Lesley's World - Lesley Blanch

August 28, 2021November 9, 2023

From the Archive Lesley Blanch & Terence Rattigan

A leading British playwright of the 1940s and 1950s, Terence Rattigan is chiefly remembered today for The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables. He also wrote screenplays based on novels, among them Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips . . . and Lesley Blanch’s The Nine Tiger Man.

But the film of Lesley Blanch’s only novel was never completed. According to a letter held in the George Cukor papers at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California 90211, dated 14 July, 1972, from 20^th Century Fox to the film’s director, George Cukor, 20th Century Studios “have 1,500,000 US dollars in charges in the film and would accept a reasonable offer for the property.”

The revised final version of Terence Rattigan’s script-screenplay, dated 14 November, 1966, is also in the Margaret Herrick Library – along with Gene Allen’s script-screenplay based on Rattigan’s, dated 5 April, 1967. Gavin Lambert’s script-screenplay is alleged by Hollywood insiders to be the best version but has disappeared and is, as yet, unfound.

Terence Rattigan said of The Nine Tiger Man: “Romantic, outrageous, savage and comic . . . It is the purest ironic comedy, almost, let’s face it, black.”

It was to be filmed partly at Belvoir Castle Grantham (Rutland).

August 11, 2021November 9, 2023

From the Archive Lesley Blanch & the Duchess of Windsor

Lesley Blanch and the Duchess of Windsor at The Mill outside Paris

Lesley Blanch with the Duchess of Windsor at Le Moulin de la Tuilerie, originally an eighteenth-century mill, outside Paris. The twenty-six acre estate was acquired by the Duke and Duchess in 1952. They lived there until his death in 1972.

July 18, 2021November 9, 2023

From the Archive Lesley Blanch & Ludwig Bemelmans

Ludwig Bemelmans was an Austrian-born writer and illustrator of children’s books and adult novels (notably the Madeline series: six were published, the first in 1939).

Lesley Blanch often commissioned his work for British Vogue when she was there working as features editor. Here is one of his humorous, self deprecating letters to her: a wonderfully evocative, idiosyncratic missive.

Note his description of the offices of Victor Gollancz, the publisher and humanitarian who published Ford Madox Ford, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Daphne du Maurier and Franz Kafka. Gollancz’s wife, Ruth, was an artist who had studied at the Slade School of Art with Lesley Blanch under Henry Tonks.

July 4, 2021November 9, 2023

From the Archive Lesley Blanch & Cecil Beaton

Writing letters is becoming a lost art outstripped by emailing, tweeting and the artsy instagraming of personal photos posted for public consumption. Image, image, image: but there’s nothing quite as rich and rewarding as private letter-writing for truly getting to know each other, well out of the spotlight, wherever you may be.

Beaton and Blanch first met in London at British Vogue in the 1940s where she was features editor; again in Hollywood in the 1950s; and they remained lifelong friends.