In the contemplation of lofty themes most people are serious though not always sincere

In the contemplation of lofty themes most people are serious, though not always sincere. Broughton, however, is always sincere but hardly ever serious. Indeed, seriousness is a questionable virtue: it is gravity rather than levity, and it was, again, that devout Catholic, Chesterton, who maintained that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And, in company with the angels, Broughton laughs with God rather than at Him.James Broughton always had a string of sobriquets throughout his life: Sunny Jim as a child; Jimmy as a boy and young man; The Unbuttoned One; Sister Sermoneta of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. I liked to call him The Modesto Catbird, and I believe it was I who deemed him Big Joy, from the time (at the age of 61) that the cinematographer and artist Joel Singer came into his life. O frabjous day!Many readers of his poems do not know about the 23 films Broughton created. The magazine Film Culture referred to him as "the grand classic master of Independent Cinema".

The American Film Institute presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Some of the films are Mother's Day, Adventures of Jimmy, Loony Tom, The Pleasure Garden, The Bed, The Golden Positions, and Song of the Godbody (with Joel Singer).British readers will be interested, particularly, in The Pleasure Garden (1953). James had been living in Barbara Jones's wonderful house on Well Walk in Hampstead. Jones took him to see the ruins of the Crystal Palace Gardens. Broughton met Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert, who said they would help him make a film there Hattie Jacques volunteered to play a fairy godmother Jill Bennett was in it And John Le Mesurier. The finished product delighted Broughton's supporters, though Stephen Spender said to him, "Don't you think your film is rather too pleasant?"Big Joy and Joel Singer retired from the San Francisco Scene and lived in the midst of a forest near Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.

Broughton, much reinvigorated by the relationship, was very productive into his early eighties, until slowed by a stroke.One of his late poems begins:How often do you think of Death?Death thinks about you all the timeDeath is fatally in love with you and meand his lust is known to be relentless. .Jonathan WilliamsJames Richard Broughton, poet, film-maker and playwright: born Modesto, California 10 November 1913; married Suzanna Hart (one son, one daughter); died Port Townsend, Washington 17 May 1999.. TALL, BLONDE and beautiful, Hillary Brooke holds an affectionate place in the memories of all aficionados of the Hollywood "B" movie. A consummate actress who gave excellent supporting performances in such films as Jane Eyre and The Enchanted Cottage, it is for her sterling work as "the other woman" or menace to such screen sleuths as Sherlock Holmes that she will be best remembered.

With her upswept hair, regal poise (she was once a successful model) and sophisticated attire - she seems to have spent most of her career wearing full-length, form-fitting evening gowns of the kind that epitomised the Forties - she was not only one of the screen's most formidable villainesses, but proved an excellent foil to such comics as Abbott and Costello and Bob Hope. Born Beatrice Peterson in New York in 1914, she was attending Columbia University when she met Johnny Powers, who ran the biggest modelling agency in America, and he offered her work posing for mail-order catalogues. In the mid-Thirties she spent a year in England, where she acted in a play and acquired an English accent that was to give her diction a distinctively clipped tone.In 1936, on her way to Australia, she was stranded in Hollywood by a boat strike and recalled later: "I didn't want to just sit out there. So I went over to RKO one day and said I would like to do a picture. A very nice casting director said, `We're doing New Faces of 1937.' I said, `I would like to be in it', and that's how I started! Everybody works so hard, and I didn't even have an agent!"Among the films in which the actress played minor roles as society ladies were The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), but her first important parts came in 1943, when she received excellent reviews for her portrayal of Blanche, Rochester's fiancee in Jane Eyre, and also made an impact as the heroine of Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, one of the best of Universal's Holmes series, and displayed for the first time her excellent flair for villainy as a Nazi agent in Fritz Lang's gripping film noir set in London, Ministry of Fear, though she did not have kind words for her director. "I hated him," she said later.If he didn't like you, he was the nastiest person.

Dan Duryea was in the film too, and we became great friends, and Fritz Lang didn't like either of us! If I were sitting in Dan's dressing room, chatting with him, Lang would pull the door open, look in, and just walk away. I know that he was supposed to be a great director, but he wasn't very popular. He didn't seem to like anybody who had any fun.Brooke's favourite of her films was John Cromwell's The Enchanted Cottage (1945), the story of two plain people who are beautiful in each other's eyes "I thought that was a very nice film. I played Robert Young's fiancee, the girl who couldn't bear him after he was disfigured during the war. I was a society dame." The same year Brooke was a splendid, villainous foil to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Road to Utopia, and in the Sherlock Holmes adventure Woman in Green played the title role, another wicked schemer who uses hypnotic powers in an attempt to outwit the sleuth.Brooke later talked with great affection of her films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson:They were so wonderful to me Basil Rathbone was a nice man. He looked very haughty, very elegant, but he was a very real person And Willie (Nigel Bruce) was always joking. During the string of Holmes pictures, we really had a wonderful time together.