Читать книгу You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The life and work of Eric Morecambe - Gary Morecambe - Страница 18

This was something I hadn’t given much thought to until writing about film legend Cary Grant. He had started life as Archibald Leach of Bristol, England. Yet if anyone ever changed his name and identity so completely it was Grant. And I soon discovered that to many Americans he was believed to be one of theirs. Except for the big Cary Grant followers, the majority assumed he was born and bred in America. And Eric adored Grant’s poise, style, chic. He was a personal friend of Grant’s and I can imagine how affected he would have been by this luminary of the film industry. Maybe some of it rubbed off on Eric, who

was often described as classy. Ernie once told me that when Eric looked in the mirror he saw Cary Grant. There is a logical link here.

Despite the happy memories—real or invented—depicted in the piece he penned on Morecambe, I know this to have been a difficult time for the young Eric. He once told me that he was very torn as a kid between loyalty to his mates, all of them having childhood aspirations to become footballing legends like Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews, and loyalty to his mother’s dream of his getting a working act together and so improving his lot in life by following the showbiz path. He must have had shrewdness about him from an early age, for while he continued to push on his football—leading to the offer of a trial with a League club—he recognized the potentially greater longevity of a career in theatrical entertainment compared with one in football. One injury and that was it, and back then it was not a well-paid profession for even the top players, and he knew he was not good enough to be a top player.

But this is jumping the gun. The young Eric still had plenty of boyish mischief to burn off before the days of theatre and football really took a grip. And most of that energy was expended with his cousin George Trelfall, always known as ‘Sonny’.