Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

Annette Bening’s work in recent years gives lie to the truism that there are no good roles for older actresses. Indeed in films such as The Kids Are Alright (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016) she arguably has done the best work of her career. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool adds to this impressive roster.

Bening  plays real-life Hollywood starlet Gloria Grahame (real name Gloria Hallward) whose career peaked in the late 1940s and early ‘50s  with B-list movies such as Crossfire (1947), In A Lonely Place (1950) and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Bad and The Beautiful (1952). Her off-screen life matched her trampy screen image, being married four times including most scandalously to her son-in-law from her marriage to Nicholas Ray. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool which was based on a memoir by Peter Turner covers the little known last chapter of her life.

The film opens in 1981 with Grahame in her dressing room in a Liverpool theatre getting ready for the night’s performance. She collapses from what turns out to be cancer-related symptoms and while in the hospital recovering she contacts Turner (Jamie Bell) a young man with whom she had had an affair some years earlier. He takes her to his family home to recuperate, the film switching between this present and the affair as Turner remembers it.

Grahame is portrayed very much as the classic faded starlet but not as a Sunset Boulevard (1950) recluse of uncertain sanity but rather a jobbing actress eking out the last vestiges of her glamorous past, circumstances leaving her no option but to soldier on. Bening gives a wonderfully empathetic performance as the tough but insecure survivor facing her final battle, one she knows that she will lose. Jamie Bell is sympathetic enough as her steadfast companion although he and director Paul McGuigan do not pull off the older woman/younger man dynamic as convincingly as, say, Mike Newell did with Dance With A Stranger (1985). In the flashbacks there is no real erotic charge between the couple and if Grahame’s appeal and motivations are surmisible enough, Turner’s involvement in what would have been to say the least, particularly in late ‘70s Liverpool, an unusual relationship is treated as a given rather than developed onscreen. This latter reservation includes his somewhat surprisingly supportive dear ol’ Ma and Pa (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) although Peter’s brother (Stephen Graham in an ill-suited curly wig) presents us with a more believable response.

Although the depiction of late ‘70s/early ‘80s Liverpool is well done in a low-key way, especially with Bening, who after all is a screen star in her own right, in the lead it is best not to treat Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool as realism but rather as a piece of theatre and enjoy the quality of the production in general and Bening’s performance in particular as McGuigan wraps things up with a hankie-drenching swan-song of which, one imagines, Grahame would have thoroughly approved..  

 

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