Nixta Rolls

I’m going through the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes stories at the moment (one of my Christmas gifts) and was surprised to find out that he:

• Left his first wife for a man (actors!).
• Married (a woman) again later in life (actors, again!), whose eventual death triggered his own.
• Starred as Freddy in My Fair Lady (really?!).

This in turn turned up some really interesting stuff on My Fair Lady, not least of which is that two of the principal characters, Colonel Pickering and Freddy, just sort of drop out of the film without any good explanation some 20 minutes before the end.

The My Fair Lady connection surprised me and reminded me that it has been only a matter of months since I was gobsmacked to find out that Tilda Swinton (herself part of an extraordinary relationship) played the lead in Orbital’s 1996 nightmarishly haunting The Box, above (for some reason not available at MTV Music ”Not Music since 1996, now also TV-free!”).

I give you two past casts that surprise me: Jeremy Brett as Freddy, and Tilda Swinton in The Box.

And no, I haven’t forgotten Mike Myers in The Littlest Hobo…