Deanna Durbin
I heard on Radio 3 this morning that the film star Deanna Durbin has just died aged 91. I suppose it was partly due to her that I was listening to Radio 3 at all.
In 1937 she made a film called One Hundred Men and a Girl, and it was an extract from the soundtrack of that film they played this morning. In it, she played the daughter of a musician who helps organise an orchestra of unemployed musicians and then persuades the famous British-born conductor Leopold Stokowski to conduct them. Stokowski played himself in that film.
It was one of those films that got trotted out on the BBC on Sunday afternoons in the sixties and I saw it several times. I would guess it was partly what got me interested in classical music in my teens. Around that time my parents bought me as a Christmas present a recording of Holst's The Planets, conducted by Stokowski.
Stokowski went on to appear with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and lived into his nineties. A few months after I moved down to London I saw what proved to be his last public appearance conducting in the UK at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1974.
In 1937 she made a film called One Hundred Men and a Girl, and it was an extract from the soundtrack of that film they played this morning. In it, she played the daughter of a musician who helps organise an orchestra of unemployed musicians and then persuades the famous British-born conductor Leopold Stokowski to conduct them. Stokowski played himself in that film.
It was one of those films that got trotted out on the BBC on Sunday afternoons in the sixties and I saw it several times. I would guess it was partly what got me interested in classical music in my teens. Around that time my parents bought me as a Christmas present a recording of Holst's The Planets, conducted by Stokowski.
Stokowski went on to appear with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and lived into his nineties. A few months after I moved down to London I saw what proved to be his last public appearance conducting in the UK at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1974.