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Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

A True Love Story

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, and Vanessa Redgrave
The Golden Age of Hollywood, a young British actor, a love affair, and a tragedy, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool is Peter Turner's touching memoir of the last days of Hollywood icon Gloria Grahame, the Oscar-winner best known for her portrayal of irresistible femme fatales in films such as The Big Heat, Oklahoma and The Bad and the Beautiful.
On September 29, 1981, Peter Turner received a phone call that would change his life. His former lover, Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, had collapsed in a Lancaster hotel and was refusing medical attention. He took her into his chaotic and often eccentric family's home in Liverpool to see her through her last days. Though their affair had ended years before, it was to him that she turned in her final hour of need.
Taking place over the course of three weeks in Turner's larger-than-life working-class family home, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is an affectionate, moving, and wryly humorous memoir of friendship, love, and stardom.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 1, 1987
      Turner recalls the dying days of the late Gloria Grahame, a movie actress who had some success in the '50s and '60s, winning an Oscar for her performance in The Bad and the Beautiful. In England in 1981 to appear in a play, Grahame reached the terminal stage of stomach cancer and called on Turner, her ex-lover, for support. He took her to his parents' home in Liverpool, where her condition continued to deteriorate; along with being a food faddist, she was so distrusting of doctors that she would not enter a hospital. Eventually Turner contacted two of her children, who went to England and flew her to New York, wher she died. As a picture of a caring lower-middle-class British family, willing to make great sacrifices to help a stranger, the story is heartwarming, but there is little else to recommend it.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In this utterly confusing memoir, author Peter Turner tells the story of the final ailing years of his one-time love interest, Gloria Grahame, a film noir actress of some note. Although Turner's and his family's kindness to a near-stranger is heartwarming, the narrative contains seemingly unending dialogue without much background in the form of narrative. Despite narrator Peter Kenny's expertise, the sharing of only who said what, where, and when does not tell a clear story. With his bright, friendly style and attempts to characterize the female voices, Kenny tries unsuccessfully to sort things out sufficiently for an entertaining listening experience. A film of this work is to be released in November 2017. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

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