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over my hat and into the bags. One bottom began to break and I was trying desperately not to drop the eggs. Still the phone kept ringing incessantly. Bloody hell, I thought, go away. I got everything in the kitchen on the counter. I was soaked and furious. The phone did not stop. I picked it up and shouted into it:
    â€œ ‘Hallo!’
    â€œ ‘Celia? Alastair here. Darling, I just saw you in the market. You were marvelous!’ ”
    I t was from Celia that I got some perspective on what it was to be a working actor and to live a full family life. She loved to ride around her property in a Land Rover and would often take me with her. One afternoon as we were bouncing along she told me she’d been offered a play in New York.
    â€œJohnnie and Ralphie are doing it.” (Gielgud and Richardson, of course.) “I’m to be one of the four characters. It’s called Home. ”
    â€œWhy don’t you want to do it?” I asked.
    â€œOh, darling. It’s just when all my flowers will be blooming.”
    Y ears later I saw her perfect performance opposite Maggie Smith in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and called to congratulate her.
    â€œSmashing part,” she said.
    In the winter of 1978, I was again in London shooting Dracula at Shepperton Studios and I received a message from Celia. I immediately rang her up.
    â€œCome out for the day—bring your new wife.”
    I agreed, but cancelled at the last minute because of a 5 a.m. set call the next morning.
    â€œIs it because you’re now a bloody film star?” she said.
    O ne afternoon she came into town and we had tea at the Savoy Hotel.
    â€œOh dear, oh dear,” she said.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    â€œDoing Hamlet ! Having a go at Gertrude. I’m afraid it’s a disaster. The avant-garde bohemian approach. Greeting the audience in half makeup—utter rot. Oh well,” she said, sipping her tea, “nothing to do but carry on.”
    M any years later, after Celia had passed away, I was performing in New York opposite the great English actor Alan Bates in a Turgenev play entitled Fortune’s Fool . One night at supper I told him the story about Celia and the disastrous Hamlet.
    â€œOh, I know that story very well,” he said. “ I was her Hamlet.”
    He then proceeded to tell me his fondest memory of Celia:
    â€œShe was quite right. It was a tiresome approach. I remember one day our director said,
    â€œ ‘Celia, I think that scene could be a bit more moving.’
    â€œ ‘More moving?’ Celia said. ‘Right.’
    â€œShe then proceeded to devastate us into floods of tears. When it was over she looked at him and said:
    â€œ ‘You mean like that ?’ ”

DOLORES DEL RIO
    W e did not meet or speak. And certainly did not touch.
    It was the summer of 1956. I was eighteen years old, still a virgin, away from home for the first time as an apprentice at the Pocono Playhouse in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It would not be the summer I would lose my virginity but it would be the beginning of my appreciation for a kind of female that until then, I had no idea existed.
    The untouchable was the magnificently beautiful Mexican actress Dolores del Rio. She was touring, as stars did in those days, from summer theatre to summer theatre, playing one-week engagements to full houses of audiences anxious to see the glamour, allure, and mystery celebrities of today no longer possess. No TV talk shows then for the incessant dismantling of self. If you wanted to see Miss Del Rio you had to watch her movies or venture forth of a summer’s evening. She was the first great star into whose orbit I ventured for a period of time, and my first lesson in style, behavior, and elegance.
    Miss Del Rio’s costar was a formidable old broad named Lili Darvas, a well-known character actress and widow of the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar. The play was Anastasia ,