My childhood hero:

230px-Houseman.jpg

Professor Charles W. Kingsfield: “You see this? This is a shroud, a burial garment; a winding sheet for the dead… this is for you.” Even at age eleven, I had an unhealthy obsession with this man, his manner, and mode of instruction.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

8 replies on “The Men in My Life”

  2. Charles, I don’t know whether you saw the Paper Chase movie or TV series or both, but did you ever see John Houseman in the U.S. TV commercials for Smith Barney brokers where he intoned: “Smith Barney. They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.” Even in my teens it made me snort.

  3. Houseman was the original producer of Virgil Thompson & Gertrude Stein’s “4 Saints in 3 Acts’ He also wrote a 4 volume autobiography

  4. I remember those, Rob. Nowadays, they’d have to change it a little, though: “We make money the old-fashioned way. We steal it.”

  6. @ 5: Yeah, I thought it was Hitch at first, too! Maybe the director IS one of Charles’s heroes! (Since this appears to be a series, I’ll guess we find out soon).

  8. @7, yes, and before that the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project:

    Macbeth (1935)
    W.P.A. Federal Theater Project in New York: Negro Theatre Unit: “Macbeth”, ca. 1935.
    Houseman immediately hired Welles and assigned him to direct Macbeth for the F.T.P.’s Negro Theater Unit, a production that became known as the “Voodoo Macbeth”, as it was set in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe (and with voodoo witch doctors for the three Weird Sisters)…

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