FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL

Liverpool, 1979: What starts as a vibrant affair between a legendary femme fatale and her young lover quickly grows into a deeper relationship, with Turner being the one person Gloria allows herself to turn to for comfort and strength. Their passion and lust for life is tested to the limits by events beyond their control.

Extract from Guardian Review by Frank Cottrell Boyce

In the late 1970s, Peter Turner was a young actor living in digs in Primrose Hill. One of his fellow lodgers in the London flat was Gloria Grahame – you know, the girl who couldn’t say no in Oklahoma!, the wayward small-town floozy in It’s a Wonderful Life.

By the time she met Peter, she was playing Sadie in a production of Somerset Maugham’s Rain at the Watford Palace. “She asked to borrow a shirt,” he says. “Then she needed a fiver. It escalated from there.” The couple began an on-off affair that seemed to dwindle to nothing – until late 1981. “Tuesday 29 September,” says Peter, embarking on a tale he’s told so often it has become a kind of ritual. “I knew she was in England, but she hadn’t called.”

But then she did call, to ask if she could stay – and, as it turns out, spend her final days – at his parents’ house in Liverpool. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE.