening on the south west side of the circus, on Oxford Street; the Charing Cross and Hampstead Railway joined the station with what is now part of the Northern Line in September 1908, with station entrance on the south east side of the circus.
The main station ticket hall was moved underground, built below the circus in the 1920s. The area today is dominated by Centre Point Tower, located on the south-east corner on New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. Built between 1963 and 1966 by developer Harry Hyams, the brutalist tower was London's first "skyscraper", is now a Grade II listed building; as part of the Centre Point project the developer was to have included a modern traffic roundabout and transport interchange, but this part of the scheme was not delivered. St Giles Circus has been since 2009 the site of construction for Crossrail, which have disrupted road flows and led to several buildings being demolished; the Dominion Theatre is close to the north-east corner, on Tottenham Court Road just above New Oxford Street. The London Astoria theatre was on the south west side. A new theatre to replace the Astoria is planned. An auditorium/gallery is planned for the south-east corner
84 Charing Cross Road (film)
84 Charing Cross Road is a 1987 British-American drama film directed by David Jones. The screenplay by Hugh Whitemore is based on a play by James Roose-Evans, which itself was an adaptation of the 1970 epistolary memoir of the same name by Helene Hanff, a compilation of letters between herself and Frank Doel dating from 1949 to 1968; the play has only two characters, but the dramatis personae for the film were expanded to include Hanff's Manhattan friends, the bookshop staff and Doel's wife Nora. In 1949, Helene Hanff is in search of obscure classics and British literature titles that she has been unable to find in New York City, she notices an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature placed by antiquarian booksellers Marks & Co, located at the titular address in London. She contacts the shop, where manager Frank Doel fulfills her requests. A long-distance friendship develops over time between the two and between Hanff and other staff members, as well, including birthday gifts, holiday packages and food parcels to compensate for post–World War II food shortages in Britain.
Their correspondence includes discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Hanff postpones visiting her English friends until too late: Doel dies in December 1968 and the bookshop closes, she visits Charing Cross Road and the vacant shop in the summer of 1971. Anne Bancroft as Helene Hanff Anthony Hopkins as Frank Doel Judi Dench as Nora Doel Maurice Denham as George Martin Eleanor David as Cecily Farr Mercedes Ruehl as Kay Daniel Gerroll as Brian Wendy Morgan as Megan Wells Ian McNeice as Bill Humphries J. Smith-Cameron as Ginny Connie Booth as the Lady from Delaware Tony Todd as Demolition Worker The film was shot on location in London and New York City. London settings include Buckingham Palace, Soho Square, Trafalgar Square, St James's, White Hart Lane in Tottenham and suburban Richmond. Manhattan settings include Central Park, Madison Avenue, Saint Thomas Church. Interiors were filmed at Lee International Shepperton Studios in Surrey.
In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called it "a movie guaranteed to put all teeth on edge... a movie of such unrelieved genteelness that it makes one long to head for Schrafft's for a double-gin martini, straight up, a stack of cinnamon toast from which the crusts have been removed."Variety described it as "an appealing film on several counts, one of the most notable being Anne Bancroft's fantastic performance in the leading role... brings Helene Hanff alive in all her dimensions, in the process creating one of her most memorable characterizations."Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "The film is based on a hit London and New York play, based on a best-selling book. Given the thin and unlikely subject matter, a series of miracles, and yet there are people. I should know. I read the book and I saw the play and now I am reviewing the movie, I still don't think the basic idea is sound... Miss Fiske... was the librarian at the Urbana Free Library when I was growing up...
She never had to talk to me about the love of books because she exuded it and I absorbed it. She would have loved this movie. Sitting next to her, I suspect, too, but Miss Fiske is gone now, I found it pretty slow-going on my own."Gene Siskel, in his review for The Chicago Tribune, wrote: "Years ago, 84 Charing Cross Road would have been called a'woman's picture' or a'perfect matinee.' But it's more. It should be irresistible to anyone able to appreciate the goodness of its spirit and its spirited characters." In its opening weekend in the U. S. the film grossed $24,350 at one theater. The total U. S. box office was $1,083,486. Anne Bancroft won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Judi Dench was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Hugh Whitemore for BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. At the 15th Moscow International Film Festival, Anthony Hopkins was named Best Actor, David Hugh Jones was nominated for the Golden Prize for his direction. Whitemore and Helene Hanff shared the first USC Scripter Award for their contributions to the screenplay.
84 Charing Cross Road on IMDb 84 Charing Cross Road at Rotten Tomatoes
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage; the service maintains 50 foreign news bureaus with more than 250 correspondents around the world. Fran Unsworth has been Director of News and Current Affairs since January 2018; the department's annual budget is in excess of £350 million. BBC News' domestic and online news divisions are housed within the largest live newsroom in Europe, in Broadcasting House in central London. Parliamentary coverage is broadcast from studios in Millbank in London. Through the BBC English Regions, the BBC has regional centres across England, as well as national news centres in Northern Ireland and Wales. All nations and English regions produce their own local news programmes and other current affairs and sport programmes.
The BBC is a quasi-autonomous corporation authorised by Royal Charter, making it operationally independent of the government, who have no power to appoint or dismiss its director-general, required to report impartially. As with all major media outlets it has been accused of political bias from across the political spectrum, both within the UK and abroad; the British Broadcasting Company broadcast its first radio bulletin from radio station.2LO In 14 November 1922. Wishing to avoid competition, newspaper publishers persuaded the government to ban the BBC from broadcasting news before 7:00 pm, to force it to use wire service copy instead of reporting on its own. On Easter weekend in 1930, this reliance on newspaper wire services left the radio news service with no information to report after saying There is no news today. Piano music was played instead; the BBC gained the right to edit the copy and, in 1934, created its own news operation. However, it could not broadcast news before 6 PM until World War II.
Gaumont British and Movietone cinema newsreels had been broadcast on the TV service since 1936, with the BBC producing its own equivalent Television Newsreel programme from January 1948. A weekly Children's Newsreel was inaugurated on 23 April 1950, to around 350,000 receivers; the network began simulcasting its radio news on television in 1946, with a still picture of Big Ben. Televised bulletins began on 5 July 1954, broadcast from leased studios within Alexandra Palace in London; the public's interest in television and live events was stimulated by Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. It is estimated that up to 27 million people viewed the programme in the UK, overtaking radio's audience of 12 million for the first time; those live pictures were fed from 21 cameras in central London to Alexandra Palace for transmission, on to other UK transmitters opened in time for the event. That year, there were around two million TV Licences held in the UK, rising to over three million the following year, four and a half million by 1955.
Television news, although physically separate from its radio counterpart, was still under radio news' control – correspondents provided reports for both outlets–and that first bulletin, shown on 5 July 1954 on the BBC television service and presented by Richard Baker, involved his providing narration off-screen while stills were shown. This was followed by the customary Television Newsreel with a recorded commentary by John Snagge, it was revealed that this had been due to producers fearing a newsreader with visible facial movements would distract the viewer from the story. On-screen newsreaders were introduced a year in 1955 – Kenneth Kendall, Robert Dougall, Richard Baker–three weeks before ITN's launch on 21 September 1955. Mainstream television production had started to move out of Alexandra Palace in 1950 to larger premises – at Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush, west London – taking Current Affairs with it, it was from here that the first Panorama, a new documentary programme, was transmitted on 11 November 1953, with Richard Dimbleby becoming anchor in 1955.
On 18 February 1957, the topical early-evening programme Tonight, hosted by Cliff Michelmore and designed to fill the airtime provided by the abolition of the Toddlers' Truce, was broadcast from Marconi's Viking Studio in St Mary Abbott's Place, Kensington – with the programme moving into a Lime Grove studio in 1960, where it maintained its production office. On 28 October 1957, the Today programme, a morning radio programme, was launched in central London on the Home Service. In 1958, Hugh Carleton Greene became head of Current Affairs, he set up a BBC study group whose findings, published in 1959, were critical of what the television news operation had become under his predecessor, Tahu Hole. The report proposed that the head of television news should take control, that the television service should have a proper newsroom of its own, with an editor-of-the-day. On 1 January 1960, Greene became Director-General and brought about big changes at BBC Television and BBC Television News. BBC Television News had been created in 1955, in response to the founding of ITN.
The changes made by Greene were aimed at making BBC reporting more similar to ITN, rated by study groups held by Greene. A newsroom was created at Alexandra Palace, television reporters were recruited and given the opportunity to write and voice their own scripts–without the "impossible burden" of having to cover stories for radio too. In 1987 thirty years John B
Tottenham Court Road tube station
Tottenham Court Road is a London Underground and future Elizabeth line station in St Giles, West End of London. It is served by the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line; the station will be served by the Elizabeth Line when the core section opens in autumn 2019. On the Central line it is between Oxford Circus and Holborn, on the Northern line it is between Leicester Square and Goodge Street; the station is located at St Giles Circus, the junction of Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road and is in Travelcard Zone 1. The station opened as part of the Central London Railway on 30 July 1900. From that date until 24 September 1933, the next station eastbound on the Central line was the now-defunct British Museum; the platforms are under Oxford Street west of St Giles' Circus, were connected to the ticket hall via lifts at the east end of the platforms. The original station building is in Oxford Street and was designed in common with other CLR stations by Harry Bell Measures.
Much modified, it now forms part of the station entrance, some elements of the original facade survive above the canopy. Apart from those limited original features of the entrance, the station building otherwise together with a whole row of other elegant old buildings were demolished in 2009; the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway arrived here on 22 June 1907 but used the name Oxford Street until an interchange was opened on 3 September 1908 from when the present name was used for both lines. The next station north on the Northern line was called Tottenham Court Road, but was renamed to Goodge Street at this time; the original ticket office was on the south east corner of the junction of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, its original lift shafts and emergency stairs are still extant. A set of emergency stairs can used as access down to the ends of the Northern line platform; the lift shafts are used for offices and station facilities. The original CCE&HR station buildings were destroyed.
Like a number of other central area stations, Tottenham Court Road underwent improvements during the 1920s to replace the original sets of lifts with escalators. Works commenced in 1923. A shaft for three escalators was driven from the ticket hall under the junction down to the east end of the Central line platforms ending at an intermediate circulation space. A further pair of escalators descend from this level to the north end of the Northern line platforms; the lifts were removed and the redundant shafts were used as ventilation ducts. In 1938 a chiller plant began operating at the station; this was decommissioned in 1949. Passenger congestion entering and leaving the Northern line platforms was eased by the addition of a short single escalator at the centre of the platform leading up to a passageway linking to the intermediate circulation area. However, this was in itself a cause of congestion, as traffic trying to leave the station from the Northern line found itself in the path of traffic entering and travelling to the Central line.
In 1984 the entire station was redecorated, losing the distinctive Leslie Green-designed platform tiling pattern of the Yerkes tube lines, the plain white platform tiles of the CLR. The 1980s design includes panels of tessellated mural mosaic by Eduardo Paolozzi, is a distinct and noticeable feature of the station; the mosaic's frenetic design is intended to reflect the station's position adjacent to Tottenham Court Road's large concentration of hi-fi and electronics shops. Some of this mosaic has now been removed in the expansion of the station for Crossrail; these parts are due to be installed in the University of Edinburgh. The station had four entrances to the sub-surface ticket hall from the north-east, south-west and north-west corners of the junction and from a subway beneath the Centre Point building which starts on Andrew Borde Street; the entrances were congested leading to occasions during peak periods of the day when they were closed to prevent overcrowding in the station. In the aftermath of the King's Cross fire in 1987, London Underground was recommended to investigate "passenger flow and congestion in stations and take remedial action".
Although a Parliamentary bill was tabled in 1991 to permit London Underground to improve and expand the congested station, the station was drastically reconstructed and upgraded in the mid 2010s as part of the Crossrail project. The £500m station upgrade took 8 years, involved building a much larger ticket hall under the forecourt of Centre Point, new sets of escalators to reach the central section of the Northern line platforms from the ticket hall, step-free access to the platforms, as well as escalators down to the eastern end of the future Crossrail station; the subway to Andrew Borde Street was replaced as part of this development. To enable this expansion to occur, both the Astoria theatres and the original Central line entrance were demolished; as part of the expansion of the ticket hall, Art on the Underground commissioned an artwork by Daniel Buren, a French conceptual artist. This piece,'Diamonds and Circles' permanent works'in situ', was Buren's first permanent public commission in the UK.
The artwork comprises colourful diamond and circle shapes, which contrast
Helene Hanff
Helene Hanff was an American writer born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is best known as the author of the book 84, Charing Cross Road, which became the basis for a stage play, television play, film of the same name. Helene Hanff's career saw her move from unproduced playwright to writer of some of the earliest television dramas to becoming a noted writer and personality in her own right, as a quintessential New Yorker, she wrote a memoir in 1961 called Underfoot in Show Business that chronicled her struggles as an ambitious young playwright trying to make it in the world of New York theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. She worked in publicists' offices and spent summers on the "straw hat circuit" along the East Coast, all the while writing one play after another, her plays were admired by some of Broadway's leading producers but somehow none of them made it to the stage. When network television production geared up in New York City in the early 1950s, Hanff found a new career writing and editing scripts for many early television dramas.
Chief among these was the Dumont Network series The Adventures of Ellery Queen. At the same time, she continued to try to get one of her plays produced on Broadway and not just be "one of the 999 out of 1,000 who didn't become Moss Hart." The bulk of television production moved to California, but Hanff chose to remain in New York. As her TV work dried up, she turned to writing for magazines and to the books that made her reputation; the epistolary work 84, Charing Cross Road was first published in 1970. It chronicles Hanff's 20 years of correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co, a London bookshop, she depended on the bookshop—and on Doel—for the obscure classics and British literature titles that fueled her passion for self-education. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop's staff, sending them food parcels during Britain's postwar shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan. Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late.
Hanff did visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still-standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. In Duchess, Hanff describes her visits with friends and fans to various locations and places of literary and historical interest in London and Southern England; this trip was a highlight of her life – her modesty and sense of humor are evident as she talks about her love of London and the friends who were so devoted to her because of 84, Charing Cross Road, including Frank Doel's wife Nora and their daughter Sheila. In the 1987 film adaptation 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff and Frank Finlay had played Doel in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. Ellen Burstyn recreated the role on Broadway in 1982 at the Nederlander Theater in New York City. Elaine Stritch played Helene Hanff in a television adaptation of 84, Charing Cross Road.
Hanff put to good use her obsession with British scholar Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in a book called Q's Legacy. The book serves as background to 84 and recounts the aftermath of Duchess. Other books include The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Underfoot in Show Business was adapted as a stage play by Charles Leipart and premiered in 2008 at the Devonshire Theatre in Eastbourne, UK, directed by David Giles. Hanff never married. In the 1987 84 Charing Cross Road movie, a photo of a US serviceman is shown in her apartment during the period of World War II, a portrait at which she smiles fondly, suggesting to the viewer that Hanff remained unmarried due to this naval officer's death. No such person is mentioned in her autobiographical Underfoot, none of her writings suggests that she had any lasting or short-term romantic relationship with any person. However, writer Al Senter claimed that she mentioned a long affair with an unnamed'prominent American' during a conversation with one of the co-founders of Marks and Co, one obituary of her asserted that'there were romances'.
Stephen R. Pastore published a biography of Hanff in 2011 based on interviews that he had conducted with her. Hanff died from diabetes six days before her 81st birthday in 1997 in New York City; the apartment building where she lived at 305 E. 72nd Street has been named "Charing Cross House" in her honor. A bronze plaque next to the front door commemorates her authorship of the book. In London, a bronze plaque on the site of the original building commemorates the bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road. Obituary in The Independent Helene Hanff biography by James Roose-Evans 84 Charing Cross Road – Play for Today, 1975 on IMDb 84 Charing Cross Road – film, 1987 on IMDb
Media related to Cambridge Circus, London at Wikimedia Commons
