Rev Peter Mullen salutes the genius of Noël Coward, 50 years after his death
It’s 50 years since Sir Noël Coward died, aged 73, at his Firefly home in Jamaica, on 26th March 1973. And yet we’re no nearer to doing justice to his personality and talent. T S Eliot called him ‘the real thing’. And Time magazine praised him as ‘full of cheek, chic, pose and poise’ – but he was even more than that. What can you say of a man who wrote 65 plays – most of which were stonking successes in the UK and in the States – and eight musical comedies, performed hundreds of scintillating revues and cabarets, and was described by Laurence Olivier as ‘the 20th century’s finest actor’? And then there all those songs from which we can all sing a line or two: Mad Dogs and Englishmen; Some Day I’ll Find You; A Room with a View; and (Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage,) Mrs...
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