LILYAN CHAUVIN TRIBUTES 4

I was introduced to Lilyan in the latter part of the 1990's. I am a relic of the pre-R. S. C. English stage tradition and have not mixed well with modern ways. Basil Rathbone is my professional cousin - by apprenticeship through Sir Henry Irving. My tradition is that which was displaced by the "new bloods" who gained the ascendancy over our older ways on the West End by the mid-1920's (more about this in a moment), and Dame Judith Anderson was part of the transition! She, of course, had been a close friend of Lilyan's.

Meeting Lilyan was electrifying. We had several delightful conversations by telephone, and met once for several hours by her graceful invitation to her pleasant home. Meeting Lilyan was, indeed, coming into my spiritual home.
       As an Englishman, I was born with the genetic anti-Gallicism inherent in our corner of the Earth, and, although my mother taught me French from infancy, I remember carving "je déteste la France" on my desk at school when I was six at the beginning of the term. The new French master then entered, a tiny elderly lady with an arch face and a sweet manner. She charmed all of us; as we did our first exercise on paper, she perambulated the room so quietly that I was startled to hear her voice behind me, quaking with laughter at the sight of my recent carving, asking me, "Pourquoi?" It was the surgical knife that cured me once and for all of any and all national prejudice.
       I told Lilyan this story, and heard the same laughter. Lilyan had the apogee of French elegance and grace, without the cynicism, hauteur, close-mindedness, and boorishness into which that elegance and charm have so often degenerated, yet she was also the apogee of the best of the British. Only the Queen and a few others have kept that spirit alive. Lilyan combined in herself all of my favourite and best early and later influences, and yet she treated me like an equal, a close friend.
       I had subsequently studied historical painting at the École des Beaux-Arts of the Sorbonne, have had several close French friends over the years, and so was no longer disarmed by French charm, but Lilyan transcended it.
       So, in this mass of indifference, ignorance, and lies called Hollywood, here before me was an Epiphany from Olympus, Lilyan. I could not decide at first whether she were a Muse or a Goddess. These two words are so misused nowadays by people who are looking either to sound clever or to superimpose false superiority on others that I hasten to say that I mean Muse or Goddess in the real sense, words which convey unearthly essence. And an epiphany is, of course, in the real sense, a presence of the Divine given us mortals by special grace.
       Such was and is Lilyan.
       I an not a religious fanatic or a cultist, I hasten to say, but, if an Epiphany be an event in which the Apparition flows straight into the core of one's being and speaks to that core in its most comfortable place without effort or delay, then Lilyan was and is an Epiphany.
       I was deprived of one of my greatest kindred spirits when Charles Bennett left us in 1993. He was the last of my school of acting on the West End stage, and left it in 1925 to become a writer, whom Alfred Hitchcock brought to Hollywood later. In 1925, Sir John Gielgud played second billing to him, and succeeded Charles that year when Charles abandoned acting for writing. In Gielgud, the Old School passed to the "new bloods", and so here is the quirk of Fate, because Dame Judith Anderson rose up the ladder with Gielgud.
       I met Dame Judith on the flight that brought me to San Francisco to play Richard III. thirty years ago. She struck me as the perfect Lady Macbeth: absolutely cold and chilling and powerful. She came up in the old school, and so never quite lost that touch, which Gielgud did lose.
       Lilyan and I traded anecdotes. Lilyan mentioned the Actor's Studio, knowing that she would elicit a tirade from me about method acting, over which we had a good laugh. "I transcended it, I hope, though I keep the connexions," she chuckled. Obviously, she had. She said that she knew of very little going on at that time (1998-ish) that would be suitable workwise for either of us, but said, in very diplomatic words, that it would be something very good if I were to add a class in traditional old-style Anglo-American acting to her school.