Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool - Hardcover

PETER TURNER was born in Liverpool in 1952 the youngest of nine children. He was educated at a local comprehensive school and started acting at the age of sixteen with The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. He worked extensively in British theatre both in London and the regions. He played Terry Adams in three seasons of the hit television drama series Spearhead and his film parts included playing Trinculo in Derek Jarman’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He met the Academy Award–winning American film star Gloria Grahame in London in 1978. They became lovers and their relationship lasted until the end of her life, dying from cancer in 1981. He wrote his memoir Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool in 1984. Peter has also written screenplays and devised and written scripts, British television, plays, and serials.

Turner recalls the dying days of the late Gloria Grahame, a movie actress who had some success in the '50s and '60s, winning an Oscar for her performance in The Bad and the Beautiful. In England in 1981 to appear in a play, Grahame reached the terminal stage of stomach cancer and called on Turner, her ex-lover, for support. He took her to his parents' home in Liverpool, where her condition continued to deteriorate; along with being a food faddist, she was so distrusting of doctors that she would not enter a hospital. Eventually Turner contacted two of her children, who went to England and flew her to New York, wher she died. As a picture of a caring lower-middle-class British family, willing to make great sacrifices to help a stranger, the story is heartwarming, but there is little else to recommend it.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.