Role: Gertrude Lawrence

Year: 1968

Synopsis

The film opens in 1940, with Lawrence in a screening room watching a documentary film chronicling her life, then flashes back to Clapham in 1915, when she leaves home to join her vaudevillian father in a dilapidated Brixton music hall. Eventually she joins the chorus in André Charlot’s West End revue. She reunites with close childhood friend Noël Coward who provides witty commentary on Gertie’s actions. Charlot becomes annoyed with Gertie’s efforts to stand out, literally, from the chorus. He threatens to fire her, but stage manager Jack Roper intercedes and gets her hired as a general understudy to the leads. She marries Jack, but it’s clear she is more inclined to perform onstage than stay home and play wife. While pregnant, she insists on going on for an absent star, and captivates the audience with her own star-making performance of “Burlington Bertie”. Charlot and Roeper witness the audiences warm approval, and both realize, Charlot grudgingly and Roeper wistfully, that Gertie belongs on the stage. After their daughter Pamela is born, Gertrude is angered when Roper takes the baby on a pub-crawl, and leaves him. A subsequent courtship with Sir Anthony Spencer, an English nobleman, polishes Gertie’s rough edges and transforms her into a lady. Caught at a chic supper club when she is supposed to be on a sick day, she is fired from the Charlot Revue. Squired by Spencer, she becomes the famous darling of society. Coward then convinces Charlot to feature her in his new production, and she is finally recognized as a star. When the revue opens in New York City, she dallies with an actor and a banker, bringing the number of her suitors to three. Gertrude faces financial ruin after spending all her considerable earnings, but ultimately manages to pay back her debtors and retain her glamour. As her career soars, her long-distance relationship with her daughter deteriorates. When Pamela cancels an anticipated holiday with Gertie, she gets roaring drunk and insults a roomful of people at a surprise birthday party thrown by Coward. Among the insultees at the party is American theatre producer Richard Aldrich. When he returns to escort the hung-over star home, he gives an honest appraisal of her. She is insulted, then intrigued by him, making an unannounced visit to his Cape Playhouse where she proposes to play the lead. They argue at rehearsal. He proposes marriage, she throws him out.

Back on Broadway, she has trouble getting a handle on a crucial “The Saga of Jenny” number in Lady in the Dark. Aldrich turns up at a daunting rehearsal where he observes her frustration and takes her, with Coward, out to a nightclub.

She protests, then realizes the kind of performance they are watching is the key to her dilemma in the show. Coward pronounces him “a very clever man.” After a rousing performance of “Jenny,” the film ends with her marriage to Aldrich, eight years before her triumph in The King and I and untimely death from liver cancer at age 54.