I’ve fallen behind with posting recently, so as I get caught up, I’ve decided to group together three memorials for Dickensians who have passed away since I last posted.
Sir Patrick Stewart passed away October 28 at age 86. Stewart, as you probably know, played Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1999 television adaptation of A Christmas Carol. But his association with the character went deeper than that. In the late 1980s, after reading and falling in love with the book, he adapted it into an award-winning one-man play in which he appeared multiple times on Broadway, in London, and on tour over the course of more than three decades. In addition, he released an audiobook version of the story in 2006. Variety called him “a perfect piece of casting” as Scrooge, and added, “His initial inflections are full of genuine antipathy, and his transformation to a goodhearted citizen is entirely believable. … Even his bitterness is delightful.”
The next loss I have to write about is more personal. On October 1, Allison Pittman, who also published as A. K. Pittman, passed away. Allison was a lovely person and a fellow Dickensian who loved A Tale of Two Cities so much that she wrote a takeoff called The Seamstress, which I got to endorse and also review here at Dickensblog. I think she would have been as disappointed with the new adaptation of Dickens’s novel as many of us were, and I’m sorry she and I didn’t get the chance to trash it together.
And finally, on October 6, an actress passed away (at the age of 102) who I hadn’t even realized had a Dickens connection. The acclaimed Eva Marie Saint made her acting debut in a 1947 TV version of A Christmas Carol, in which John Carradine starred as Scrooge. IMDb doesn’t say whom she played; pretty much all I could find about it was this picture of her. Saint would later go on to revisit the story in Rod Serling’s updated 1964 TV version, Carol for Another Christmas, playing a WAVE driving for a Navy commander in post-Hiroshima Japan. It just goes to show, sometimes you find Dickensians in the most unexpected places.
(Image courtesy of TNT.)
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