Richard Briers To Be Celebrated At The Chiswick Book Festival
A trio of Bedford Park 'treasures' with Polly Devlin and WB Yeats also featured
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One of Britain’s best-loved actors Richard Briers, who lived in Bedford Park, , for over 50 years, is to be celebrated at this year’s Chiswick Book Festival in September. The paperback edition of his biography, More Than Just A Good Life, will be launched at the Festival with a panel session featuring its author James Hogg, Richard’s daughter Lucy Briers and his friend Peter Egan, who co-starred with him in Ever Decreasing Circles.
They’ll discuss Richard’s career and life in Bedford Park with the Festival director Torin Douglas, on the evening of Friday September 13th 2019. The session will take place in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation Theatre at Arts Ed, in Bath Road, W4.
Best known for his roles in The Good Life, Marriage Lines and other TV comedy series, Richard later played King Lear for Kenneth Branagh at the Renaissance Theatre Company and appeared in eight films directed by him, including Hamlet, Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing. Read an interview with author James Hogg about Richard Briers in The Stage.
Richard Briers is one of three distinguished residents of Bedford Park who will be celebrated at this year’s Chiswick Book Festival.
The writer and broadcaster Polly Devlin, who has lived in the area for several years, will talk about her book Writing Home, a collection of her articles in Vogue, the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. Brought up in rural Northern Ireland, Polly won a Vogue talent competition at the age of 21 and was catapulted into the heart of Swinging Sixties London and later New York. She worked with David Bailey and met Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Yoko Ono, Peggy Guggenheim, Princess Margaret and many more. Seamus Heaney was her brother-in-law; her brother is musician and screenwriter Barry Devlin.
Polly Devlin will talk to Amelia Fairney about her fascinating life and work on Sunday September 15th in St Michael & All Angels Parish Hall.
The Nobel Prize-winning poet WB Yeats spent his formative years in Bedford Park and wrote one of his best-known poems there, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Poet, critic and broadcaster Cahal Dallat will give a lecture ‘On the Pavements Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park’, with music and Yeats readings by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe. It will take place on Friday September 13th at the London Buddhist Vihara, W4 1UD, which was built as the original Bedford Park Club in the 1880s when the area was an artists’ colony of actors, anarchists, painters, playwrights & spiritual seekers, who fostered Yeats’ literary genius.
Names already announced for this year’s Festival include AN Wilson, who will talk about his forthcoming biography Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy, marking the bicentenary of the births of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He will speak at Chiswick House on Thursday September 13th.
Tickets will go on sale towards the end of July via the Festival
website: www.chiswickbookfestival.net
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June 14, 2019
