Obit of the Week
The Telegraph really does the best obits. Check out these juicy tidbits:
Liana’s sister, Grazia, died young in a mountaineering accident, and her mother, who claimed to be descended from Attila the Hun, spent years mourning her dead daughter by painting countless portraits of her and writing bad poetry in her memory.
They arranged to meet for lunch in Chiswick, and immediately began a clandestine affair. “I fell in love with the work,” she said later. “Anthony was never a good-looking man.”
Burgess was powerfully attracted by her dark-haired beauty, and by her passionate hatred of the Italian state and the Roman Catholic Church. He was unhappily married to his first wife, Llewela, a notoriously aggressive Welsh alcoholic, but refused to leave her for fear of offending his cousin, George Patrick Dwyer, who was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds.
When she sued the executive producers of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange for 10 per cent of the film’s profits, this money allowed the family to establish a semi-permanent home on the rue Grimaldi in Monaco. Living in a tax haven accorded with her strong belief that the earnings of writers should not be taxed under any circumstances.
Bless you, Mrs. Burgess!
The obit did not do justice to all the people who later in her life had to pick up the pieces of the mess she made of her husband’s estate. She was NOT a good literary agent and was saved a number of times by professionals from the industry. We will see how many people attend the funeral.