Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
My good literary friend Lily Malone was hoping to find a famous Lily Malone at Friday Night @The Flicks, not only do I have to disappoint her on the first count, I have to disappoint her on the second and third as well as well!*
It’s Sunday and instead of Lily Malone we have… Lillie Langtry the lover to princes and a woman who never appeared on the silver screen although her life story was told in a 1978 mini series.
The luminescent beauty is a romantic heroine writ large – in fact becoming possibly one of the world’s first pin up girls.
Intelligent, vivacious but desperately short of money she decided to forge a career away from her Irish husband with whom there would be no love lost (at his death in 1897 she sent a letter of condolence to a widow that read: ‘I too have lost a husband, but alas! it was no great loss’).
The luminous beauty, Lillie Langtry.
She accepted playwright Oscar Wilde’s suggestion that she supplement her coffers by taking to the stage, which she did with great success also joining the long line of actresses who became English royal mistresses, the most famous of while would be Charles II’s lover Nell Gwynn.
Like actresses today, she was not above taking a few bob endorsing cosmetic products, lending her famous face and figure to Pears Soap.
Entertaining many lovers in her 20s and 30s it was clear that male flesh fascinated as did later horse flesh with Langtry operating a string of up to 20 racehorses in the latter part of her life after she had emigrated to America.
Sadly she was not so lucky in love. At the age of 46 she married a toy boy many years her junior, a young baronet with whom she shared an interest in horses and nothing else. They did not even live in the same house.
This striking woman set the standard for beauty for late Victorian and early Edwardian eras and one that would not surpassed until the flapper era of the 1920s.
*In my defence I wasn’t slacking this weekend, I had edits to do for Moonstone Obsession. Yay! one step closer before my novel is published!