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| Dame Barbara Cartland |
Anne Reid is starring in the TV drama ‘In Love With Barbara’ about the life of Dame Barbara Cartland. Some critics say she looks so much like the pink writer it’s like a revenant. It is to be hoped that Anne Reid will forgive them; she looks much better now than Dame Barbara did at any time during her life.
The film plays in the seventies at the high point of her writing career or rather her commercial success. In flashbacks, it pilfers through her life showing the high and low points. Starting in the twenties as a writer novice she became part of the London beau monde of the twenties and thirties. It covers her divorce, a scandal in itself at that time especially when spiced with the accusation of adultery, which was a cross petition actually. It goes through the later marriage to the man she had been accused of committing adultery with, incidentally the cousin of her divorced husband.
She vehemently denied impropriety, and was believed at court. But her later marriage stretched credulity of society to breaking point, especially the society she wanted to belong to. Of her first marriage she had a daughter, Raine, who later became Lady Spencer, stepmother to Princess Diana. Her nickname ‘Acid Raine’ says all about her. The drama also brushes on Barbara’s friendship with Lord Mountbatten.
Barbara Cartland has published 723 books during her lifetime, 722 times with a swooning heroine and a dark prince as main parts in stories all strangely the same. One book falls out of this category completely; her Etiquette Handbook (reviewed here) which strangely does not deal with the proper proceedings in divorce. Her life certainly was much more interesting than any of her books.
The film might have become more serious and daring if Ian, Barbara’s son, had not been attending every detail of it to insure that no detrimental facts were included. At his time, Ian is still editing and publishing a further 160 manuscripts of his mother left after her death in 2000. One dares to ask if he has nothing more serious to do with his life.
Barbara Cartland’s greatest claim on fame has been the fact that through the marriage of her daughter Raine she became the step-grandmother of Princess Diana. In keeping with her rather overweening self-esteem and the skewered conception of her own importance and achievements, I doubt very much that she would have been satisfied with this film.
But as a preparation for Halloween, the film and its heroine are certainly grizzly enough. In fact, a fourth rate TV channel brings a third rate film about a second rate writer. Let’s hope that it will be a first rate Halloween after this ghoulish revenant in pink.
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