‘If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.’
– Tallulah Bankhead
The original bad girl of the golden age of Hollywood, Tallulah Bankhead was glamorous, scandalous, always witty, and never well behaved. In the Summer of 1965, with her career and her life burning away, she spent one drunken day in a Los Angeles recording studio to record a single line, a loop, of dialogue for her final film, Die! Die! My Darling! x
Tallulah Bankead lived an incredible life. She seized the stage as a teenager and made a name for herself from London to L.A. She became famous to audiences of stage, screen, television, and radio. As much as her rapier wit and powerful voices, she was known for her irrepressible passion for life as someone who refused to conform to anyone’s standards. She was determined to live life to its fullest and on her own terms. At the end of a successful career, Talulah’s increasingly self destructive behaviour made this one day of sound recording infamous in Hollywood history.
Glenda Kenyon has studied extensively for this role and enjoyed the journey of learning about her. She found that she has more in common with her subject than first appears, having played the same characters in Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, both for The Guild Theatre. Glenda enjoys the challenge of bringing this larger than life star to the intimacy of live theatre. ‘I’m not setting out to be a Tallulah impersonator. There are many. But we’re telling a story about her character, more than anything. Her outrageousness as well as her empathy… her vulnerability. I would like people to have their interest piqued in her person.’
Glenda believes the film star’s private compassion has been obscured by the stories of her wild sex life and substance abuse and that people don’t hear enough about her charity work or her generosity in the support of refugees. It is this duality of character, someone formidable and compassionate, vulnerable and unrestrained, that Glenda hopes to capture in her performance.
The Guild Theatre opens their dynamic 2020 Season with the Australian Premiere of LOOPED by Matthew Lombardo. The Guild Theatre’s Australian Premiere season features Glenda Kenyon as Tallulah and she will be joined on nstage by her son Jordan and husband Greg, both very well known to community theatre audiences.
LOOPED opens on Friday at Rockdale Theatre, Walz Street Rockdale on the 14th of February 2020 and runs to the 7th of March, playing Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays. Tickets are available on The Guild Theatre website www.guildtheatre.com.au or phone 9520 7364. Follow The Guild Theatre on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Sydney Arts Guide has one double pass to give away to the opening night performance of LOOPED. Email editor.sydneyartsguide@gmail.com with LOOPED PROMOTION in the subject heading. The winner will be advised by email.
Tallulah Bankhead in Little Foxes. 17 Jan 1941
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice. See Commons:Hirtle chart for further explanation. Note that it may still be copyrighted in jurisdictions that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works (depending on the date of the author’s death), such as Canada (50 p.m.a.), Mainland China (50 p.m.a., not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany (70 p.m.a.), Mexico (100 p.m.a.), Switzerland (70 p.m.a.), and other countries with individual treaties.
Higher resolution sizes can be found at Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The-Little-Foxes-Bankhead-1.jpg
This work is from the Carl Van Vechten Photographs collection at the Library of Congress. According to the library, there are no known copyright restrictions on the use of this work. As the restrictions on this collection expired in 1986, the Library of Congress believes this image is in the public domain. However, the Carl Van Vechten estate has asked that use of Van Vechten’s photographs “preserve the integrity” of his work, i.e, that photographs not be colorized or cropped, and that proper credit is given to the photographer.
Higher resolution sizes can be found at Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tallulah_Bankhead_(1934).jpg