Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

When Gloria considers playing Juliet she is not just playing for her lover’s confirmation of her youthful beauty.  She still craves her mother’s approval, unsatisfied despite her huge past stardom. 

The two mothers may center this film. Peter’s working-class Liverpool mum Bella (Julie Walters) works the kitchen and has a fully maternal relationship with her three hearty sons. She dreads the 24-hour stopover in Manilla required for her to see her Asian-posted son for possibly the last time. A close family themselves, they can’t fathom Gloria’s desire not to inform hers of her fatal disease.  

When Gloria’s mother Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) brings her other daughter for dinner chez Gloria and Peter, there is none of that rough warmth. Jeanne’s pride in Gloria drowns in her own eagerness to recite Shakespeare, from Henry V.  Clearly feeling the undervalued child, Gloria’s sister seethes in bitter silence and then erupts in insult. Gloria should have played more Shakespeare, her mother avows, effectively disdaining her entire Hollywood career. 

Jeanne's British snobbery contrasts to Bella’s immediate and unconditional warmth. Indeed the most intimate bed scene here may be the one where Bella lies beside Gloria, drinking tea, embraces Gloria’s casting her as her mother in the last act of her life.   

Only when she sees the family division she has unwittingly cost does Gloria ask for her son to be called, for her fatal flight back to America. 

Given the usually egocentric film star, this Gloria is remarkably careful for others. The narrative leaves us sharing Peter’s suspicion about her morning “meeting” and then throwing him out. We later see she has been protecting him from her mortal diagnosis and pushing him to return to Liverpool for an audition.  

Annette Benning draws her Gloria out of her screen and personal persona. She catches the star’s sultry voice, cheeky manner, resignation to betrayal and abandonment. This Gloria alternates between a cocky coquettishness and a will of cold steel when aroused, between the B-girl she commonly played and the strong woman who fashioned herself a career in an uncompromising industry, between the black-and-white world of most of her films and the colour of real life. 

Peter meets that steel when he opines she should play the nurse not Juliette, the bawdy old woman not the young lover. The passions aroused in that exchange light their love affair. She’s again offended when his “Stella!” quote implies Gloria is a pathetic drunk, all beauty lost. Her insecurity makes her take his jokes seriously.

In their first meeting Gloria asks Peter in to help her practice the Hustle for her dance class. At the tail end of a long career she’s still trying to keep up with the times. And she can, as they prove fine partners. They are decades apart in age and in career. When they meet she’s touring as the gracelessly aging Amanda in The Glass Menagerie; he is a supporter player in a current farce. But offstage they dance and love well together. So she wants to die in his and Bella’s care,  

The narrative structure shifts between Gloria’s last days and Peter’s memories of their past. This allows for a scene’s replay, as in the different perspectives we get on their break-up in New York. But it also catches the doubled lifespan of a film star. The actor may die but the roles live on in celluloid. Film stars don’t die in Liverpool — or anywhere else — so long as their roles replay.

There’s a cost. The star may age as a woman but she stays ever young onscreen. So Gloria needs constant assurance she’s still beautiful. She remains in competition with her past self. Bella may dye her hair but she has none of Gloria’s need for that constant reassurance.  She earlier refused cancer treatment because she needed her hair to extend her acting career. 

Aptly the film’s last image of Gloria is touchingly bathetic. She appears in the grainy black-and-white of the Oscar telecast, receiving from the unblushing Edmund Gwenn her Best Supporting Actress Award for The Bad and Beautiful. That one was in colour, but here we only see her noirs. Her brisk, no-nonsense character is epitomized by her thank-you speech: “Thank you.” Even in that early period, before the current long windy pages of thanks, emcee Bob Hope is still taken aback by her efficiency. 

This film is a worthy, nuanced addition to our pantheon of mythologized aging screen goddesses. This Gloria didn’t ascend to a wealthy marriage like Joan Crawford (Mrs Pepsi Cola) or Grace Kelly (Monaco). She didn’t dissolve into an inculcated addictiveness like the real Judy Garland or follow her faithful supportive wife role in A Star is Born. She didn’t resurrect herself in grand guignol like Bette Davis or retreat into delusions like the Gloria Swanson character in Sunset Boulevard. She wasn’t subverted or overthrown as in All About Eve, nor did she turn recluse like Hedy and Greta.
     Gloria kept her self-respect and independence, risking her life to keep working as she had to, welcoming a new love, then setting him free to protect him. She happened to find through him the mother’s unconditional love she hadn’t known.